On Mount Athos, in northern Greece, a monk rises before dawn to sing the same office that has been sung on that mountain for more than 1,000 years. He learned it from older monks who came before him, who learned it in turn in an unbroken chain stretching back to Athanasios the Athonite, in AD963. Over the centuries, individual monks have come and gone, and yet their chants, prayers, oaths, costumes and ceremonies endure.
This persistence is remarkable and revealing: cultural traditions endure because they share a fundamental property with biological organisms. Not metaphorically, but literally. I believe that human culture isn’t just an accidental add-on to organic life; rather, it’s a separate expression of life in its own right.
But first we should define our terms. There isn’t just one answer; indeed, the lack of a clear definition has become a kind of bad joke among life scientists, who can’t quite agree what it is they actually study. One attribute of life that most biologists would say is critical, however, is the encoding, processing and transmission of information.
In organic life, this is the function of genes. Information about how to survive and reproduce is written in DNA, processed by cells and transmitted over generations. Thanks to occasional copying errors and the sifting of natural selection, biological information has evolved to produce the extraordinary diversity of life on Earth today.
But millions of years ago, a second kind of self-perpetuating information appeared – one that wasn’t written in DNA or read by cells, but which nonetheless began to replicate and propagate itself through time. And it has evolved and diversified to create the stupefying complexity of the modern world. Cultures consist of knowledge or behaviours transmitted from one individual to another through social learning.
We used to believe culture was uniquely human, but animals have cultures, too. Chimpanzees from some parts of west Africa use rocks to crack nuts, for example, but in other parts they don’t, even though the same nuts and rocks are available; in some places they strip sticks of their leaves to fish termites from their nests; and elsewhere they use moss as a sponge from which to drink water. Each population has its own particular way of doing things.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
