R. Allen Gardner - Böcker

If culture is grounded in human biology, then it has an evolutionary history and rudimentary aspects of culture should be detectable in the behaviour of other modern species. In this volume, ethological investigators and biologically oriented anthropologists examine new discoveries in the transmission of behaviour in social groups and across generations and focus on the theme of the ethological roots of culture.

Drawing together research and theory in ethology and psychology, this book offers a clear and provocative account of the ways in which living organisms learn. Throughout, the authors' focus is on the importance of operational definition.In lively prose, describing experiments in enough depth to involve readers in the drama of experimental method, they recount the history of scientists' attempts to answer basic questions, and show how one study builds on another. Although they present the major traditional positions, they demand that readers examine actual evidence, recognize weaknesses, and consider alternatives.This critical process leads to the delineation of a bottom up, feed forward model in contrast to the traditional top down, feed backward one. Recent research in robotics and fuzzy logic suggests ways in which artificial as well as living systems pursue bottom up, feed forward ethological solutions to practical problems. The authors' extended discussion of their exciting work teaching sign language to chimpanzees vividly illustrates the application of the basic principles of learning elucidated in the book.

In this volume, the Gardners and their co-workers explore the continuity between human behavior and the rest of animal behavior and find no barriers to be broken, no chasms to be bridged, only unknown territory to be charted and fresh discoveries to be made.With the beginning of Project Washoe in 1966, sign language studies of chimpanzees opened up a new field of scientific inquiry by providing a new tool for looking at the nature of language and intelligence and the relation between human and nonhuman intelligence. Here, the pioneers in this field review the unique procedures that they developed and the extensive body of evidence accumulated over the years. This close look at what the chimpanzees have actually done and said under rigorous laboratory conditions is the best answer to the heated controversies that have been generated by this line of research among ethologists, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers.