ETA some are still active either as crybullies or doing as you say and only holding up a community for rhetorical purposes, but the worst of them have gotten banned.
They absolutely do!
it certainly is if you consider behaviour and cognition as isomorphic. I'm not sure that's a notion most cognitive scientists today would subscribe to.
How many of these species' recent evolution includes a fairly rapid decrease of sexual dimorphism, plausibly triggered by the ancestral male behavioral phenotype becoming maladaptive? I expanded on why I think humans' does probably sneering like 20 pages back. You even liked that particular part if I remember correctly.
In the words of the master: "trans women" is a polyphyletic category. It includes individuals with partial androgen insensitivity that were diagnosed as boys at birth but have since pragmatically chosen to present as women because their entirely inconspicuous female appearance absent any intervention would raise to many eyebrows when presenting a men; individuals who, by choice, have been and continue to be under a female-typical hormone regime since before their physical development completed; individuals who started doing so at a later age; and individuals who fit neither of the above and basically just applied for a legal name change and wear skirts. Expecting all of these disparate groups to have the same level of innate criminal inclination as each other and as cis males doesn't seem particularly plausible biologically, and if we do find such similar levels after lumping all those groups, that's pretty much a giveaway that biology isn't the only factor.
Politesse didn't just say "learn", but "learn new patterns of behavior". Obtaining information about a food source or a foe from a conspecific and doing exactly as you would do if you'd found out yourself isn't learning in that sense. It isn't a new pattern of behaviour, it's applying an innate pattern to a situation you might otherwise be unaware of.
If that's the case, humans don't learn rather, because none of our patterns of behavior are "new" either.
That is not what happens. The ant culture dictates that if you find a food source, your behavior will be/will have been different than if you were chemically “told” what to do. That it has taken millions of years for cultural compliance to become so uniform, is not a difference in the nature of “learning”, societally speaking.
I would fully expect that among ants, there's a kind of endogenous encoding. Any largescale ant redistribution would be very ill informed indeed. It would take a fair bit of introducing groups of ants into new environments and studying their successfulness, and doing this would be very environmentally destructive if any "took root" in these new and strange settings with innovative strategies or behaviors.
Ants have been farming aphids for millions of years. That doesn't imply they have a culture of farming, the way humans have. When the Spanish brought sheep to the new world in the 16th century, the Diné/Navajo quickly learned to farm them, but that is not instinctive behaviour. If you'd parachuted an extended family of Diné onto a deserted Island with a feral sheep population in the 15th century, they'd have hunted them, not farmed, because humans do not have a farming instinct, they have a farming culture. Conversely, if you take a colony of ants of a species that has a mutualistic relationship with aphids in the wild and raise them in an aphid-free environment for several generations, they will start farming the aphids the moment you introduce them into their environment - because ant farming is instinctive, not cultural.
Right. It implies humans have developed a culture of farming, the way ants have for millions of years. But much much faster.
Bees most certainly do learn information from one another, this has also been exhaustively demonstrated.
It's a similar result produced by a very different process. In one case, evolution of instincts, in the other case, learned behavior based on, but qualitatively different from instincts.
Ants are still Hymenopterae. We don't know what got ants started on farming, and we do know class Hymenoptera has a wide variety of learning behaviors. Some learn, some don't.
Hmmm. Are you sure? Has the “instinct” not changed over millions of years? Is it not responsive to the environment?
How is “learned behavior” not an outcome of evolution? Humans’ behavior is very apparently (to me) as instinct-driven as any other organism’s.
Of course it has, that's what evolution does.
The capacity to learn, the processes by which learning (and more rarely, though prominently in humans, teaching) occur, and the possibility space of what can be learned by a given organism, are.
Of course, as is usually the case in biology, there is a fuzzy line and feedback loops galore. Back in the pleistocene, when some wolf packs learned to exploit human leftovers, staying close to humans without attacking them or provoking attacks was a culturally learned behaviour among wolves. It was however a learned behaviour that changed the selection pressures, and within possibly as little as a few dozen generations, what would become our dogs had evolved the genetic basis for increased docility towards humans - but we still need to train dogs we want to keep as pets in the house.
Wherever interindividual learning is faithful enough to produce recogisable shared patterns of behaviour beyond the instinctive ones, there is culture. It is probably true that in most instances, the capacity for social learning was and continues to be selected because of the benefits of culture, but improving reproductive success isn't itself a necessary and sufficient condition for culture - faithful social learning is. Social learning is, in apes, arguably selected because it allows a culture of making elaborate tools or a culture of knowing which plants are edible, which are poisonous, and which are beneficial for certain woes without almost killing yourself a dozen times while finding out. The culture of making up deities and ostracising anyone who doesn't believe in the same set, or of getting outraged when strangers sie their ankles or consume beef, are arguably an unintended side effect of that tendency and themselves maladaptive.
Okay, i was with you right up to “beyond the instinctive”, which is not only undefined, but may well be undefinable.
That has not been demonstrated afaik. The “sufficient” part is almost certainly correct, but obviously reproductive success is necessary for the continuation of the population.
When a behavior becomes detrimental to a group’s reproductive success, it has become maladaptive. Over enough time, the changes in a dynamic fitness landscape renders almost all behaviors maladaptive. (It can happen fast, too, as with the rise of “NONEs” in the US rendering certain religious behaviors maladaptive in an evolutionary nanosecond)
Agreed. Evolution guarantees NO outcome other than change. But it is guaranteed to occur continuously within any population of imperfect self replicators, as long as that population persists within a dynamic environment.
I don't think it's that hard to define. An instinctive behaviour is one that requires no environmental input, or only very unspecific input, to emerge, and, within the "normal" range of environments, doesn't co-vary with variation in the environment. To circle back to gender roles, soccer being a girls' sport is clearly not instinctive - it's a boys' sport in much of the rest of the world, including the places where most Americans' ancestors hail from. Men being more prone to violence than women may well be (partly) instinct driven - it appears to be fairly universal among the cultures that have been described by ethnographers, though the details vary significantly.
Reproductive success is indeed necessary for the continuation of the population, but that doesn't say that a population that has culture cannot thrive if the culture itself doesn't contribute to reproductive success.
Or it always was maladaptive. This may be more common than we intuitively think, though this also depends on the granularity of the analysis. Tuning down the immune system during pregnancy is arguably adaptive as it allows the fetus to escape being eliminated - but there wasn't a point in our evolutionary history when pregnant women being more susceptible to infectious diseases than the population average was adaptive. Similarly, the capacity of culture was and is adaptive in all apes - if nothing else, since it allows us to learn about edible plants without trial and (potentially lethal) error, but that doesn't imply that religion every was.
It's going to be a fuzzy border. We're talking biology after all. But see my attempt above.
