Quotes from Hal Whitehead

This is all speculation, as are our ideas about the overall functions of the songs. However, what we do know about the humpback song is that it is an important part of the acoustic ecology of the ocean; that it is loud, long, complex, beautiful; and that it is culture.

ocean competition is usually a scramble—who can get the most per unit time—rather than a contest in which only one competitor gets the spoils. In scramble competitions, the emphasis changes from the competitors themselves to the resources. One expects less antagonism between members of the same species in the fluid, three-dimensional ocean.

Newborns can be up to 20 percent of their mother's mass in the smaller cetacean species. This is extreme. Few, if any, large terrestrial mammals give birth to young that are more than 15 percent of their own weight.26 The minimum size for a newborn marine mammal seems to be about 0.6 meters long and five kilograms.

Their myoglobin, which holds oxygen in the muscles, evolved to become more electrically charged and therefore better at holding onto oxygen, so their muscles became huge oxygen stores.

give birth to precocious offspring, able to swim immediately after birth and so to follow their mothers through their fluid world. For

The scientists reviewing McDonald's paper were fine with a discussion of a frankly tenuous hypothesis that ocean acidification could affect the frequencies of blue whale song, but would not, he felt, be open to an explanation that would be near the top of the list were this the behavior of humans, rather than blue whales: cultural drive propagating around the world.

The sound-producing organs of their terrestrial ancestors, their larynxes, evolved to make louder and more complex sounds. For instance, dolphins have two nasal passages and two sets of sound-producing organs and can simultaneously produce two different sounds. The

Because culture is learned socially, we generally think of social structure as a driver of culture, but these examples suggest the reverse, that cultural behavior can shape society.

The terrestrial heritage of the marine mammals is evident in their air breathing and its consequences for metabolic rates, size, and sound production. There is one other characteristic of the marine mammals and especially the cetaceans that is remarkable among marine creatures, but is less obviously tied to air breathing: their brains.

then social learning is, down the line, affecting the genetic structure of the species.

However, there are actually few good data, or much theory, as to why relative brain size is the best indicator of cognitive ability, other than a general feeling that large animals need large brains. Instead, there is increasing evidence from structural analyses of brains, as well as from attempts to test species with different-sized brains on comparable tasks, that absolute size may be a better general measure of cognitive ability.

There is one variant of bubble feeding where the case is stronger for its being culturally based, and this is because, as with the songs of humpback, bowhead, and blue whales, there has been a change in the population's behavior over timescales of less than a generation. The behavior is called lobtail feeding, which is a variant on the bubble-cloud feeding that we described a little earlier. The

If you're going to run into your enemies, you better be with your friends, or have some that are close by, willing to be recruited.

superalliance, a

For similarly unclear reasons, adult men did not take part in this. However, it does seem clear that by consuming the brain tissue of their relatives who had themselves died of kuru, the Fore had spread the disease through their female population. Thus, a culturally transmitted practice led to catastrophe, both for the Fore and for their genes.

We pay large costs, particularly in energy costs and birthing difficulties, for our cognitive apparatus. Is this another cultural consequence?47

The idea that culture can be viewed as a form of inheritance goes back to Charles Darwin, who sometimes did not clearly distinguish between what we now recognize as genetic and cultural inheritances.62

Culture needs a community of social relationships over which the knowledge flows. At

Human cultural supremacy over the surface of the earth is recent and not quite complete. If we could have listened at lower frequencies, below the limits of the human ear, we would have heard rumbles and groans of other whales—the finback and the blue—their songs competing in the lowest frequency bands with the recent sound of ships. Could these be other nonhuman cultures?

Genetic determination and social learning are, however, fundamentally different processes. Tellingly, the cultural songs of the oscine birds are generally more complex, sometimes much more so, and more diverse than the genetically driven nonoscine calls.

The bowhead lives its life extremely slowly, becoming sexually mature at about age twenty-five, with females giving birth every seven years or so; if it avoids the whalers, a bowhead has a good chance of living well past a century.19 It is definitively the

Genes do not code for behavior—they code for proteins and control the production of those proteins. How

While the definition of culture used in all chapters included transmission by social learning and an element of sharing, as in our definition, the anthropologist authors of the later chapters added additional requirements. These

The first time I ever recorded the songs of the humpback whales at night was off Bermuda. It was also the first time I had ever heard the abyss. Normally you don't hear the size of the ocean when you are listening, but I heard it that night . . . That's what whales do; they give the ocean its voice, and the voice they give is ethereal and unearthly."44