Reaction paper 1
The article, Darwin’s Rib, by Robert S. Root-Bernstein was fascinating to me. My personal reaction to the reading was one of surprise. When I read that the student in Dr. Root-Bernstein’s class believed that “males have one fewer pair of ribs than females” (Root-Bernstein 2010: 53), I was shocked. As someone who is invested in scientific information, I found her reasoning odd and unfounded. She had based her knowledge of scientific facts off a personal religious assumption. I found myself as shocked as the professor; how could a college student bring biblical knowledge into a scientific class without expecting to have her evidence for life and life’s origin, falsified? The professor describes that his “mandible dropped” (Root-Bernstein …show more content…
The evidence for these cultures are the ways chimpanzees use different techniques and learn different behaviors depending on the area in which they have grown up. The way different cultures develop among chimpanzee communities was very interesting to me. I found the idea that a non-human community could have a culture to be intriguing. It made me think about how this information could be applied to early hominins. I was under the impression that culture begins when Homo sapiens live together and share knowledge and information amongst themselves. I may have had this idea because language is such a vital part of culture, but chimpanzees, or any primates for that matter, don’t use a proper language to communicate with each other. But the idea that learning can take place without language, which can create incipient cultures among groups of chimpanzees, astounded …show more content…
They do not have the ability to “ratchet up” knowledge over time. Each community must start from scratch with every new generation; nobody builds on past ideas, they just accept them as the only way of doing things and continue on. This occurs even when there is a possible “better” option, if there has already been an established way of doing something, there is no evident need to reinvent the way the task is performed. This is significantly different to human culture that reinvents how things can be achieved often and without much consequence. Perhaps it is a necessity to use these things constantly to survive that keeps chimpanzees from innovating their
The article, Darwin’s Rib, by Robert S. Root-Bernstein was fascinating to me. My personal reaction to the reading was one of surprise. When I read that the student in Dr. Root-Bernstein’s class believed that “males have one fewer pair of ribs than females” (Root-Bernstein 2010: 53), I was shocked. As someone who is invested in scientific information, I found her reasoning odd and unfounded. She had based her knowledge of scientific facts off a personal religious assumption. I found myself as shocked as the professor; how could a college student bring biblical knowledge into a scientific class without expecting to have her evidence for life and life’s origin, falsified? The professor describes that his “mandible dropped” (Root-Bernstein …show more content…
The evidence for these cultures are the ways chimpanzees use different techniques and learn different behaviors depending on the area in which they have grown up. The way different cultures develop among chimpanzee communities was very interesting to me. I found the idea that a non-human community could have a culture to be intriguing. It made me think about how this information could be applied to early hominins. I was under the impression that culture begins when Homo sapiens live together and share knowledge and information amongst themselves. I may have had this idea because language is such a vital part of culture, but chimpanzees, or any primates for that matter, don’t use a proper language to communicate with each other. But the idea that learning can take place without language, which can create incipient cultures among groups of chimpanzees, astounded …show more content…
They do not have the ability to “ratchet up” knowledge over time. Each community must start from scratch with every new generation; nobody builds on past ideas, they just accept them as the only way of doing things and continue on. This occurs even when there is a possible “better” option, if there has already been an established way of doing something, there is no evident need to reinvent the way the task is performed. This is significantly different to human culture that reinvents how things can be achieved often and without much consequence. Perhaps it is a necessity to use these things constantly to survive that keeps chimpanzees from innovating their