Although this may be true for some aspects of the process, for others it is clearly suspect, as chimpanzees’ sister species, bonobos, who shared that same common ancestor, have so far provided little evidence of cultural traditions or transmission in natural populations (though of course they have not been observed nearly as closely as have chimpanzees). In the case of primates, the further claim is sometimes made that chimpanzee culture and human culture are homologous, that is, that their common ancestor some 6 million years ago passed on to both species the same basic skills of cultural transmission ( Boesch 2003 Whiten et al. Assuming that these claims are to some degree valid, this means that cultural transmission as an evolutionary process may arise in a wide variety of species given the right ecological and social conditions. 2003), Japanese macaques ( Huffman 1996) and capuchin monkeys ( Perry et al. Culture has been claimed, for example, for dolphins and whales ( Rendell & Whitehead 2001), New Caledonian crows ( Hunt & Gray 2003), chimpanzees ( Whiten et al. In recent years, researchers have claimed that a variety of different animal species have some form of culture or cultural transmission. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans’ unique form of cumulative cultural evolution. This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the ‘ratchet effect’). Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species’ existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the ‘zone of latent solutions’) that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well.
![that so ratchet urban dictionary that so ratchet urban dictionary](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l4Q98sBeVCM/Vm8y1ySAHNI/AAAAAAAAAIA/e82uut0MAUE/s1600/Urban%2BDictionary%2BExtra%2BDefinition.jpg)
![that so ratchet urban dictionary that so ratchet urban dictionary](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cVoSaVeUQGg/UDtcnHXeCDI/AAAAAAAABGo/Nla61v19afE/s1600/unnamed.png)
I mean, they both involved assholes.Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms.
![that so ratchet urban dictionary that so ratchet urban dictionary](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma3qrilux81rdueojo1_r1_500.png)
To be honest, the definition of Twitter didn’t actually shift all that much. How does context change over the course of a decade? Do the teens of today relate to the teens of 2005? Let’s find out! 1) Twitter So we decided to flip through its pages and find a couple of definitions of the same word-but separated by a decade or so. It’s generally frequented by teenagers who write lewd nonsense under their enemies’ names, but there’s still a lot of unexpected poignancy.Īnd since it’s more than 15 years old, Urban Dictionary hosts both ancient and modern definitions of every term, celebrity, country, genre of music, or sex position known to man. One of my favorite repositories of the human condition is Urban Dictionary, the long-running website that allows any cretinous individual with a Web browser to define whatever term he or she thinks is worth defining. We’re unwittingly creating the people’s history of the world, together, through our constant vandalizing of this terrible, wonderful place. All the drudgery, perversions, and absent-minded commentary we upload to this place on a daily basis is more or less still here, waiting quietly on long-forgotten Xangas, message boards, and MySpace profiles. Seriously: It’s strange to think we’ve been living under an overpass of the information superhighway for more than 20 years, but here we are.