Fish Culture

Consciousness, cognition, culture... cichlids and carp? Oh my!

When facing the lived reality of the metacrisis, it can be more than overwhelming to ponder what possible actions we might take in the hope of defusing this bomb. We can only act individually, and no individual can hope to “solve” the collective predicament. Yet if large groups of individuals act in concert, then meaningful change is possible. How could you motivate large groups of individuals?

Expanding people’s spheres of concern and compassion would be a great thing; a potential bottom-up, values-based point-of-departure for positive action. How might such an attitudinal change take place? Notions of human exceptionalism are a common root underneath most of our ecologically destructive tendencies as well as our collective apathy towards the plight of the natural world. Yes, humans are special and beautiful; but we are not more important than any other aspect of the biosphere. All other nonhuman life on this planet is also special and beautiful, and has every “right” to exist as humans do.

The differences that set humans apart from other animals in this world are differences in degree, not differences in kind. Absolutely every trait we think of as fundamentally “human” is already shared by our nonhuman cousins: cognition, emotion, conceptual thinking, goal-making, problem-solving, language, self-awareness, names, identity, family and social relationships, societal organization and hierarchy, cooperation/collaboration, compassion, empathy, the capacity for life-long love, grief, visual art, music, architecture, the appreciation of beauty, and — the result of the combination of many of these factors — culture. There is nothing fundamental in the human world that does not already have its deep counterpart in the nonhuman world.

“Organized religion” is one thing that doesn’t exist in the nonhuman world. But it’s not ubiquitous in the human world either. Religion isn’t needed in the nonhuman world because that world hasn’t fallen victim to the over-conceptualization that plagued humans with the rise of agriculture. The advent of large scale agriculture and “civilization” resulted in us cognitively alienating ourselves from nature. Organized religion is the human “software patch” on the conceptual operating system “bug” of human exceptionalism (which is our self-alienation from nature).¹

Indigenous “religions” aren’t like organized religions; indigenous spirituality is part-and-parcel of the people’s very existence. Organized religions are part of the cultures they are embedded in. Indigenous spirituality subsumes indigenous culture. Organized religion is something “civilized” people “believe in” and/or “do.” Indigenous spirituality is what the people are. You cannot disentangle indigenous spirituality from identity, culture, tradition, landscape stewardship, and so on. Whereas in “civilized” societies, you can separate separate "organized religion” from identity, governance, and agriculture much more easily. Yes, organized religion is intertwined with those things, sometimes very deeply. But there was always some “space” that can be found between organized religious doctrine/tradition and daily life for some, if not the majority of the people.

Can modern humans relax their grip on human exceptionalism? Can modern humans realize everything that “makes us human” has their corollaries with our nonhuman cousins in the living world? One of the things that makes us human is all of our human cultures. Can we look at the cultures of our nonhuman cousins and realize that those cultures are beautiful and worthy of concern and compassion as well?

No author got me more curious about the nature of culture in general, and the cultures of various animal groups in particular, than the wonderful Carl Safina. If you’ve never read Safina, I’d highly recommend ordering about a dozen copies of each of his books; you never know when you’ll need spares ;) What follows draws heavily on his book Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.²

To begin: what is “culture?” Quoting Safina:

Culture is… a form of inheritance. Culture stores important information not in gene pools but in minds. Pools of knowledge — skills, preferences, songs, tool use, and dialects — get relayed through generations like a torch. And cultures itself changes and evolves, often bestowing adaptability more flexibly and rapidly than genetic evolution ever could. An individual only receives genes from their parents but can receive culture from anyone and everyone in their social group… because culture improves survival, culture can lead where genes must follow and adapt. p.xiii, emphasis added.

Note that last phrase. Safina subscribes to the idea of Darwinian Natural Selection. I most certainly do not (although that rejection does not bring the idea of evolution itself into question). But even as a supporter of the idea of natural selection, he acknowledges at least the potential of the primacy of culture in leading genes. This is crucial and we’ll come back to it. But staying with what “culture” is, he continues:

What is cultural becomes obvious if not everyone does it. Everyone eats; eating isn’t culture. Not everyone eats with chopsticks; chopsticks are part of culture… group-to-group variations in customs, traditions, practices, and tools — such differences show what is cultural. p.23

Now some (many?) people think culture is a strictly human phenomenon. Not only is that not correct, but to adhere to that notion is to make the concept of “culture” nigh-meaningless. As Safina elucidates:

If our definition [of culture] considers only what is cultural for humans, we can never ask questions like “Where did the human capacity for culture come from?” or “Do nonhumans have any cultural attributes?”… A definition restricting culture to humans offers nothing. p.33

And, finally, a distinction between what we do and how we do it; and the strange collaboration it takes to make culture:

One definition of culture… is: “the way we do things.” Behavior is what we do; how we do it — is culture… Ironically, culture — a process of learning and conformity — depends on individuals who don’t entirely conform to the way we do things. Culture depends both on doing what you’ve seen done — and on someone, at some point, doing what no one else has ever seen done… culture depends crucially on crowds of conformists and the rare innovator. Without some original innovator — some untaught learner, some unschooled teacher — there is no knowledge, skill, or tradition that can get started; there is no culture to copy and conform to.

With the foregoing discussion of culture, hopefully it’s not too hard to recognize that we find culture everywhere in the wild world. From the astonishing work of weaverbirds to bowerbirds, to the problem-solving genius of the corvids; From the self-names, dialects, and songs of cetaceans, to the decades-old memories of the matriarch elephants that lead their families on immense treks to survive the hard times; From differing tool use across different groups of primates, to the seemingly-simple act of a dog learning it’s human’s voice commands; The astonishing intellect of our animal cousins enables deep culture, if only we are sensitive enough to realize it.

But fish? Can fish have culture? If so, wouldn’t that mean that they are intelligent, social beings with a sense of community? Yes and yes. And, not only that, but this capacity for culture is actually a primary driver in evolution and can extend to far more “simple” organisms than highly intelligent birds and mammals. For example, the waggle dances of honeybees are quite sophisticated and must be learned by new hive members. Supposedly “simple” organisms are not so simple at all! In fact, the closer you look, the more implausible human exceptionalism becomes. So let’s take a closer look.

Even after Darwin published On the Origin of Species there were fundamental mysteries his hypotheses did not illuminate (and Darwin acknowledged this). It seemed that two daughter populations descending from one parent population needed to become somehow reproductively isolated from each other. But how? Darwin was never confident that there was a definitive answer. Surprisingly, there never really has been any clear-cut answers to this. Geographic isolation has historically been presumed. In defense of that hypothesis, some cases of it are fairly clear — and others that are at least fairly plausible. For example, the separation of bonobos from chimpanzees by the formation of the Congo river. But there are a mind-numbing (actually unknowable) number of species that have existed on this planet. It more-than-strains credulity to think that nothing but geographic isolation is responsible for reproductive isolation in the descent of all species that have ever existed.

Quoting Safina:

“…populations remaining in the same region must have fractured into different species many, many times. But — how?” p.194 He continues:

The existence of hundreds of species of cichlid fishes in the same African lake has always seemed to me proof that some other process is functioning the world. Proof, yet the mystery remained: What process? Some experts believe that …[the fishes] first separate by occupying different areas… before they can evolve towards separate species. And this is plausible…

But… there are hundreds of species in some lakes; it’s unlikely that there are hundreds of kinds of places to get away from everyone. Something else must be going on.

He then quotes Les Kaufman: “Environments with many microhabitats give major advantages to individuals specializing in making a living in a particular microhabitat.”

So we have the necessary presence of microhabitats, but those aren’t numerous enough to be a sufficient explanation; a closer look is need. Safina frames the problem clearly: “Do specialists actively avoid mating with fish that are still generalists and with others specializing in using the lake differently?” He continues:

So far, scientists have documented about a hundred species, from mammals to fishes to butterflies, in which individual or groups use different specialized skills… …I dug deeper into the scientific literature, asking whether specialization spread by culture could have anything to do with the evolution of new species.

Turned out: it could. In some lakes sunfish have developed two types of specialists within the same species. Moreover, their behavioral specializations have led to physical differences between the specialists… p.195

The specialization is cultural because it requires the young to observe and copy (and occasionally improvise on) what the older generations ares doing, as will become more apparent. Safina offers the general thesis:

How might cultural specialization carry into genetically evolved differences? Imagine a fish species in which two kinds of specialists develop. Let’s say that one group specializes in bottom feeding, another specializes in open-water feeding. Let’s say that young fish learn how to feed by watching older fish. And let’s say that there’s an advantage to specializing such that specialists forage more efficiently than generalists, so they survive better. Relatively inefficient generalists, at a disadvantage, would begin to dwindle. Young fish that fail to specialize would not survive well. Higher survival of specialists, and of the young fish who tend to adopt the specialties of nearby adults, would push the two specialist groups apart. Over many hundreds of generations, specialists would start to diverge from one another. Specialists would begin evolving different shapes and behaviors that further improve the efficiencies of their specialty. Eventually they’d be different enough — maybe — to be different species.

This is no longer hypothetical… pp.195-196

Safina provides references to several papers illustrating exactly these dynamics in bluegill sunfish, pumpkinseed sunfish, sticklebacks (all North American fishes), Midas cichlids in Nicaragua, and cichlids in Cameroon.

So far we have seen that over thousands of years, some diverging specialists turned into different species in the same lakes…

But can social learning alone cause specialists to be attracted only to similar specialists? Could a species first begin to break into diverging groups while occupying the same place simply because individuals learn and do what they see others doing, and mate with the types they grow up around and have seen others mating with? Culture could not create a species unless the answer to those questions was: yes.

Does it sound far-fetched? Human exceptionalism compels us towards wanting to say “preposterous!” But reality is stranger than simplistic thinking like human exceptionalism can allow for. Safina then quotes from a personal email from Melanie Stiassny:

If any fish can be thought of as having a ‘culture,’ it would be cichlids. Very unusual for fishes, they have protracted parental care (both parents are usually involved with ‘child care,’ usually for a long time), so the opportunities for behavioral imprinting are particularly high. It makes sense that small preferences for habitat or parental coloration could be imprinted on offspring, leading to differential mating, ergo — speciation. p.197

He provides a reference for a salient paper and immediately follows the above quote with:

And, in fact, experiments with Lake Victoria cichlid fishes show that young females develop sexual preferences for males who look like their fathers — even when researchers rigged it so that the fish the females saw as their fathers were actually males of a different species.

Providing references for two more studies, he continues:

We have seen from just a superficial survey of examples that in species ranging from sperm whales to birds to fishes to fruit flies, groups form and stick together and isolate from other groups of their kind based on socially learned cultural habits — habits as practical as foraging specialties and as seemingly arbitrary as differing preferences for certain dialects, colors, and markings.

So even the specifics of sexual preferences can be cultural. If we reflect on human culture, is this such a surprise? Yet the implications for this are huge. Darwin was left with many questions as to what the “mechanisms” behind evolution might be. Here, more than 160 years later, Safina is shedding tremendous light on these questions:

Darwin, Fisher, and others have pointed out how arbitrary³ mating preferences result in peacock tails and elk antlers. I am now convinced that breeding preferences don’t just create mating winners and losers who score high or low while playing for the same team — but that breeding preferences can and do create different leagues that take their own games into differing arenas, We’ve seen that cultural innovation and social learning create specialists. Once specialists occur, the stage is set for each to avoid others, take their specialization into a new niche, and permanently cut ties.

I strongly suspect that the mechanisms driving⁴ the origin of new species are mainly three: Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” and his “sexual selection,” and the one our present exploration has brought us to here, which I’ll call cultural selection.⁵ By cultural selection I mean the power of socially learned preferences to create group cohesion and cause avoidance between groups. The avoidance means reproductive isolation. The reproductive isolation sets groups up for different journeys. Cultural learning can cause groups to mate like with like, thus deepening specializations, amplifying differences, and, I believe, diverging until they are sufficiently distinct to be different species.” pp.197-198

After citing a paper and giving some examples of cultural selection, Safina continues:

I believe that without the necessity of waiting… for ponderous epochs to create geographic isolation, something pushed these creatures apart and sharpened their differences while they were poking around the same places.⁶ And that something was: mating preferences that were observed, learned, and copied, creating cultural specializations that bestowed advantages, driving separation and ultimately sparking new species.

This really is an astonishing conclusion, and I’m amazed so few biologists and ecologists highlight it. Safina closes this section with a final example of others reaching the same conclusion. He cites a paper and quotes biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant discussing how the different Galapagos finches maintain species isolation even though they cohabitate: “Mate preferences that develop from sexual imprinting on parental body size and beak traits and from learning parental song… tend to maintain the reproductive isolation.” [p. 199]

Perhaps it’s not mind-blowing to some people that animals have culture. But to see how ubiquitous culture is, it’s presence in what some might regard as “simple” animals, such as fishes or insects (which really are not simple at all), and it’s power in shaping the evolution of life on this planet — hopefully in seeing this, some new people can begin to deeply appreciate our kinship with all life on Earth.

Humans are kin to the natural world and all our fellow inhabitants of Planet Earth. Further, our nonhuman kin live amazingly rich and complex lives. What we learn about them while studying them can teach us much about ourselves if only we are wise enough to pay attention. In one of my favorite studies to read, researcher Ava R. Chase pondered the possibility of fish being able to correctly interpret human culture: could koi learn to tell the difference between the blues and Bach? As it turns out, they can. From the conclusion of the paper’s introduction:

I felt that a demonstration that fish could learn to categorize stimuli as complex as music, according to a criterion as unnatural as musical genre, not only would show that they extract meaningful signals, but also might suggest a capability for higher order auditory processing comparable with that of pigeons and people.⁷

Human exceptionalism has fueled a grotesque usurpation of Mother Nature’s hallowed domain. The genocides that imperial human cultures have committed against fellow human beings over recent millennia are nothing compared to the genocide our modern, global culture has conducted against our nonhuman kin in recent centuries. Further, we are salting our own fields and poisoning our own wells. Wiser human cultures already exist and have always existed. Must we wait for the current system to destroy itself before seeking a wiser, more compassionate, path of stewardship?

1. Imago dei is something some theologians would claim is exclusively human (i.e. proffer it as support for human exceptionalism). But this is a doctrine from one slice of human religions, and is anathema to virtually all indigenous spirituality/religion. One can’t hold up imago dei as evidence for exceptionalism; one has to justify the veracity of imago dei in the first place.

I would assert it’s a vacuous concept: either there’s no such thing as imago dei, or everything that there is is imago dei. Or, even better, drop the “image” part. Everything is God. But the term “God” is an empty placeholder as well, something I’m not overly-fond of. This is (one of the many reasons) why I’m not a theist.

2. All subsequent page numbers come from my copy of the book: Carl Safina, Becoming Wild, Henry Holt and Company, 2020, 1st Edition (Hardcover).

3. Even though he uses the word “arbitrary” here, he is not belittling the importance of preferences in any way. He later argues that it’s the aesthetic judgment of beauty that’s often behind these preferences; a key theme of the book:

“Sexual tastes and preferences — many of them cultural, many of them female — have helped drive Life’s diversification. Likely they drive it far enough to repeatedly cause the origin of beautiful new species. Beauty — for the sake of beauty alone — is a powerful, fundamental, evolutionary force. Beauty coupled with behavioral specializations, all reinforced by cultural learning that makes the young prefer the preferences of their elders, drives much of what we see in the wondrous living world.” p.199

4. “…mechanisms driving…” Notice both the appeal to mechanics and the presumption of something like “impetus.” It’s implied the evolution of species are being “pushed” forward by (i.e. is reducible to) more fundamental “forces.” I strongly disagree with that characterization and will argue against this position (and against the concept of “natural selection” itself) in detail in a future essay drawing on the twelfth chapter of Iain McGilchrist’s astounding The Matter With Things and the work of Kinji Imanishi.

In summary: the history of biological evolution can be entirely described in terms of sexual selection and cultural selection alone. “Natural selection” is not needed because I don’t believe the concept reflects any behavior of the natural world that isn’t already addressed in those two prior selection types.

5. Here’s a sneak peak of the upcoming essay: not only is natural selection is not a force, there’s actually no such thing as “natural selection” (per 4 above). Of course evolution from common descent is as much a fact of science as we can have; and we are grateful to Darwin for formulating his notions of it. But there’s no “survival of the fittest” because “fitness,” if it is ever defined, is simply “that which enables survival.” The statement is tautological. What actually enables survival is the sum total of the organism and its environment. In other words, the entirety of that organism’s universe. Yes, genes are a part of it, but only a small part. Much more will be said on this in the future essay.

Safina is quite correct, however, in identifying sexual selection (as Darwin was correct to do so) as a “force.” And he’s correct to identify cultural selection, which Darwin was not aware of. Of course, these “existential factors” are not “forces” in the physics sense, and they, like all biological processes, are not mechanistic. They are organic and comingled. Just as you cannot separate organism from it’s environment (it’s always got to be somewhere, right?), you cannot separate sexual and cultural selection from the organism-environment. Or from each other, for that matter. Sexual and cultural selection intersect like two overlapping circles in a Venn diagram.

6. What Kinji Imanishi, when writing in English, referred to as “synusial complexes.”

7. Chase, A.R., Music discriminations by carp (Cyprinus carpio), Animal Learning & Behavior, 29(4) (2001), pp. 336-353. And from the paper’s concluding remarks:

Prior to this series of experiments, the prevailing opinion appeared to be skepticism as to whether koi could discriminate one piece of music from another under any circumstances. Now it appears that these animals can discriminate polyphonic music, discriminate melodic patterns, and even classify music by artistic genre. As far as I know, these experiments presented the most complex auditory stimuli to which fish have ever been shown capable of making sophisticated discriminative responses.