Exploring The Foundations Of Human Cumulative Culture
Host – Kerry Klein They may be our cousins, but orangutans and other primates are nowhere near humans in terms of technological achievement, social organization, or culture. And it’s humans’ capacity for building off of one another—an integral part of our so-called cumulative culture—that has allowed us to build up so much in so little time. But how did we develop such advanced methods of learning in the first place? Kevin Laland of the University of St. Andrews spoke with me about his team’s quest to pinpoint the social and cognitive processes that underlie humans’ ability to acquire and transmit knowledge.
Interviewee - Kevin Laland We’re interested in trying to explore the evolutionary routes of the human capacities of cumulative culture. If you think about it, humans have these cultural traditions that will accumulate refinements over time thereby allowing technology and other cultural achievements to build up in complexity and diversity. Think of satellites or particle accelerators or modern medicine – these are not things that any one individual has devised, they reflect the inventions of thousands of individuals over long periods of time. If you contrast animal cultures on the other hand, or animal social learning, they’re clearly capable of learning from each other. They acquire knowledge about foraging behaviors, for instance, or anti-predator behavior from each other. And sometimes we see some simple traditions exhibited, but seemingly they don’t exhibit this cumulative quality – there’s no sort of improvement or refinement over time, at least not obviously. So we set out to understand why that should be. And there are a number of hypotheses out there in the literature. It could be to do with cognitive differences between humans and other animals; it could reflect social factors. So we carried out an experiment to set out firstly to establish whether other animals might be capable of cumulative culture if put to the test, even if they don’t actually exhibit it naturally and then to try and understand if not, why that should be and to measure a whole bunch of predictor variables that potentially might explain why they might fail to exhibit this capability.
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Interviewer - Kerry Klein Are there any other species at all that we suspect might also have developed this cumulative culture, or is it only humans?
Interviewee - Kevin Laland Well, there are no clearcut examples of cumulative culture in other species. There are certainly one or two cases where people have made claims of cumulative culture. For instance, in chimpanzees, we see that some populations of chimpanzees who use stone tools as hammers to crack open nuts and others will combine those stone hammers with stone anvils –place the nut on an anvil and then use the hammer to crack it open. So some people have argued that this is a reflection of cumulative learning. The trouble is we don’t know the history of this time series. So it’s a kind of plausible story, but it equally seems just as likely that some individuals could have independently invented the use of the stone tool and the hammer because it’s not so devastatingly complex that it’s hard to imagine that any individual could invent it themselves. You can contrast that with, you know, a computer – it’s just really hard to imagine that any one individual could have invented a computer and invented all of its component parts and all of the technology necessary for it. So we humans clearly have the capability to produce cultural knowledge and technology that goes way beyond what any individual can produce. But that’s not at all clear for other animals.
Interviewer - Kerry Klein Right. Okay. So your study here involved, you know, asking the question why and how have humans developed this cumulative culture where other animals have not, or at least we don’t think that they have. So what were some of the key questions that you had to ask, and how did you go about answering them?
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Interviewee - Kevin Laland Well the key issue is to, first of all, identify whether the animals were indeed capable of cumulative culture in spite the fact they don’t show it in nature; and secondly to ask if they don’t exhibit this capability, what explains that? What co-variants with the performance of the individuals that do well explaining their performance in the task. So what we did was we devised this puzzle box, which could be solved at three different levels or stages, each one building on the earlier. My graduate student, Lewis Dean, then presented this puzzle box to groups of capuchin monkeys, groups of chimpanzees, and groups of nursery school children recording their performance on the task, but also, at the same time, recording whether there was any evidence for any of these potential predictor variables. For instance, did we see any signs that individuals were helping each other, teaching each other, giving each other verbal instruction, giving each other rewards, scrounging from each other, monopolizing the puzzle box, and so on and so forth? And so we could then look to see whether any of these potential predictors explained performance in the task.
Interviewer - Kerry Klein So for your non-human subjects here, what made you choose chimps and capuchins?
Interviewee - Kevin Laland Yeah, well that’s a good question. We chose chimpanzees and capuchins for a couple of reasons really. Firstly, these are two species of animals that exhibit quite sophisticated social learning and behavioral traditions. So the evidence for simple forms of cultures that are strong in these two species, as in any. But there’s also the reason that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, and so they’re a natural comparator to humans. And then you might use another species, for instance, the capuchins as a kind of outgroup to help you interpret any differences observed between chimpanzees and humans. So that’s the rationale behind our choice of those two species.
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Interviewer - Kerry Klein So in the end, how did all of these groups perform – the humans, the capuchin monkeys, and the chimps? Were there any major differences or similarities?
Interviewee - Kevin Laland Yeah, so we didn’t find any evidence for cumulative culture in either the chimpanzees or the capuchins. We had one female chimpanzee who managed to solve the puzzle box at the highest stage, the third stage. But it didn’t seem to spread to any of the other chimpanzees. And we did have conditions in our experiment where there were trained demonstrators, which were other trained chimpanzees, who exhibited, who demonstrated the solving of the task, but that didn’t seem to enhance their behavior either. We had the sort of conditions where the learning was scaffolded so you couldn’t move onto the second stage unless you’d kind of progressed on the first stage. And none of these manipulations seemed to help with chimpanzees to get to the highest level. And similarly, with the capuchins, we’ve seen no evidence at all of any cumulative cultural learning in them. And that contrasts starkly with what we see in the children where in spite of having a lot less time to access the puzzle box, we see evidence for cumulative culture in five of the eight groups of nursery school kids we studied with multiple children solving the task to the highest level. So there really were quite strong differences between humans and the other two species.
Interviewer - Kerry Klein And did the other primate species here surprise you in any way? Were there any behaviors that they possessed that you were not expecting?
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Interviewee - Kevin Laland Well, it was more the other way around really. There is a literature that suggests that chimpanzees, in particular, are very good at imitation. There are scientific reports of them exhibiting prosociality and helping others. But we saw none of that at all. In our behavior, we saw the children approach the task in a very social way, in a collaborative way, helping each other, teaching each other, giving each other rewards. And this I think reflects the fact that they understand that the other individuals are also trying to solve the task, and they have the same motivations and goals. So they went about this exercise in a very collaborative, social way; whereas the chimpanzees and the capuchins seemed to go about it sort of all for themselves, essentially undertaking this exercise as a means to procure resources solely for themselves. We did wonder whether there might be some tolerated theft that mother chimpanzees might, for instance, let their offspring take food that they themselves had retrieved. In fact, we found exactly the opposite – the mother chimpanzees were stealing food from their babies. So the differences between humans and the other two species were actually more stark than we had imagined going into this exercise.
Interviewer - Kerry Klein So is this capacity for collaboration the key here to our cumulative culture? What’s your overall interpretation of these results?
Interviewee - Kevin Laland Yeah, so our findings really fit very nicely with an argument that’s been made by Michael Tomasello and his colleagues. He’s a professor of psychology and evolutionary anthropology at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and he’s argued for many years that humans differ from other animals according to a package of sociocognitive capabilities which includes the ability to teach, to imitate very accurately, to help each other through verbal instruction and to use language in general, and, of course, this tendency for prosociality and our collaborative nature. And those arguments really fit very nicely with our findings. And how well a child does in the task really does seem to co-vary very strongly with how much teaching they receive, how much verbal instruction they receive, how much they imitated, how many acts of prosociality they benefited from. So there seems to be a strong link – at least in the context of our experiment – between those sociocognitive capabilities that Tomasello and his colleagues have emphasized and this capability for cumulative culture that we were investigating experimentally. So we suspect that that really is the key set of attributes that seems necessary for the ratcheting we see in culture in humans.
ANIMAL COGNITION ‘Killjoys’ Challenge Claims Of Clever Animals
LONDON AND CHICHELEY—It seems that hardly a week goes by without a new report about animals performing marvelous feats we once thought only humans could do: Crows make tools, chimpanzees seem to mourn their dead, and rats supposedly empathize with one another’s pain.
Charles Darwin, were he alive today, might approve this trend. “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “… is one of degree and not kind.” For many researchers, the new evidence represents a welcome shift from behaviorist paradigms often associated with psychologist B. F. Skinner, which denied nonhuman species anything approaching advanced cognition (Science, 25 January 2008, p. 404). Yet recently, some researchers have been pushing back against attributing humanlike qualities to other animals without considering cognitively simpler explanations.
This more skeptical contingent was present in force at two recent back-to-back meetings sponsored by the Royal Society in London and Chicheley. At both, researchers explored what animals are really doing when they engage in seemingly complex behaviors, rather than reported still more discoveries of their impressive abilities.
“There’s an arms race to identify the most clever animals,” Lars Chittka, an animal psychologist at Queen Mary, University of London, said at the London meeting. “But what are we trying to demonstrate?”
Attempts to measure the gap between human and nonhuman minds have become like a “party game,” said experimental psychologist Cecilia Heyes of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Some researchers blamed the news media, and even some scientists, for exaggerated interpretations of animal behavior. “People in the field often gravitate into two camps,” Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, told Science. “There are the romantics,” those who are quick to see humanlike traits in animals, “and the killjoys,” who prefer more behaviorist explanations. “I think the truth is almost always in the middle.”
Crinkly bananas
In a talk at the London meeting titled “Simple Minds”, Heyes argued that many researchers discount associative learning—the expectation that two events, for example, a stimulus and reward, are connected. Heyes argued that this type of learning is ubiquitous among both animals and humans and remains a “contender” when interpreting animal experiments. As a case study, Heyes critiqued a paper on chimp altruism published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers have been hard put to show that chimps have much desire to help each other out; unlike humans, they seem to do so only when pressured or pleaded with rather than spontaneously.
In the study, led by primatologists Victoria Horner and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, chimps were given a choice between two different colored tokens. One color prompted the human experimenter to give a banana to both the subject chimp and another chimp in an adjacent enclosure whereas the other color resulted in food for the first chimp only. Chimps showed a significant preference for the token that led to a banana for both themselves and their partners. The team concluded that chimps are more altruistic than usually given credit for.
But Heyes pointed out that the bananas were wrapped in crinkly paper, so chimps could both hear and see when the partner got a reward. She suggested that the chimps may have begun to like the sound of the crinkly paper, “just as Pavlov’s dogs got to like the sound of a bell.” Thus they might have opted for the color choice that yielded a double shot of the noise.
Psychologist Sara Shettleworth of the University of Toronto in Canada says she “totally agrees” with Heyes’s reservations, and even Horner calls the arguments “thought-provoking.” But Horner argues that the chimps got only one reward no matter “how many rustling papers they heard.” Had associative learning been the primary mechanism operating, she says, the chimps would not have preferred one token color over another.
Although researchers still debate what’s behind the behavior of close human relatives such as chimpanzees, there was wide agreement with points made at the Chicheley meeting by cognitive scientist Derek Penn of the University of California, Los Angeles. His talk, titled “Animals Aren’t People,” included a blistering critique of a 9 December 2011 Science paper (p. 1427) that claimed that rats are capable of empathy—or, as Science’s online news coverage headlined the story, “Rats Feel Each Other’s Pain.”
In the study, neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago in Illinois and her colleagues trapped one rat in a small plastic restrainer that could be opened only from the outside; trapped rats gave alarm calls roughly 20% of the time. A second, free rat was placed nearby, and it soon learned to free its compatriot by opening the door. Free rats did not open the door when the trap was empty. The authors concluded that the helping rat reacted empathically to the distress of its fellow.
But Penn argued that the team hadn’t shown that either rat was truly in distress. The team didn’t perform at least one other important control, he said: using trapped rats that were not distressed. Playing videos of the experiments to the meeting, he pointed out that once the door was open, the free rat entered the trap and explored it with the trapped rat, suggesting that being in the trap was not that stressful.
Mason, who was not at the meeting, counters that once the trap was open, it became “an object to be explored, and in fact rats might prefer it to staying out in the open.” As for the lack of an unstressed control rat, Mason says the team now has an experiment under way suggesting that the more anxious the trapped rat, the more helping behavior is evoked. She agrees that rats probably are not aware of one another’s mental states, as humans are, but says the behavior her team observed is the “rodent homolog of empathy.”
Nevertheless, Penn argued that this and many other recent papers suffer from what is called “folk psychology”: interpreting animal and human behavior in “commonsense” rather than strictly scientific terms. Folk psychology, Penn said, gives animals humanlike reasons for what they do, such as “the rats helped free their cagemates because the caged rats were feeling scared.”
Penn’s talk evoked murmurs of agreement in the meeting room. “Our folk psychological labels carry a lot of specifically human baggage,” Dennett says, “which can be gradually jettisoned as we come to understand other ways of accomplishing many of the same basic cognitive tasks.”
速度 01'35'' 01'09'' 01'15'' 01'05'' 01'40'' 越障 6'49 Many people believe that animals have the same emotion to human beings，such as chimpanzee feel sorrowful when their parters dead. Some researchers announced that there are only different degree between human and animals. Researchers want to do some experiment to test the theory. A scientist said that animals do not have emotion and this is the huge different between human and other species. Researchers had two experiments. 1、Chimpanzee experiments In front of group of chimpanzees，there are two boxes. NO1 - little bananas, which only for one chimpanzee. NO2 - lots of bananas with crinkly paper.==chimpanzees chosen NO2 So researchers believe that chimapanzees tend to share with others（+） Other specialist did not accept--chimpanzee may like the sound of crinkly paper（-） 2、rats experiments Open doors- NO1 traped, NO2 free doors==rats chosen NO2 doors and help other rats So researchers believe that rats have sympath with other rats（+） Other specialist did not accept（-） conclusion：human-like animals is not fully explained, although it shows the "empathy" in certain situations作者: 铁板神猴 时间: 2012-3-12 15:04
作者: ainiAnnie 时间: 2012-3-12 15:16
今天才找到阅读小分队。。。。这个必须常来~~作者: babybearmm 时间: 2012-3-12 15:48
This more skeptical contingent was present in force at two recent back-to-back meetings sponsored by the Royal Society in London and Chicheley. At both, researchers explored what animals are really doing when they engage in seemingly complex behaviors, rather than reported still more discoveries of their impressive abilities.
我对这个contingent用法不是很懂，查了e-e
adj.1. Liable to occur but not with certainty; possible: "All salaries are reckoned on contingent as well as on actual services" (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 2. Dependent on conditions or occurrences not yet established; conditional: arms sales contingent on the approval of Congress. See Synonyms at dependent. 3. Happening by chance or accident; fortuitous. See Synonyms at accidental. 4. Logic True only under certain conditions; not necessarily or universally true: a contingent proposition.
n.1. An event or condition that is likely but not inevitable. 2. A share or quota, as of troops, contributed to a general effort. 3. A representative group forming part of an assemblage.
adj1.(when postpositive, often foll by on or upon) dependent on events, conditions, etc., not yet known; conditional 2. (Philosophy / Logic) Logic (of a proposition) true under certain conditions, false under others; not necessary 3. (Linguistics / Grammar) (in systemic grammar) denoting contingency (sense 4) 4. (Philosophy) Metaphysics (of some being) existing only as a matter of fact; not necessarily existing 5. happening by chance or without known cause; accidental 6. that may or may not happen; uncertain
n1. (Military) a part of a military force, parade, etc. 2. a representative group distinguished by common origin, interests, etc., that is part of a larger group or gathering 3. a possible or chance occurrence[from Latin contingere to touch, fall to one's lot, befall; see also contact]
好喜欢baby的越障~简直就是GMAT的copy版本~谢谢啦~ 话说最近读越障的时候特别的慢，好像有时精神不集中，最好来个自我强迫症可能就能恢复状态了~ MI: The passage is to refute the generalization of theory that the animals behave as human-like and illustrate by showing two experiments. - Scientists argue that the animals can behave and think as human is not true. a. an experiment that the scientists place chimps and their partners together and choose the bananas from two of them (one is regular color, another one is regular one with wrap in different color). b. the scientist H. believes that the chimps don't prefer the noise when open the wraps of the banana is the reason that they don't choose. Other scientists agree with H.. However, these chimps are tested for several times of the same experiment, they still don't show the preference of the non-regular banana. Thus, this demonstrates that chimps don't have the similar behavior as human, and the "stimulus-reward" effect doesn't show from the animals' behavior, and the chimps seem to be more altruistic than we commonly think. c. Then the scientists held another experiment: they placed one rat in the restrainer with the alarm calls, and another free rat out of the restrainer. The study shows that the free rat would learn to open the gate to let another trapped rat out. So the scientist believes the effect of "empathy" works for rats when they are placed in a distress environment. d. However, other scientists refute this opinion by illustrating that the rats don't show their distress in the restrainer. because the free rat would explore the restrainer once opening the gate. This means the two rats don't assume the restrainer is a distressful place. - Through all these experiments above, the thought of human-like animals is not fully explained, although it shows the "empathy" in certain situations, there are still other ways need to be achieved to explore the cognitive animals' behavior.作者: 778879 时间: 2012-3-13 07:26
速度 2‘00 1’54 1‘48 1‘09 1’50 越障是关于动物研究的。说现在科研界有两种人，一种只注意观察发现动物身上一些类似于人的一些行为，而另外一些只注意解释这些行为。研究者认为二者中间的middle是对的 用了两个例子。第一是猩猩吃香蕉。第一次选A两个组都给香蕉，而选B只给一组香蕉。猩猩们都选A然后得出结论说猩猩们有合作意识。但有人提出质疑说猩猩选A是因为A的包装纸不一样而猩猩们能听到包装纸的声音，他们喜欢这种声音。 第二是用自由的老鼠会救笼子里被困的老鼠来证明老鼠是有同情心的，但有人说笼子里被困的老鼠并没有多难过，而且自由的老鼠救了被困老鼠后和他一起进笼子，这并不能说明老鼠具有同情心。研究者说他们正在进行被困老鼠难过的实验来再次证实 最后文章说现在很多研究者都首先假设动物和人一样具有某些行为，而这是不科学的。作者: 半阙 时间: 2012-3-13 10:52
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越障：8m20s 1、动物常常表现出一些人的行为，比如。。。。如果达尔文还在的话，他会认为XXX。但现在从一个更简单的cognitive方面来研究。measure the gap between human and nonhuman minds引出两派人的解释：romantic and killjoys.D认为：真理是介于中间的。
2、又做了一个实验：大猩猩选择token……得出结论：大猩猩比人类更利他主义 3、尽管现在仍有争议：大猩猩行为与人类相似的机理是什么，但一致同意：Animals are not People（论据：下面的老鼠实验）。。。这么重要的转折句都木有记下来。。。。sigh。。。下次努力！！！ 4、X说老鼠会感受到对方的痛苦。做了实验：把一只老鼠关在笼子里，在外面的想办法弄开笼子，而在笼子里没有老鼠时，free mouse不会那样做。但是P说：这并不代表老鼠能感知对方的痛苦，因为在被关着的老鼠没有出痛苦时，free mouse还是会冲进去找它的伙伴。后来M又说，不是老鼠能相互精神感知，而是XXX（rodent homolog of empathy）——论据：被关着的老鼠越着急，free mouse就会有more helping behavior.但是P说现在解释更倾向于常识而非科学。
红字部分为很重要但没记下来的。。。。 作者: 半阙 时间: 2012-3-13 10:53
大赞babybearmm的选材~~~作者: 很邻家 时间: 2012-3-13 13:28
2'20/ 1'48/ 2'02/ 1'21/ 2'21 1. Studies have showed animals can do a lot of things we once thought only human can do.
2. Scientist Ho takes an experiment to demonstrate that the animals also have the ability to associate learning. However, scientist H thinks it’s hasty to get this conclusion without considering other factors such as the sound that money prefers. And scientist S says she totally agrees with H.
3. Some scientists claim that rats are able to show sympathies to their peers. Then they take an experiment, in which some rats are trapped and some are free. Through the rescue behaviors of the rats they get their conclusions.
4. At last, P claims ‘folk psychology’ to explain the similarity between human and nonhuman.作者: lileeli 时间: 2012-3-13 14:44
1.58 1.36 1.40 1.22 2.17 7.08 不怎么懂，下一篇接着努力作者: kaitlynyl 时间: 2012-3-13 21:03
速度：第一段差6-7行，2-4读完，5差了6行，讲了很多动物，主要讲大猩猩，通过研究这些动物，看人类从他们这积累到的文化 越障：跟速度有点类似，讲的是clever动物的研究。开始提出一堆人的理论，然后又说media夸大了聪明动物的行为，怎样证明这个理论呢？通过大猩猩的香蕉和paper实验，说明什么时候大猩猩有什么表现，得出什么结论，大猩猩识别颜色什么的，后来说到老鼠，先根据一个现象得出一个结论，然后又说不是那样的，好像不distress，然后又说笼子里的老鼠比较害怕，还研究了老鼠的同伴。具体什么结论忘了，跟压力有关系。最后提出一个folk心理学的东西，简要介绍了一下。作者: 一加heidy 时间: 2012-3-16 10:09
1‘52 1’19 1‘31 1’12 2‘05 越障7分半钟 是说动物是否和人一样，也有一些行为什么的，比如。。。 为了了解这些，科学家们做了实验 通过猩猩的实验，给他们香蕉，说了它们是会分享的 通过老鼠的实验，把一些老鼠关到笼子里，没被关着的老鼠会把笼子打开，说明它们会感受对方的紧张和痛苦 一些人觉得老鼠的实验有缺陷 最后说这些实验不是为了让找不足，而是想让大家更好的了解动物的一些行为与人的相似等 越障看了后面就把前面忘了啊。。。。。作者: livdl 时间: 2012-3-17 22:36
1‘45 1’28 1‘42 1’20 2‘01 6’37作者: Threesu 时间: 2012-4-6 08:57
1‘00 0’54 0‘41 1’15 0‘41作者: imddung 时间: 2012-4-8 23:29
2'05 1'26 1'28 1'09 2'07
第一次参加阅读小分队，继续加油！作者: thouzand_ 时间: 2013-8-18 14:57
越障: 1st 08'32
Further exploration on whether animals boast human-like quality and debates persist.
1) focus on complex behavior addressed the attention from schlars again. (Party-Game case)
2) Chimps display Altruism
-Cond 1:when pressured
-Cond 2:pp voice occurred
3) rats bear empathical quality
weakened by two points:
- being trap rat is not stressful
- Folk psy theory (promising in further study)作者: Feelun 时间: 2021-5-14 11:55
3'21'' -- introduction of the topic - the difference between human being and other animals - accumulative ability?
2'15'' -- we dont have clear evidence that other species have the same ability, but some people claim it. give example. then question the claim with a metaphor of computer to define what is accumulative knowledge.
2'42'' -- the key questions are asked and then design a game to answer them. also show us the reason why choose the group of species to attend the experiment.
2'01'' -- the result of the expriment
3'54'' -- put emphasis on the difference between humans and other species and give the general conclusion - the accumulative culture is built on the coorporation.
<it was more the other way around really.事实上是相反的>
12'06'' argue against some conclusion from some experiment in a meeting
contingent - A contingent is a group of people representing a country or organization at a meeting or other event. 代表团
back to back - Back-to-back wins or victories are victories that are gained one after another without any defeats between them. 一个接着一个的作者: 小学生Pon 时间: 2021-5-15 04:12
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