The Imitation Factor: Evolution Beyond The Gene Hardcover – January 8, 2001

Dugatkin is a biologist and science writer. His specialist field seems to be the mating behaviour of guppies. Mating bahaviour is interesting from the perspective of cultural transmission - since chooseing a mate is a very important decision that it is difficult to get right - and many creatures may well use social cues to help them decide on the best mate.

In the book Dugatkin describes in considerable detail the evidence that shows that guppies do, in fact copy each other's mate choice. This involves experiments with mirrors, fake male guppies attached to sticks.

The book is mainly concerned with the issues of animal culture and animal teaching. It came out in the year 2000 - and the subject has exploded since then, with many new publications. As fellow reviewer Herbert Gintis says, it is rather strange that Dugatkin makes no mention of: "The Evolution of Culture in Animals" by John Tyler Bonner from 1983 - which is an important previous landmark in this area.

There are some studies relating to human mate choice in the book as well, but that isn't the focus. The book is pretty well written and readable. However, the topic involves a lot of descriptions of scientific experiments - which is an intrinsically dry subject area for many. You have to be pretty interested in the topic to want to read the book. Fortunately the topic is a key issue in biology, so there will be some who are interested.

There's a chapter on defining culture - where Dugatkin endorses the definition of Boyd and Richerson from 1985 that confines culture to information transmitted by imitation and teaching - and excludes other forms of social learning. I don't really approve of defining culture that way - but defining culture remains a controversial issue.

The book has a whole chapter on memes, which serves to put the author's ideas in context. A few months before his book was published, Dugatkin published a "counterpoint" to Susan Blackmore's Scientific American article titled "The power of memes" which was called: "Animals Imitate, Too". One of the flaws of Susan's book was that it was very human-centric. It played down the abilities of animals to imitate - and positioned memes as the factor that had transformed beasts into men. Memes did do that - but it is important to note that animals have cultural transmission - and thus memes - too.

Here is what Dugatkin wrote in that response article:

"In my work as a behavioral ecologist I have run across dozens of other examples of animal behavior that fit the definition of a meme, and I would not be surprised if the total number were quite large. Memes may be older and more fundamental to biological evolution than Blackmore or anyone else has argued to date. More specifically, the difference between animal and human memes may be quantitative rather than qualitative. Memeticists may well take hold of the idea that animal memes are real and use this to bolster the claim that memes truly are a universally important force in evolution. But if memes do not separate us from animals, as Blackmore suggests, then they alone cannot explain why human culture is uniquely advanced."

The chapter in the book on memes is pretty good. Dugatkin closes by quoting Dawkins on the power of memes (the bit where Dawkins says that memes may leave genes panting behind)- and then he says:

"Memes may have the power that this quotation implies, but even so, the more profound point is that they may be older and more fundamental than Dawkins, Blackmore or anyone else has tended to think."

That pretty neatly encaspulates the main theme of the book - that culture is an ancient and ubiquitous phenomenon in the animal kingdom. These days, there's even evidence for cultural transmission among small insects like ants and flies- which have pretty limited cognition.

I think it is fair to say that Dugatkin's ideas about memes have withstood the test of time. We can now see that memes are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, just as Dugatkin claimed that they were.

Enjoy.

Lee Alan Dugatkin is a first-rate animal behavior experimentalist whose specialty is the guppy, as well as a game-theoretic modeler. Most welcome is Dugatkin's talent for popular exposition of animal behavior research.
This book is a very general exposition of animal behavior theory for the general public, with a special emphasis on epigenetic transmission of information, which Dugatkin equates with cultural transmission. He does quite a good job, and I would recommend this book to curious newcomers to the field. Dugatkin is especially good at weaving general themes (e.g., the various explanations of mate choice) with the specifics of particular
experiments.
My concern here will be as an animal behaviorist whose specialty is human beings. Humans come into the picture in the first sentence of Dugatkin's book: "We desperately want to think of ourselves as somehow distinct from other life forms on our planet...Currently there is the sense that we are unique because
"culture" is found only in humans...As we shall see, culture is not humanity's gift to the universe." (p. ix). There is no doubt but that Dugatkin is correct, and indeed, it is impossible to understand human culture as divorced from the broad sweep of cultural phenomena across species. The attempt to do so is a major flaw in sociological and anthropological approaches to human culture--but that is another story to tell.
While Dugatkin's assertion is correct, and his efforts to motivate his position are quite successful, it is curious that he does not place his argument in intellectual context. John Tyler Bonner's pathbreaking The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton University Press 1984) is not mentioned, nor is Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's ambitious Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution (Oxford University Press 1995) are not mentioned.
Nor is the Baldwin effect, which is a major causal link from culture to genes (Baldwin, "A New Factor in Evolution", American Naturalist 30 1896).
Dugatkin is quite orthodox in taking the gene-culture coevolution definition of culture as "information", a definition anchored in the two great contributions of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution (Princeton University Press, 1981), and Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985). In brief, this view holds that culture is information concerning the organism's physical and biological environment. While the basic biological information transmission mechanism is genetic inheritance, epigenetic transmission may also be fitness enhancing, and when it is, we can expect cultural transmission in animals. I do not dispute the fact that culture includes epigenetic information transmission. For instance, as Dugatkin stresses the tendency for previously mated male guppies to be desirable to unmated females may be due to the fact that older female guppies "teach" younger females who the desirable males are (although there are other plausible explanations of this phenomenon). I do believe, however, that (a) imitation in animals is categorically distinct from the "teaching" and "learning" that typically occurs in human cultural transmission; and (b) the culture-as-information definition of culture is considerably too narrow to embrace all of human culture, and misses what is particularly unique about human culture.
On the first point, most animal behaviorists have come to accept the idea that, pace bird imitations of vocalizations, animals do not imitate complex learned behavior directly. Rather, the contiguity of an individual to a conspecific carrying out a particular learned behavior increases the probability that the individual will stumble upon the same behavior. For instance, if a chimp discovers how to use a stone to smash open a food item,
her child will be frequently in situations where stones and the food item are contiguous, and hence is more likely to discover the complex behavior. But the behavior is neither "learned" from the parent, or "taught" by the parent to the child. For more on this topic, the reader might refer to Tomasello and Call, Primate Cognition (Oxford University Press 1997), Daniel Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works (Oxford 2000), and Marc Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (Henry Holt, 2000).
The most distinctive characteristic of human culture, however, is the existence of ethical norms and values. A value such as "dress modestly," "work hard and do not succumb to temptations that yield only short-run pleasures," and "forgive those who transgress upon you," are deeply cultural forms, but they do not involve objective information about the world. Unlike a technique, such as how to fashion a tool, where to look for prey, or what types of things are edible, an ethical value has no scientific truth value. Of course, one might assert that if one follows a certain norm, certain material results will obtain (e.g., long life, good after-life, high fitness, happiness), but humans follow norms for their own sake, and
even when these good results are not expected. In sociology this is called the internalization of norms (see, for instance, Grusec and Kuczynski, Parenting and Children's Internalization of Values: A Handbook of Contemporary Theory, John Wily & Sons 1997). The human capacity to internalize norms is thus akin to the programmability of human goals, since the key factor in an internalized value is that people \emph{conform to the prescribed behavior for its own sake, and as a goal of action, rather than a means towards the realization of other goals. As I argue in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism: Genes, Culture, and the Internalization of Norms", Journal of Theoretical Biology 220,4 (2003):407-418, the programmability of the preference function is key to human prosocial behavior, quite on par with the accumulation and transmission of the types of cultural techniques associated with improving the ability to exploit the physical and natural environment.
I would have preferred that Dugatkin include in his analysis both the factors leading to a commonality of culture across species, and the factors involved in the special cultural position of humans, but just dealing with the first of these makes for a quite informative and interesting contribution.