Do Animals Have Memes

Abstract

Imitation has been put forward as a defining feature of memetic transmission. Since \nthere is currently poor evidence for imitation in non-human animals, such definitions \nhave been interpreted as restricting meme theory to the study of human behaviour \npatterns and birdsong. We believe this is a mistake. Human capacities for imitation, \nteaching and language may well account for the extraordinary diversity of human \nculture compared with animal proto-cultures, but imitation is simply one mechanism of \ntransmitting acquired information between individuals. As long as information is \ntransmitted with sufficient fidelity to be replicated in the brain of the receiver, any \nsocial learning process will do. Non-human animals may be poor imitators, but many \nare excellent social learners. We argue that the meme concept can, and should, be \napplied to animal cultural transmission.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.