Whales in 19th century shared information about ship attacks
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We should be able to determine intelligence/communication first without antromorphizing the notion of culture.
Some quotes from this article, and another linked by the author [1]
> Bound by communality, sperm-whale culture expresses a collective individuality: “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”. If that isn’t a lesson for their Homo sapiens cousins, I don’t know what is.
> Whales and dolphins observe rituals of the dead and exhibit grief. Could they, then, express spiritual sentiment, founded on values and belief – even a sense of religion?
> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us.
> Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/cultural-lives...
For better or worse, people are individuals, not members of a collective. Collectives of people don't work, and it isn't for a lack of trying. People aren't whales or bees in a beehive.
That doesn't mean, however, that people can't organize. Under free markets, people organize well and effectively, but they still organize based on self interest, not self sacrifice.
The existence of armies and corporations suggests otherwise. I think you may be over-stretching the meaning of the term here to suggest some sort of entity that displaces individual cognition.
Armies consist of people forced to cooperate, usually under threat of death or at least imprisonment. Such cooperation isn't very efficient, and indeed armies tend to be extremely wasteful of lives, treasure and property.
(Volunteer armies tend to be less wasteful of lives.)
While I thought this Guardian article was rather hyperbolic and tells us more about the author's personal views than about whales, it seems to me that you're taking the same approach from something like an objectivist standpoint.
Perhaps it would be more insightful to look at collectivism vs individualism as a continuum rather than a binary choice.
I already did in this thread:
"The more the country tries to run the lives of its citizens, the worse the country does."
Which is neither here, nor there.
First because nobody said people on collectives can't also have self-interest: just that they work together for the benefit of the collective too.
That said, there are also collectives where self-interest comes second (to the point of sacrificing yourself for them) and they work just fine. In fact the whole of human history they have been instrumental: families, armies, countries, and so on.
We tend to give medals to soldiers who self-sacrifice, because it's unusual. Not many are interested in dying for their country. If you refuse an order to advance on an enemy stronghold, you'll get shot. Remember those Soviet blocking battalions? How does that relate to self-sacrifice for the collective?
You overlooked the rest of what I wrote about armies.
Actually, what that shows more than anything is that not many people are willing to kill for their country. Killing other humans, even in self-interest, is often very hard to do - this is actually further evidence that people are quite collaborative and non-confrontational by nature.
You won't find many who are eager to advance under fire.
The 8th AF was suffering 80% casualties when my father was in the air war. He would talk sometimes about the terrible, gut-melting fear, and how it would crush some of the men, and how some of the men dealt with it (like heavy drinking).
They weren't reluctant to kill the enemy - I asked him about it. He said the enemy was doing their damnedest to kill him, and he was trying to survive, not die. If you refused to go on a mission, the threat of execution was there, although they didn't do it. There was surely prison and utter disgrace, though, which many would consider worse than dying.
My father dealt with it by looking at the numbers and resigning himself to death. He figured that while he lasted he'd do his duty and his best. When he signed up, I think he thought of it more as an adventure than a death sentence, like most young men do. Young men imagine themselves to be immortal.
> You won't find many who are eager to advance under fire.
I have actually, my grandfather fought in WW2. His stories were usually short, grim, brutal. He, however, emphasized the importance of fighting for the country, of reclaiming occupied land, of putting the greater interest ahead of your own personal fears. Incidentally, while I fully admire his behavior, I don't think 'fighting for the country' is a particularly natural thing for humans to do.
> They weren't reluctant to kill the enemy - I asked him about it.
As far as I know lots of evidence points to the contrary. People often go so far as to deliberately miss shots in order not to kill somebody.
> My father dealt with it by looking at the numbers and resigning himself to death. He figured that while he lasted he'd do his duty and his best.
This sounds quite selfless to me. It may have been done through social pressure, but what this shows is that the fear of opprobrium is greater than the fear of dying - moving against the group is more unpleasant for humans than death.
Once again, I must emphasize that being motivated by self-interest usually means collaborating. That's how free markets work - collaboration among self-interested people.
Collectivism is about self-sacrifice. Sure, you can find people willing to do that. But not enough to structure society around it.
> being motivated by self-interest usually means collaborating
If you're willing to define self-interest broadly enough then everything can fall under it. Altruism? it's just self-interest because some people simply derive utility from helping others. Self-sacrifice? just self interest because some people like the idea of glory and having streets named after them etc.
> Collectivism is about self-sacrifice
I think wittingly or unwittingly you're playing around with different interpretations of the terms you're using. Altruism and collectivism are not the same thing, just like selfishness and individualism are not the same.
If by collectivism you mean the top-down, oppressive treatment of humans as replaceable cogs in a machine, then we're in agreement - that's inhuman, unnatural. If on the other hand you call basic altruism unnatural, then we're in sharp disagreement.
I have, I don't fully agree with Dawkins. I'm not a biologist, merely a dilettante, but I can point to source [1] for some counter-arguments. First, there's a difference between the biological and the common use of the term 'altruism':
> This biological notion of altruism is not identical to the everyday concept. In everyday parlance, an action would only be called ‘altruistic’ if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. But in the biological sense there is no such requirement. Indeed, some of the most interesting examples of biological altruism are found among creatures that are (presumably) not capable of conscious thought at all, e.g. insects. For the biologist, it is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action counts as altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed.
When I used the term I used it in the common sense, not in the biological one.
Then there's the concept of kin selection:
> The basic idea of kin selection is simple. Imagine a gene which causes its bearer to behave altruistically towards other organisms, e.g. by sharing food with them. Organisms without the gene are selfish—they keep all their food for themselves, and sometimes get handouts from the altruists. Clearly the altruists will be at a fitness disadvantage, so we should expect the altruistic gene to be eliminated from the population. However, suppose that altruists are discriminating in who they share food with. They do not share with just anybody, but only with their relatives. This immediately changes things.
[...]
> Contrary to what is sometimes thought, kin selection does not require that animals must have the ability to discriminate relatives from non-relatives, less still to calculate coefficients of relationship. Many animals can in fact recognize their kin, often by smell, but kin selection can operate in the absence of such an ability. Hamilton's inequality can be satisfied so long as an animal behaves altruistically towards other animals that are in fact its relatives. The animal might achieve this by having the ability to tell relatives from non-relatives, but this is not the only possibility. An alternative is to use some proximal indicator of kinship. For example, if an animal behaves altruistically towards those in its immediate vicinity, then the recipients of the altruism are likely to be relatives, given that relatives tend to live near each other. No ability to recognize kin is presupposed.
Separately, I have found interesting points of view different from those of Dawkins in the works of ethologists (I read de Waal and Lorenz myself) and in 'What Darwin Got Wrong' by Fodor and Piattelli. Just because Dawkins is the more popular author it doesn't mean he's right by necessity. There are a host of theories about how evolution works, the role of altruism etc. Things don't begin and end with the selfish gene.
Robert Sapolsky's work [2] also touches on selfishness, aggression, altruism etc. He discussed the baboon troupe in detail on the Joe Rogan Experience as well.
It is hard to see how whales are more collective than humans. Humans for most of their existence lived in collective family units, not unlike whales.
Countries, companies, armies, sports teams, FAMILIES are all collectives of people. Not all of these organizations are voluntary, and not all are “based on self interest”.
> sports teams
Of course they are based on self-interest. Team members all have different statuses and pay. They compete with the other team members to not get cut. They switch teams to gain personal advantage.
> Countries
are forced collectives. The more the country tries to run the lives of its citizens, the worse the country does.
You'd be surprised. There are people who would die for their country, and nobody has a gun to their head.
Hell, historically people died to BUILD or FREE their countries.
> There are people who would die for their country,
We call them heroes and give them a medal and commemorate them with a statue. Because they are rare.
> Hell, historically people died to BUILD or FREE their countries.
It's pretty rare for people to do it knowing they will die.
(People more often will risk death because of the value of the gain they'll get if they don't die. That's selfish behavior.)
> and nobody has a gun to their head.
Armies historically execute anyone disobeying orders to advance or show cowardice in the face of the enemy. The Soviets had blocking battalions ordered to shoot any of their own comrades who did not advance.
Armies are trained and organized around the concept of forcing men into combat. And it starts with conscription.
They quite literally do have a gun to their heads.
Well, yes, but also not that straightforward.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3igu17/on_the_c...
And that's one example, from one particular culture.
Executions for desertion are very rare in western culture armies. Not that western culture armies couldn't be cruel. Field Punishment No. 1 is culturally engrained in my country: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/field-punishment-no-1
That said, you seem to be implying that all armies ever have relied on force to recruit and retain members, which rings hollow.
If simply because my step-father, an Englishman touring the world, happily volunteered to fight the North Vietnamese as part of the RNZA, as did many others, all of NZ's troops in that war were volunteers. No conscription at the barrel of a gun.
Hell, during WW1 and WW2, people were faking their age to join up.
Reality is a lot more nuanced than you're making out.
I mean, we're social animals, for millennia we've lived or died by the group.
> you seem to be implying that all armies ever have relied on force to recruit and retain members, which rings hollow.
There are exceptions. But by and large, conscription is used. Conscription is force. As for retaining soldiers, all of them I've ever heard of did not allow soldiers to desert. Deserters are imprisoned or shot.
The US military is currently all volunteer. But they're still not allowed to desert. Being in the military is a good career, and there are many benefits making it attractive. But you can bet if we get into a war where they start dying in large numbers, the government will start drafting. After all, all young men are required by law to register for the draft when they turn 18. Even now.
When I was young, I considered joining the Air Force or the Navy. But not to sacrifice myself. I seriously doubt many of those join up, nor would I really want to serve with someone who wanted to sacrifice himself.
Vietnam was the only 20th century war with a fairly limited draft rather than the broad drafts of the World Wars and Korea. That actually played a lot into the political controversy.
Yes, sorta. Once again, you can't generalise about this stuff. Every country approached it differently. Often conscription only happened after all the volunteers were depleted - i.e., it wasn't the first port of call.
> So did the Vietnam War.
Not in my country. The US, and Australia, yes, but New Zealand hasn't used conscription since WW2, despite fighting in Malaya, Borneo, Korea, Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan etc.
> Deserters are imprisoned or shot.
I thought it was just executed? At least it was in your prior comments.
> The US military is currently all volunteer. But they're still not allowed to desert.
Sure. Military discipline being what it is, well, yeah, I'm not overly surprised.
But a) no-one forced them there at the muzzle of a gun, as you alleged, and b) no-one is shooting them for leaving.
So... well, not really sure what your point was.
Those are just the most celebrated ones.
They are quite more than those. Especially in popular armies (as opposed to professional military), resistance moements, national revolutions and anti-colonial movements and so on where there's no "draft".
Even in the US, who is not known for that sort of thing, tons of people volunteered e.g. in world war II (~ 39% of those that fought).
>It's pretty rare for people to do it knowing they will die.
It's extremely common for people to do it knowing there's a big chance they'll die, far more than any "extreme sport" today.
>Armies historically execute anyone disobeying orders to advance or show cowardice in the face of the enemy
But that's not the case of armies where people volunteered for the cause (and would have suffered no ill fate if they didn't, probably the contrary), which are plentiful in the examples I have.
Note that I specifically said that people will risk death for a potential large gain.
It's also true that 18 year old men are very poor judges of their risk of death.
> and would have suffered no ill fate if they didn't, probably the contrary
My dad told me that during WW2 if you were a man of military age walking around in civvies, people would spit on you. After the war, if you didn't serve, you were strongly discriminated against.
Would you risk death to go on an adventure and not be a pariah for the rest of your life?
Huh? There might be a few "individuals" living individually in the history of the world. Isolated from the world, forgotten in some jungle, retreated to some cabin in Alaska, or so.
Some not by choice (e.g. due to some accident with their boat or something), others by choice but only after they've first been raised and prepared by living in communities.
The huge majority has always been members of communities and collective entities.
Without living together with others, collaborating with them, inheriting traditions and knowledge from the past, you don't even have language, culture, science, or anything, not even a cuisine. You're like some animal...
>Collectives of people don't work, and it isn't for a lack of trying
Between famillies, villages, cities, companies, churches, armies, nations, and so on, I can't even think what you had in mind as "not working"...
The huge majority of organizations are set up for selfish benefit, not collective benefit.
Cooperation in mutual self-interest is NOT the same thing as cooperation in self-sacrifice.
Company members, for example, certainly cooperate. But the employees are doing it out of self-interest.
Sure it does. In a commune, everything produced is shared equally. That's self-sacrifice, as in if you produce more than the mean, that is taken from you.
Is this thread about some naive US conception and fear of "socialism" and such?
Heck, not even in USSR "everything produced was shared equally". Not to mention really existing communism is hardly the main example of the idea of a collective (or a good one)...
That was the plan. Of course, it didn't work.
> Not to mention really existing communism is hardly the main example of the idea of a collective (or a good one)...
Existing communism is when people try to implement communes, and wind up having to rely on force to do it.
Back to the point I wanted to make here, though: It's possible in a commune, as with other organizations, to contribute more than the mean and still get back more than you would get for your effort independently. That's the nature of cooperation, that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts, through economies of scale like specialization.
What on earth are you talking about? For most of human history we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers where selfishness could lead to ostracization. Even nowadays we organise in nation-states which try to (artificially) extend tribal loyalty to larger groups. Sometimes this leads people to commit the very self-interested act of dying for their country (note the sarcasm).
And how about families? Have you heard of those?
> we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers where selfishness could lead to ostracization.
Are you sure they were communes? Slavery goes as far back as we can tell. The head of the band didn't get the best food? Nobody owned their horse, weapons, etc.? They certainly traded. Why wouldn't they trade amongst themselves?
In general I think there's broad agreement that in bands and small tribes of up to a few hundred people there's basically no hierarchy. Even when a chief emerges, he/she doesn't have a lot of power over others - they're more like mediators, they alleviate conflict etc.
I think you're making a mistake that I've seen often (Steven Pinker does smth similar), namely assuming that hunter-gatherers behaved like settled societies. They didn't. Most of the increase in violence comes after the agriculture revolution and the development of large settlements. For most of our history we roamed the land in small packs that rarely interacted with outsiders.
This is not to say that hunter-gatherers lived in heavenly harmony, just that they mostly lived in collaborative equality. They were also strongly independent (note that independence/individualism and collaboration do not exclude each other. Individualism however is not the same as selfishness, collaboration is not the same as collectivism).
That aside, the most obvious evidence that the Native American communities were not collectives is they practiced slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans...
which also states "property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line." Valuable property is not a sign of a commune.
> basically no hierarchy
That doesn't imply they shared everything equally. If I own more horses than you, it doesn't mean I control you.
> Individualism however is not the same as selfishness, collaboration is not the same as collectivism).
I say that over and over again in this thread, including in my opening post.
My counter to that is that free markets allow for all sorts of coercion by organizations that harms individual freedom and prevents new organizations from succeeding. You get a join-us-or-lose situation, as you can see playing out with hyper-consolidation of various industries.
Your premise that free markets translate into individual freedoms is limited to those freedoms that dominant organizations can't directly coerce you out of exercising or lobby/collude to take away from you.
They all failed.
People try it. After a few months, within a couple years, they tire of it and leave, and the commune collapses.
What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.
I really don't understand how this conclusion follows from your premises. Even assuming that you're right and that all US communes failed, what does this have to do with human nature?
By the same token you could say that people tried to be gay in Nazi Germany, but they all died, therefore it's against human nature to be gay (maybe my example is a bit strong, but hopefully you get the point).
and getting murdered is not remotely like losing interest in commune life and leaving.
The fact that certain human institutions or behaviors face strong opposition in certain contexts doesn't say much about human nature.
w.r.t. your example, this would mean that the failure of communes in the US doesn't say much about the failure/success of communes in other places/times. Nor does it say much about human nature in general.
A commune will inevitably fail if its members are allowed to leave at will. Because individual productivity of people varies, in time the most productive members will grow dissatisfied with the way the rewards are distributed and quit, the commune remaining stuck with the moochers.
It is human nature, just like in another great example, the Tragedy of Commons.
A simple gedanken experiment will illustrate. You and Bob are stranded on an island. You and Bob agree to form a commune, and share equally in all the food gathered.
Bob figures, why work, when TFYS is working hard and will split what he gathers with Bob.
Is TFYS going to be dissatisfied that he does all the work and Bob does nothing?
> It is human nature, just like in another great example, the Tragedy of Commons.
As far as I know the commons worked quite well for many centuries, until enclosure that is. Just a brief look at [1] yields:
> A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century.In 1833 William Forster Lloyd introduced the concept [...]
> However, his argument has been widely criticized, since he is accused of having mistaken the commons, that is, resources held and managed in common by a community, with open access, that is, resources that are open to everyone but where it is difficult to restrict access or to establish rules. In the case of the commons, the community manages and sets the rules of access and use of the resource held in common: the fact of having a commons, then, does not mean that anyone is free to use the resource as they like. Studies by Ostrom and others have shown that managing a resource as a commons often has positive outcomes and avoids the so-called tragedy of the commons, a fact that Hardin overlooked.
[...]
> While the original work on the tragedy of the commons concept suggested that all commons were doomed to failure, they remain important in the modern world. Work by later economists has found many examples of successful commons, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize for analysing situations where they operate successfully. For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons#Tragedy_of_the_commons
Communes predate America.
The more likely story is free markets collapse under weight of adversarial greed and need communes to bail them out. Where would American airlines be at right now left up to free markets? We've socialized their losses and privatized their profits like so many ither examples.
> Communes predate America.
You're right. Jamestown was a commune. They starved. The Pilgrims' first year was spent as a commune. They starved.
> Where would American airlines be at right now left up to free markets?
They were shut down by the government lockdowns and travel bans. Whether or not the lockdowns are a good idea, the damage they caused are not the fault of free markets. Do you propose that communes thrive under lockdowns?
This axe you're grinding is getting hella sharp. Can't believe you failed to bring out the 'millions of deaths' because of communes this time.
Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
I see no mention of sharing equally. They own property, run small businesses, pay income taxes, etc. They do help each other out, but that is not the same thing as sharing everything equally.
> They all failed.
> [...]
> What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.
All things in the material universe are impermanent, communes exist in the material universe, ergo communes are impermanent.
But many of those started in the US have not yet failed, and some have lasted several decades. So the actual evidence doesn't even show that communes are incompatible with American-style capitalist context, much less “human nature”.
What is great about America, though, is the free market allows anyone to set up a commune. You're free to join one, and free to leave one. You and everyone else who downvotes me in this thread is also free to make or join a commune.
I doubt any of you will, though.
Certainly, there is room for individuals, but individualism as you describe it is always the exception.
> Collectives are fundamental to human society and always have been. Even hunter gatherers lived and still live in communities.
Communities, sure. Collectives, not so sure.
Oh? How old is our culture?
What were whales doing a million years ago that primates weren't that qualifies as culture?
Anyway, while we can assume that whales and dolphins have exhibited advanced behaviors throughout the time their species existed do we have any evidence that these behaviors did not develop independently in different populations and were lost or recreated again over those millions of years?
Sure. This was well documented by a movie in the 1960s. The apes were at first quite surprised that humans could talk.
Have you not ever taken a dog for a walk and been required to change course when the dog indicates its preference to you in a non-negotiable, but culturally acceptable way?
He defines culture as, ”the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.”
He estimates that our ability to use culture started at perhaps a million or so years ago, maybe a bit more, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.
This article challenges his ideas bit since he seems to think that culture is unique to our species, and in contrast these researches of course claim wales have it too.
I think the largest point of contention may lie in the definition of culture. Does the ability to communicate danger really amount to “culture”?
The origin of the word is to cultivate, from Latin, and implies building and transmission. Familial training in whale pods for feeding techniques is not the same thing. It seemingly echoes some facets of the immensely more complex concept we call culture, but saying that of whales is reductionist in way that isn't useful for clear thought.
Perhaps we can blame modern dictionaries, because the older ones shed more light on the matter: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/culture
But we also need a word for a shared, passed-down learned experiences.
Such a thing has been observed in numerous species. For example, certain groups of gulls have learned to drop shells onto the rocks to smash them open. Similar gulls in other areas have not learned this. The ones that have have passed this lesson down for generations.
"Culture" to me sounds like a perfectly-good word for it. Cambridge Dictionary has the definition "the way of life of a particular people, esp. as shown in their ordinary behavior and habits."
Words can have multiple meanings in different contexts.
How can you be so sure of that?
Clearly they don't build roads, city halls, cinemaplexes, court houses, theatres, or boxing rings, and they didn't invent Spotify, but neither did you do any of that, and you have culture, don't you, even if you don't engage with any of those examples from 20th century homo sapien culture?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190337
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/130425-hu...
http://www.replicatedtypo.com/cultural-transmission-observed...
https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~barrett/documents/Asoundapproach...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
https://ceal.lab.uq.edu.au/project/cultural-transmission-hum...
> "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
-- the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”
Not necessarily. It depends on the species and males and females behave differently. Some whales at least have a strong sense of individuality. They are one of the very few animals known to call other specimens by its individual name. The big sperm whales have a sort of matrilineal culture (Pygmy and dwarf sperm whales are solitary probably. Males definitely only care about themselves).
In any case this would be the common behavior, as seen in many fishes, spiders, mammals or birds.
Talking about societies in many dolphins is justified, and not a new thing. Like elephants or humans, they have grandmas also, that is also an uncommon trait. Grandmas keep mental maps of the territory. This is useful to drive the other members directly to that hidden submarine mount that is plenty of fishes. Grandmas also take care of the young whales in surface playgrounds while their mothers dive deep to hunt.