Language and Culture Amongst Other Animals

[jordan179]

There has been strong resistance from the scientific community to the use of the terms "language" and "culture" to describe animal communication and learned behavior. But this resistance seems to me to be essentially irrational and unscientific in nature.

Comments

[notebuyer]

Moral recognition goes to moral agents: how have they demonstrated that capability?

[jordan179]

In a primitive and simple fashion, as one might expect of primitive and simple creatures.

All great apes have a notion of reciprocity in relationships: they remember who has been nice to them and who has been nasty to them, and tend to treat those who have been nice to them in the past nicely in the future, and vice versa (*). Franz Van Waal (sp?), in Good Nature (which discusses the evolution of proto-morality in intelligent animals) goes into detail about the appearance and relative complexity of systems of reciprocity and expected reciprocity in apes and other intelligent animal species.

I mean, you're not going to find complex philosophy emnating from creatures whose intellects are, on the average, subhuman. Koko's "Be good. Be polite" is about as far as an ape moral code goes (**). But it is the key to pretty much all human moral codes, too, so I wouldn't knock it