> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Oh? How old is our culture? What were whales doing a million years ago that primates weren't that qualifies as culture?
Joseph Henrich, a professor of human biological evolution as Harvard, has some pretty good theories on the subject. He defines culture as, ”the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.” He estimates that our ability to use culture started at perhaps a million or so years ago, maybe a bit more, m…
The origin of the word is to cultivate, from Latin, and implies building and transmission. Familial training in whale pods for feeding techniques is not the same thing. It seemingly echoes some facets of the immensely more complex concept we call culture, but saying that of whales is reductionist in way that isn't useful for clear thought.
Perhaps we can blame modern dictionaries, because the older ones shed more light on the matter: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/culture