Summary: A innovative research proposes that human society’s special strength lies not in its ability to accumulate understanding, as previously thought, but in its “open-endedness”. Unlike pet cultures that reach limits in development, human society constantly expands, adapting without bounds.
This “open-ended” character, which allows us to develop infinitely, makes people culture unique from others in the animal kingdom. Pet cultures can accumulate knowledge but eventually stop evolving, as demonstrated by examples like the development of chimpanzee device use and dolphin song evolution. In contrast, animal culture keeps advancing, allowing for extremely complicated cultural, technological, and academic developments.
Important Information:
- People culture is marked by “open-endedness”, enabling constant evolution.
- Pet societies acquire knowledge before reaching their evolutionary limits.
- The research compares individual culture to examples of steady, but finite, animal cultures.
Origin: Arizona State University
Why is pet society much more powerful than human culture, which is a collective body of knowledge that is passed down through generations?  ,
” What’s unique about our types”? is a problem that researchers have been wrestling with for generations, and a new study from Arizona State University suggests that it might affect how we perceive both ourselves and the world around us.  ,
In a new study published this week in Nature Human Behavior, biological anthropologist Thomas Morgan said,” Ten years ago, it was generally accepted that the ability of human society to gather and develop that made us special. However, recent discoveries about canine behavior challenge these assumptions and force us to reevaluate what makes our cultures, and we as a species, special.  ,
Morgan is an associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Human Origins.  ,
When a new queen leafcutter spider doors, she collects a small bit of her family’s fungi and transports it with her to form a new settlement, just as humans do so with our children. Because of this ongoing development, which has taken millions of years, the pathogen in these colonies has a different genetic makeup than the wild fungus outside.  ,
New data demonstrates that humpback shark tunes evolve, spread among groups, and become more sophisticated over time, much like how people languages change. Like people, chimpanzees learn to apply equipment and we now have proof that they have been doing so for thousands, possibly millions, of years.
Yet locusts adapt to local conditions using sophisticated growing systems to adapt to factors like age and environment, which can cause gene activity to fluctuate between peaceful and green or teeming and yellow and black depending on overpopulation.  ,
These discoveries, along with others, have shown that not only do creatures have tradition, but there are also examples of concentration in their traditions, someone that for a long time was believed to be truly individual.  ,
” It used to be thought that other species just did n’t have culture”, said Morgan. ” And we now know that many other species do.” Then, it was believed, that only human cultures would grow or develop over time.
” But we now know that animal cultures can do this as well. So, if animals do have evolving cultures, then what’s special about human culture that differentiates us from other animals? ”  ,
Open-endedness
Morgan and Stanford University Professor Marcus Feldman address this question in their new paper”, Human culture is uniquely open-ended not uniquely cumulative, “published in , Nature Human Behaviour.  ,
They present a new hypothesis: that we humans dominate and are so special because of” open-endedness,” – our ability to communicate and understand an infinite number of possibilities in life.  ,
” The way that animals think about what they’re doing constrains the way that their cultures can evolve,” said Morgan”. One way might be that they ca n’t imagine elaborate sequences very easily, or they ca n’t imagine subgoals.”
” For example, when I’m making my boys ‘ breakfast in the morning, it’s a nested, multistep process. First, I need to get the bowls and pots and other equipment.
” Then, I need to start cooking the ingredients in the appropriate amounts and order in the pot.” Then, he said, I need to cook it, stirring, and controlling the temperature until it’s the right consistency.  ,  ,
This entire process is complicated because each of these steps is a subgoal and each of these subgoals has steps that I need to carry out in the right order.
Human brains simply continue working when the system’s limits are reached. We are able to create and retain sequences of highly complex instructions, which allow us to carry out an almost infinite number of behaviors.  ,
Beyond culture
While other scientists have compared human and animal cultures before, Morgan and Feldman’s research is unusual because it also compares animal examples of , epigenetic inheritance , and , parental effects. The locust is an illustration of cumulative epigenetic inheritance, while the leafcutter ants are a prime example of parental inheritance.
While both epigenetic inheritance and parental effects are stable and accumulate in non-human species, they eventually stop developing, explains Morgan.
” Just like animal cultures, there are constraints that these systems run-up against and that halt their evolution” . ,
We tried to answer that question by contrasting human cultures with animal cultures, with epigenetics, and with parental effects,” as many evolving systems as we can think of,” according to” the key question.”
We came to the conclusion that human culture is unique because of its openness. It can build up, but it never stops; instead, it just keeps going.
About this news release about research in evolutionary neuroscience
Author: Nicole Pomerantz
Source: Arizona State University
Contact: Nicole Pomerantz – Arizona State University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
By Thomas Morgan and al.,” Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.” Nature Human Behavior
Abstract
Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative
The adaptive capacity of human culture and its capacity for cumulative change and high-fidelity transmission are increasingly the focus of theories about how people came to be so ecologically dominant.
We test this hypothesis again by contrasting animal and human cultures, as well as parental and epigenetic inheritance cases.
We come to the conclusion that, contrary to popular belief, cumulative change and high transmission fidelity are not unique to human culture, and that this is unlikely to account for its adaptive qualities.
We then evaluate the evidence for seven alternative explanations: the inheritance of acquired characters, the pathways of inheritance, the non-random generation of variation, the scope of heritable variation, effects on organismal fitness, effects on genetic fitness and effects on evolutionary dynamics.
From these, we identify the open-ended scope of human cultural variation as a key, but generally neglected, phenomenon. We conclude by laying out a hypothesis that accounts for this open-endedness cognitively.
