Identity, Culture, and Communication in Sperm Whales

Shane Gero, Postdoc, Dept. of Bioscience, Zoophysiology

Abstract:
Early on in the evolution of humans, ethnic groups, emerged as a way to identify those which abide by the same sets of social rules, facilitated cooperation between strangers, and paved the way for large scale cooperative societies. Cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, are an important taxon for the comparative method when investigating questions about culture and identity as they have cognitive capacities, communication systems, and social structures that rival terrestrial mammals in complexity, while providing a dramatic contrast in ecology. Much of what we know about social learning and culture among cetaceans is based on vocal communication. Sperm whales (Physeter microcephalus) have a multi-levelled society in which the largest affiliative structures, the vocal clans, are marked by culturally-transmitted dialects of ‘codas’. Synthesizing work from around the world and summarizing 10 years of his own research on the social and communication networks of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean, Shane will discuss his work on what drives sperm whale society, how they mediate their relationships through vocalizations, and what it means if sperm whales have sympatric ethnic groups.

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Cooperation and competition within and among groups

Abstract:
Humans and other animals must make tradeoffs in allocation of resources: acquiring benefits for oneself comes at the expense of cooperatively providing them to others, and cooperating with members of one’s own group may preclude cooperating with members of other groups. I have investigated how different types of competition mediate these tradeoffs, with an aim of uncovering universal evolutionary principles that predict cooperative behavior across species. For example, cooperation with group members is known to be promoted by intergroup competition in humans; I present work investigating this idea in social insects such as wasps. In contrast, individuals frequently compete with group members over resources produced and shared by all; I discuss results from an economic game testing in humans predictions from theory developed for the division of resources in non-human animal groups. I also show the importance of the scale of competition (competing locally with neighbors versus globally with a broader population) in influencing two puzzling behaviors in humans: “spite” and the second-order cooperative dilemma of policing.

Webpage:

http://aias.au.dk/aias-fellows/jessica-barker/

Jessica Barker, AIAS Fellow, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

http://cis.arl.arizona.edu/Pert/People/jessie-barker