For many years, the prevailing view was that the distinctive feature of human culture was its ability to build upon itself, accumulating knowledge and practices over generations. But as Morgan explains, "Ten years ago it was basically accepted that it was the ability of human culture to accumulate and evolve that made us special, but new discoveries about animal behavior are challenging these ideas and forcing us to rethink what makes our cultures, and us as a species, unique."
Morgan's research, conducted in collaboration with Stanford University's Marcus Feldman and published in 'Nature Human Behavior', proposes a different perspective. Instead of simply being uniquely cumulative, they argue that human culture is "uniquely open-ended." This characteristic, they claim, is what gives human culture its unparalleled depth and flexibility.
Morgan notes that various animal species, from ants to whales, demonstrate complex cultural behaviors. For example, new queen leafcutter ants carry their mother's cultivated fungus to new colonies, leading to genetic divergence between the domesticated and wild fungi. Similarly, humpback whales' songs evolve and spread across populations, and chimpanzees have been observed using tools for generations. Even locusts exhibit rapid evolutionary changes in response to population pressures through epigenetic mechanisms, altering their coloration and behavior without modifying their genetic code.
These observations have shown that animals possess cultural systems that accumulate knowledge and behaviors over time. "It used to be thought that other species just didn't have culture," said Morgan. "And now we know that lots of other species do. Then it was thought that only human cultures accumulate or evolve over time. But now we know animal cultures can do this too. So, if animals do have evolving cultures, then what's special about human culture that differentiates us from other animals?"
The answer, Morgan suggests, is in our "open-endedness" - the unique human capability to imagine, create, and adapt an infinite number of cultural innovations and sequences. Unlike animal cultures, human cultural evolution doesn't seem to reach a limit. He explained, "The way that animals think about what they're doing constrains the way that their cultures can evolve."
Morgan illustrated this concept by describing a multistep process like preparing breakfast, which involves a series of nested tasks and subgoals that must be executed in sequence. This kind of open-ended planning, where humans can continuously refine and add steps to processes, gives us the ability to generate highly complex behaviors and cultural practices.
Morgan and Feldman's research also compares human culture with animal examples of epigenetic inheritance and parental effects, such as those seen in leafcutter ants and locusts. These systems, although they exhibit stability and accumulation in animal species, ultimately encounter developmental constraints. "Just like animal cultures, there are constraints that these systems run-up against and that halt their evolution," Morgan said.
Reflecting on their findings, Morgan stated, "I think the key question is what is special about human culture, and we tried to answer that by comparing human cultures with animal cultures, with epigenetics, and with parental effects - as many evolving systems as we can think of. And in the end we concluded that the special thing about human culture is its open-endedness. It can accumulate but then it never has to stop, it just keeps going."
Research Report:Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative
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