Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did tha...t of species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Among animals, symbols are transmitted by tradition from generation to generation, and it is here, if one wishes, that one may dra...w the border line between the "animal" and man. In animals, individually acquired experience is sometimes transmitted by teaching and learning, from elder to younger individuals, though such true tradition is only seen in those forms whose high capacity for learning is combined with a higher development of their social life. True tradition has been demonstrated in jackdaws, greyleg geese, and rats. But knowledge thus transmitted is limited to very simple things, such as pathfinding, recognition of certain foods and of enemies of the species, and--in rats--knowledge of the danger of poisons. However, no means of communication, no learned rituals are ever handed by tradition in animals. In other words, animals have no culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only two animals have entered the human household otherwise than as prisoners and become domesticated by other means than those of... enforced servitude: the dog and the cat. Two things they have in common, namely, that both belong to the order of carnivores and both serve man in their capacity of hunters. In all other charac teristics, above all in the manner of their association with man, they are as different as the night from the day. There is no domestic animal which has so radically altered its whole way of living, indeed its whole sphere of interests, that has become domestic in so true a sense as the dog: and there is no animal that, in the course of its century-old association with man, has altered so little as the cat. There is some truth in the assertion that the cat, with the exception of a few luxury breeds, such as Angora, Persians, and Siamese, is no domestic animal but a completely wild being. Maintaining its full independence it has taken up its abode in the houses and outhouses of man, for the simple reason that there are more mice there than elsewhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »