Ignoring Animal “Culture”: A Critique of Dawkins’s Evolutionary Ethics

Ignoring Animal “Culture”: A Critique of Dawkins’s Evolutionary Ethics *Note: This article is from Richard Dawkins's "Critique of Evolutionary Ethics: A Model." The reader may be surprised by the term animal culture, but this surprise disappears with the statement of the intended, what is meant by culture here is a certain "picture of life" that the organism deals with its environment, in its choice of food and how to get it and how to deal with relatives and strangers and other necessities of life, or the definition of specialist in the anthropology of culture Margaret Mead "A set of acquired behavioral patterns, shared by a group of individuals and transmitted to humans only"[1] Just like most biologists - animal culture, and deals with terms based on mathematical equations as will be shown in his interpretation of the extent of animal altruism, and the reason for this is clear, which is the central doctrine in modern Darwinism is the automated handling of animals and focus on genes, but this picture has differed somewhat to a number of modern researches, most of which there is a long shadow of the second millennium and the beginning of the third millennium, and this research is trying to prove that animals certain behaviors are inherited through "education" It is recognized that this research has destabilized the central tenet of modern Darwinism, usually referred to as neo-Lamarckists, and the most famous pioneers of this field are Eva Jablonka, a large biological theorist[4], who has a special interest or project on non-genetic inheritance, such as behavior, and we will focus on elements that are considered radical criticism of Dawkins's neglected thesis of cultural behavior. In Jablonka's view, there is a concentration "in almost all environmental and evolutionary reports of parental care, the transmission of information from parents to offspring, and its evolutionary impact were ignored"[5] and that "there is no systematic treatment of the role of social education in the development of behavior within textbooks related to the evolution or ecology of behavior"[6], and this neglect is not due to ignorance of information acquired and inherited in a non-genetic way "the mechanisms of transmission of crucial information about aspects of life." Known for many years to biologists and experimental psychologists, but not fully integrated into a basic construct of evolutionary and environmental thought",[7] in short, "behaviour has not received the comprehensive cognition it deserves"[8], and opposes the behavioral school that treats the animal as a response to the stimulus only, animal behavior is usually studied as the machine is taught, i.e. focusing on a single behavior independent of the life image in which it was acquired The small animal has this behavior, and then draw a proposed plan for how to acquire or develop this behavior, and is rarely sure of the validity of suggestions that give up the extreme difficulty in re-imagining the past informationally, behavior is an event that occurs in a time frame and does not remain an effect often other than fossils, the process of portraying the image of the life of an organism involves the perception of its environmental and social conditions, and this requires more innovative treatments Gablonka admits: “We are far from having a complete evolutionary explanation of the panda’s dependence on bamboo, at least three major problems remain (after understanding the panda’s ancestral diet and the environmental conditions in which it lived). Second, have we identified the developmental pathway that led to this behavior? For this reason, Jablonka argues that "cultural evolution in animals may encompass the whole lifestyle, not a particular isolated behavior."[10] To illustrate this, she provided a famous and well-documented example of macaques, an example that was the starting point for interest in animal culture. To live and gather forage in the forests, but Japanese primate scientists began to feed these monkeys by spreading delicious potatoes on the sandy beach. Soon after, the monkey forces began to leave the forest and feed on the beach. About a year later young monkeys were observed washing potatoes in a valley close to the sand, and within the next few years potato washing spread in this community, and this practice moved from the valley to the sea, and besides washing potatoes established a set of behaviors associated with feeding on the beach in the group of macaques. "European red foxes have successfully adapted to complex and novel civic behavior during a period that is too small to allow for adaptation through gene selection." The main cultural or meme features attributed by Dawkins to humans are to some extent present in the animal.[17] Here, "cultural transmission is similar to gene transfer in that it may arise as a form of evolution."[18] Here, "evolve according to non-genetic methods, and to a rhythm that quickly outpaces its diffusion and the speed of gene development."[19] Here, culture transfer depends on the "ratio of time in which Individuals allocate it to actively pass this meme on to other individuals" and here "memes are spread in the meme assembly by jumping from one brain to another by a path that can be called in the broad sense of tradition" [16] so why make Dawkins only human with a culture capable of "rebelliously rebelling against selfish multiples" rather than animals? If human culture (such as language) has influenced the process of natural selection, why do animals’ social behaviors influence the same process? Dawkins acknowledges that "the melodies produced by the tiki appear to be actually developed in non-genetic ways".[14] He also acknowledges that "other examples exist of the cultural evolution of birds and monkeys", but goes on to say that "these examples are just interesting anomalies; it is our species that shows what cultural evolution can actually achieve, and language is only one example. Fashion in clothing, food, ceremonies, customs, art, architecture, engineering, and technology have all historically evolved in a way that looks like very rapid genetic evolution, but has absolutely nothing to do with genetic evolution. First, what is the meaning of the anomaly here? "Small animals can either learn simple behaviors similar to programming such as some spiders, or through self-learning such as a European hedgehog in its compilation of feed or through social education, to follow a set of examples from parents and others, such as young people."[19] Neglecting a method of learning is obstinacy, and then the comparison must be between humans and other social animals to show whether there is an anomaly, and generally "a persistent." Communication of information acquired by parents over a relatively long period of time in the same habitat helps young people prepare a life course that is as successful as adults, and this assistance covers almost every aspect of life, from immune defense – through food, mating, site selection and placement – to the control of predators. It is recognized that no bird or mammal is born knowing what to eat, or how to find or harvest its food, so it must learn this art, "The world seems in the eyes of young birds and mammals complex and very dangerous place often to live, among other things must the smallest Being able to successfully handle basic but complex tasks to find food, protection, and the right mate later. Since these sources are not available enough, the young may unite against other individuals or species. The world is also crowded with enemies – predators and parasites – who are predictable and may not be able to, and are willing to, attack the uneducated and the unsuspecting. Young people must deal with climate risks such as frosts, heat waves, droughts, disasters such as fires and floods, and sometimes even earthquakes and hurricanes. Second, given that the animal's cultural examples are negligible, why does Dawkins cite examples of mutualistic altruism as a quasi-combined material on its rarity? Not to mention that the two cases presented by Ward, detailing mutualistic altruism come later, on the recognition that cultural examples are numbered, or else they are "revealed by increasing long-term research on chimpanzee populations on a range of behavioral diversity between populations, which is attributed to social learning."[22] From primates may acquire complex new behaviors through social education"[23], and on the next page we will show how social education plays a role in survival, adaptation, and more. Third, the reason Dawkins describes these cultural examples as aberrations is based on a misunderstanding of the animal's "instinct," which we also explain in the next critical element. [1] Mona Abboud, Al-Mayma: An Evolutionary Theory in the Interpretation of Culture, Bisan Publishing, p. [2] The Selfish Gene, pp. 312. [3] The Selfish Gene, p. [4] For those who want to see this modern trend in understanding heredity, the following two books should be added to the books of Eva Jablonka, and the first book is very important: Mary Jane West–Eberhard,2003, Developmental plasticity and evolution, Oxford University Press Andreas Wagner, 2011, The origins of evolutionary innovations, Oxford University Press. [5] Avital, E., & Jablonka, E. (2000). Animal traditions: Behavioural inheritance in evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P.111 [6] ibid. p111. [7] ibid. p111. [8] ibid. p338. [9] ibid. p45. [10] ibid. p99. [11] ibid. p10. [12] ibid. p10. [13] Regardless of the validity of Dawkins's conception of culture, what we mean is that Dawkins is obliged to recognize animal culture. [14] The Selfish Gene, p. [15] Ibid., 309. [16] Ibid, p. 313. [17] Ibid., p. 310. [18] Avital, E., & Jablonka, E. (2000), p310. [19] ibid. p110. [20] ibid. p111. [21] ibid. p110. [22] Michael A. Huffman , Satoshi Hirata, 2003, Biological and ecological foundations of primate, in The Biology of Traditions, Cambridge University Press, p269. [23] Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, 2005, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, Oxford University Press, p20. - Reza Zeidan. — Source: Brahin Center website - Published on 2018-10-10 (archived at the Internet Archive) https://braheen.com/articles/ethics/تجاهل-ثقافة-الحيوان-نقد-الأخلاق-التطورية-عند-دوكينز