Hal Whitehead > Quotes

“We can get caught in what have been called “information cascades,” where incorrect information propagates through a community because individuals, for whatever reason, prefer to copy others rather that trust their own judgment.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The ocean covers the majority of planet Earth, contains most of the living world, and is a primary driver of Earth’s biosphere. Life evolved in the ocean and continues to evolve there. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution “one of the great unexplored domains of science.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Humpback song has clearly had its effects on human culture—influencing both our music and whaling practices—but what of our interest in whale culture? These discoveries are particularly important for us because there is only one way large numbers of animals can sing the same song that evolves over periods of time that are much less than an individual’s lifetime: culture. Genes”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Galef and Tomasello come from a null-hypothesis-testing, experimental psychology background. The null hypothesis is something like “chimpanzees do not possess culture,” with culture being defined by something like “traditional behavior transmitted by imitation or teaching.” They could not show in their own or others’ experimental studies that captive chimpanzees could imitate or teach, so did not reject the null hypothesis. No culture.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“People listened to whale songs, and politicians listened to the whale-song listening people and, then, finally, acted on the warnings of the population biologist Cassandras. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“This degree of specialization is not expected unless it takes some practice to drive fish well. It is not clear why certain dolphins become specialized like this—they don’t obviously seem to get more fish and surely use more energy herding than do their comrades, waiting for their food to arrive.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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?”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Ethnicity and morality can of course combine, giving the sense that “we” are “good” and “they” are “bad.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“In frequency-dependent bias, common variants are disproportionately likely to spread. Humpback”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Genes do not code for behavior—they code for proteins and control the production of those proteins. How”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Removing the ink, containing the pigment melanin that inhibits secretions in the digestive system, as well as other chemicals that apparently impair taste and smell, would, the scientists state, “improve palatability and internal digestive processes.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Seawater is about 0.5–0.9 percent oxygen at the surface. Most marine animals use gills to get this oxygen into their bodies. A”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“We pay large costs, particularly in energy costs and birthing difficulties, for our cognitive apparatus. Is this another cultural consequence?47”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“There are currently four species of sirenian: three manatee species in the Atlantic and Caribbean and one species of dugong in the Indian and Pacific oceans.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Morality, by promoting cooperative behavior, can change the whole population biology of a species, and it seems to be an important product of gene-culture coevolution in human societies.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution “one of the great unexplored domains of science.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“then social learning is, down the line, affecting the genetic structure of the species.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“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.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The sea cows lived in the northern North Pacific and ate kelp. Humans exterminated sea cows in 1768.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“3.2. Evolution of the marine mammals, showing aquatic, semiaquatic, and largely terrestrial groups of species. Copyright Emese Kazár.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins