I'm still working out how I want to do this reading club. I was waiting for others to catch up, but only a few really added very many comments. So I thought I'd put up the first comments on chapter 2. But before I get to that, I thought I'd add a part b to my first chapter comments. In this I want to briefly engage some recent news relevant for how we read Tomasello..
The one thing I notice in Tomasello is that he is very focused on Ape - Human relations. That's understandable, especially from an evolutionary point of view. Yet, at the same time, there are some other very intelligent animals. Dolphins, certain species of parrots, crows and so forth. All use tools and thus are potentially offering insights into learning. While I'm simply not versed enough in the literature to say much about cognitive studies on non-primates, it seems somewhat relevant to Tomasello's arguments.
Along these lines, New Scientist this week coincidentally had an article along those lines. Now some of the examples are similar to a discussion of monkey learning in Japan that Tomasello does discuss. But they are very interesting.
An inventive male devised a brand new way to catch birds, and passed the strategy on to his tank-mates. The 4-year-old orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish onto the water's surface. He waits below for a gull to grab the fish, then lunges at it with open jaws. "They are in a way setting a trap," says animal behaviourist Michael Noonan of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, who made the discovery, "They catch three or four gulls this way some days."
“The orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish into the water. He waits for a bird to grab the fish and then lunges” Noonan had never seen the behaviour before, despite three years of observations for separate experiments. But a few months after the enterprising male started doing it, Noonan spied the whale's younger half-brother doing the same thing. Soon the brothers' mothers were enjoying feathered snacks, as were a 6-month-old calf and an older male. . .
. . .[dolphins] apparently learn from group-mates how to use sponges to protect their snouts while scavenging. But the evidence from killer whales is much more conclusive because the process was observed from start to finish.
Now New Scientist does bring up some of the same comments that Tomasello makes later in the text.
Some researchers have suggested that many purported examples of cultural transmission can instead be explained by individuals discovering the skill on their own rather than following another's lead. But because the gull-baiting behaviour is so unusual, "it would be hard to argue that it is individual learning", says ethologist Janet Mann of Georgetown University in Washington DC, one of the authors of the dolphin sponging study. Behavioural scientist Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews in the UK agrees, "This is a particularly clear set of observations."
The story goes through a few other examples. All of these may contributing to undermining some of Tomasello's arguments in the text. I'd encourage reading the full text of the New Scientist article. One often has to be careful with New Scientist, as they tend to sensationalize things. But I think this seems a tad safer.
Just a note that I have up a page listing all the blog posts that are part of the reading club. It's also in my right sidebar in the archive area as Reading Tomasello. If you aren't a member of the club but have a post at your blog on this book, please post a note there with a link.
I'm looking forward to them publishing this in a scholarly journal. While it doesn't directly impact Tomasello's evolutionary argument, because whale cultural transmission could be a case of convergent evolution, it could provide evidence against (or even for) Tomasello's theory about what sorts of cognitive abilities allow for cultural transmission. Two things to note, though:
1.) This isn't yet cumulative cultural transmission, which is the main things humans have and nonhuman animals don't have, according to Tomasello. It's innovation and the passing on of that innovation, but they haven't built on that innovation and passed all of that on yet.
2.) It's not clear from the article how they are passing it on. In chapter 2, Tomasello notes that there is some cultural transmission in chimps (interestingly, it's mostly from mother to daughter, but I'll say more about that in a post on Chapter 2), but that it doesn't appear that the chimps are directly teaching their offspring. Instead, they seem to learn through immitation and association (they immitate actions that they see acheiving desired results, like gaining food). That doesn't really require theory of mind, only that you have a desire (e.g., to catch a gull) and observe an act that acheives it.
Hopefully any scholarly publications on these orcas will clear some of these issues up.
By the way, could you post a link to this on the yahoo group? I know there aren't many commenting there, but when I post a link there, I get several people coming to the blog through the group, so I know people are reading it.
I actually already did - back on Friday.
Oh, OK... man, having a sick child really does put you out of the blogging loop. I need to keep him healthy just so that I can keep up.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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