Wild Culture: A Conversation with Hal Whitehead

How and when can we use culture to divide populations for conservation?
 

Introduction

What is culture? Depending on whom you ask—an artist, a historian, a linguist—you’ll get radically different answers. And if you ask a social scientist, you may get one or more of 164 definitions. Perhaps the best response to such a profound and plaguing question is a joke, in this case one borrowed from David Foster Wallace. “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Culture incorporates ways of life, knowledge, and practices so common that we do not always recognize them as such. Culture, it turns out, is not so very different from nature. But it’s not just our nature, it’s all around us—and not only us. More than two decades ago, the primatologist Frans de Waal exclaimed of animal cultures, “one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time has come.” Though some scientists disagree over the use of the term “culture,” Nature and other prominent journals have published the findings of dozens of studies demonstrating that many species learn socially and pass on traditions or skills—from chimpanzees to birds to fish.

Dr. Hal Whitehead has long held a fascination with the language and culture of whales. He was observing and interpreting cetacean language long before Project CETI formed in 2020 to apply artificial intelligence and robotics to “translate the communication of sperm whales.” Whitehead is professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he runs the Whitehead Research Lab, which studies sperm whales, northern bottlenose whales, and long-finned pilot whales. Whitehead has published dozens of articles on aspects of cetacean culture, given a popular TED Talk on the subject, and written several books, including The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (with Luke Rendell, University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (University of Chicago Press, 2003). His work stands out as thorough and insightful, respectful of the differences between humans and other animals, and attuned to the similarities—including culture, which de Waal defines as “a way of life shared by the members of one group but not necessarily with the member of other groups of the same species. It covers knowledge, habits, and skills, including underlying tendencies and preferences, derived from exposure to and learning from others.”

Whitehead was kind enough to meet with me in February 2024 to discuss his current insights into whale culture and how the field of cultural biology has changed over the last 80 years.

I do not want to engage with the whales. I want to understand how they live their lives and interact with each other, with as little impact from us as possible.

Interview

Helena Feder: The study of nonhuman animal cultures may be traced back to Kinji Imanishi’s and Satsue Mito’s work with primates in the 1950s and, as you’ve noted in your chapter in Deep Thinkers (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Ken Norris’s conclusions about dolphins in the 1980s. What percentage of cetologists do you think now confidently view sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins, among other cetaceans, as cultural animals?

Hal Whitehead: Well, pretty much all of us who study behavior in the wild think culture has a role in their lives, but we vary in terms of how much we attribute to culture. Some people are much more conservative than others.

Helena Feder: More conservative, meaning they attribute less to culture versus to, say, genes or environment?

Hal Whitehead: Yes. For example, some cetologists might articulate support for a particular behavior as cultural as, “it almost certainly has some cultural component, but we don’t know how much.” There are subdisciplines of cetology that do not study behavior in the wild. There is a fair amount of good data on dolphins in captivity (psychologists typically do this), which supports social learning and thus culture in the wild. Molecular geneticists, who tend to believe that if we understand genes then we understand everything, often find it very hard to attribute nonhuman behavior to culture, especially when we start talking about culture and evolution. I follow Boyd and Richerson’s dual inheritance formulation, in which culture and genes function as different but interacting forms of inheritance. Some geneticists will ask, well, what do you mean by cultural inheritance? And I say when the behavioral phenotype of one individual gets passed to the phenotype of another through social learning, we can say there has been a transfer or inheritance of information or behavior—cultural inheritance.

Helena Feder: When I started researching the field, biologists still referred to culture as the controversial “c” word—and most of the few people working in cultural biology were primatologists. Now there’s a great deal of work on a range of animals—such as crows, tits, elephants, and others. Where should we be looking for culture that we haven’t yet—or should we, in fact, begin working from the opposite assumption, that most or all animals have culture, even if we’ve not yet observed it? 

Hal Whitehead: We should look everywhere. For example, there are good studies on culture in insects. What they show is that some insects convey information to each other that homogenizes their behavior. If one defines culture as information that’s socially learned and group specific, it could be found anywhere. I think we do ourselves a disservice by excluding culture as a driver of behavioral patterns or making it the last possible explanation (after genes and environment). But that was, and in some cases still is, the assumption, that we can only assume culture if genetics, environment, and other factors have been excluded.

Some cases of culture in nonhumans are much more accessible than others. Birdsong, for example. There is so much great work on birdsong, and we now understand which birds’ songs are culture, and which parts of songs are cultural. Conversely, we have only a very few clear cases of the culture of fishes in the wild, but there are indications that it may be widespread.

Other challenges to wide acceptance of the idea of nonhuman cultures may be attributed to disciplinary differences. While molecular geneticists can be very uncomfortable with the whole business of nonhuman cultures, this attitude is even more common among some anthropologists. An anthropologist once said that having biologists define culture is like anthropologists defining genes. But we who study culture in the wild pretty much agree on a definition of culture, one which is operational for studies of nonhumans in the wild.

Helena Feder: Your 2011 article “The Cultures of Whales and Dolphins” (and your 2015 book with Rendell) discusses the need for a more thorough rejection of what’s called “anthropodenial” (the bias against, or automatic rejection of, similarities between humans and other animals) in the study of nonhuman cultures. You wrote, “New techniques of studying culture are needed, methods that do not exclude but rather apportion behavioral variation between genetic, environmental, cultural, and possibly other causes.” In 2017, you noted that such new techniques are “beginning to become important in the study of nonhuman culture.” Are we there yet?  

Hal Whitehead: We’ve come a long way. The old method of exclusion is now more of a big thorn in the side of our work, as opposed to the laser beam guiding our research. Take, for example, new work carried out by an international scientific collaboration in a remote region of Russia on Baird’s beaked whales, one of the weirdest species out there. These scientists published the first finding of culture in Baird’s beaked whales. They made their case by using one of these new techniques, network-based diffusion analysis. I was just amazed by their findings; the work is so cool.

Helena Feder: That is truly remarkable. In the same 2011 article, you discuss the problems of identifying culture in the wild, some of which are due to the exclusionary method and some are due to the difficulty of observing behavior—just the paucity of data. And so, some researchers prefer laboratory work, which can yield a lot of data on social learning, and so an aspect of culture. But can there ever really be culture in a lab? Culture is both inherited and an expression of self: aren’t most laboratory conditions too restrictive or too artificial for something as natural as culture? 

Hal Whitehead: I think there can be examples of nonhuman culture in labs, such as the fantastic study of bumblebees learning from each other to pull strings for a reward. It is artificial in as much as scientists trained individual bees, and then “seeded” the behavior by placing a trained bee in each colony. It’s something bees have to be trained to do—but the outcome is that one bee can be a model for the rest; they learn from each other, and the behavior outlives the initiating bee. A general problem is that most lab studies have do not have a long enough lifetime, so you can’t observe behavior over generations. And of course, I think it is wrong to keep some animals in captivity—but probably not bees.

Helena Feder: I learned a lot from your 2024 article, “Sperm Whale Clans and Human Societies.” I’m interested in the conclusion drawn from your evidence, that some of what we’ve previously assumed to be the drivers for culture (such as bipedalism, use of fire, syntactic language, tool-making, and opposable digits) can be ruled out as necessary conditions for “large-scale, culturally distinctive social structures whose members experience within-group symbolically marked identity.”  Might one rephrase it this way: you don’t have to be human, or even a primate, to demonstrate cultural diversity—to think abstractly to create, communicate, and maintain complex individual and social identities?

Hal Whitehead: Yes—and by “think abstractly” I assume you mean use symbols, not composing symphonies. The article synthesizes things I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Helena Feder: Yes, but speaking of symphonies, in this article you argue it’s important “to steer a path between unthinking anthropomorphism (assigning human characteristics to non-humans) and anthropodenial (denying human properties to other animals).” Later, you remark that it seems unlikely that whale clans exhibit more than a fraction of the cultural “richness and complexity” of human groups. Richness is a subjective experience and a subjective measure. Aside from the fact that there is still so much we do not know, how can scientists study a sperm whale clan, or any nonhuman group, without reproducing our assumptions about what constitutes richness for others?

Hal Whitehead: One question to which I’m drawn, and have thought a lot about, is the question of “cumulative cultures”: the mechanism that results in a behavior which no individual could invent themselves, a process of sequentially building on the work of a whole bunch of individuals learning from each other. Some say this is the very thing that animals don’t do. But this was once said this about culture itself, and then they had to move that barrier, raise the bar…

Helena Feder: To keep the other animals out.

Hal Whitehead: Yes. If you think about the song of the nightingale or the song of the humpback whale, that’s when you see accumulation: Could any individual have invented such songs from scratch? Surely they built up from the cumulative work of many individuals over time, in two ways. There is the function of the song and content of the song; we see complex structures built out over time as well as changing content (as we humans have the symphony form and many variations of symphonic content). These vocal cultures look cumulative. The evidence for cumulative nonvocal nonhuman cultures, such as such as material cultures (physical objects of a culture, things made or used) seems less good.  

Helena Feder: You discuss how little is generally known about sperm whale clan characteristics aside from their coda dialects—that is, their linguistic diversity—but that you’re willing to make the reasonable assumption based on your ten years of data on the two Galapagos clans that “distinctive behavioral practices” and language dialects “largely line up.” Was there a moment in this work that you thought clan might become the next controversial “c” word?

Hal Whitehead: In 2003, Luke Rendell and I introduced the word “clan” for the large-scale social structures in sperm whales, following the terminology for killer whales. At that time, and for both species, clans largely referred to sets of animals with distinctively different vocal dialects, codas for sperm whales and pulsed calls for killer whales. Later we found that in sperm whales the clans showed clear differences in other kinds of behavior as well. For many reasons the notion of clans has become more and more central to our research and thinking, and perhaps interesting to others; so, maybe the term will become controversial.

Helena Feder: Are aspects of your work spurred by claims of human uniqueness? For example, Hill’s claim that nonhuman animals don’t have moral systems or reinforce social norms with the use of symbols. I am thinking of your 2022 article on symbolic marking among sperm whale clans, or the 2023 article on collective decision-making among aquatic mammals. I particularly like that you begin this piece with the idea that collective decision-making is, in itself, “inherent to the definition of what a group is.” You discuss avoiding anthropomorphic terminology, but if the shoe fits, why not call it politics? As in de Waal’s book, Chimpanzee Politics…?

Hal Whitehead: Yes, well, the animals I study in the oceans tend to have more positive relationships with members of their own species than many land animals. This is, I think, because resources are hard to monopolize in the fluid three-dimensional ocean, where it does not make sense to contest others for real estate or food items. On the land, the term politics might make more sense because, with intense competition over one resource or another, animals with good social skills can gain an advantage by forming competitive alliances and the like. In whales and dolphins, social life is important, but more to help each other find food, raise babies, and escape predators, than to compete. This sets up a system where cooperation becomes more important than competition. There are certainly exceptions, but generally animals in the ocean are peaceful to members of their own species.

Helena Feder: Conversely, are you ever concerned that a characteristic of human cultural evolution or a current theory of it might lead to false assumptions—just as biologists in capitalist cultures once saw competition everywhere and were less attuned to the cooperation around them. I am thinking of the idea of schismogenesis—the creation of cultures through difference and friction. It might be less true of humans than we think, or it might be true of primates and less true of other cultural animals?

Hal Whitehead: In the whale world, schismogenesis is just an idea, and I think even in humans it’s a bit controversial. But we have to look broadly, to speculate; otherwise, we’re going to miss stuff. It’s hard for us to predict what is important, especially with animals that live in a completely foreign environment and communicate in a totally different way. We need comparative cultural work, and comparing human and nonhuman cultures can be useful. But we have to be careful: a) not to assume that because humans do something, other animals don’t; and b) because humans do it, other animals must as well. Because, with all species, it could go either way. And then c), which hasn’t received much attention but should, be careful to remember that other animals may do things that we don’t do, socially as well as physically.

Helena Feder: That is a challenge and may be a place where the arts may collaborate with science to imagine what’s beyond what we can see. For example, other forms of human and nonhuman social cooperation. You’ve mentioned a few examples of human communities fishing with dolphins and, once upon a time, with killer whales. Is such cooperation a product of cross-species learning? Can you envision new forms of cooperation or perhaps participatory action research, in which nonhuman subjects participate voluntarily in scientific studies?

Hal Whitehead: The fishing cooperatives are fascinating in many ways, in particular as examples of cultures crossing species. I try to practice passive research, non-invasive research. I do not want to engage with the whales. I want to understand how they live their lives and interact with each other, with as little impact from us as possible. Others, such as CETI, have projects that involve direct engagement with animals, but I don’t see that as my way forward.

Helena Feder: I was going to ask about CETI, so I’m glad you mentioned it. It makes sense that nonhuman cultures are also something to be protected, conserved. You wrote in Science in 2019 about the importance of understanding nonhuman cultures for material conservation, and noted in a much earlier piece in 2004 that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) implicitly recognized the importance of nonhuman cultural differences when they divided orcas into three “nationally significant populations.” In a later piece you note the 2005 U.S. ruling that acknowledged the culture, the specific cultural diversity, of killer whales of the Pacific coast of North America.

Hal Whitehead: Yes, the relationship between the culture of nonhuman animals and their conservation is something I’m really interested in. It is stimulated by my work on the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada where we assess the conservation status of Canadian wildlife. Aside from the paper in Science you mention, I’ve written others, including one just last summer. It addresses what I think is a very important question: How and when can we use culture to divide populations for conservation?

Helena Feder: I agree. You’ve also written that while culture isn’t a requirement for personhood, for individuality or the need for ethical consideration, “it can be seen as the context in which personhood is expressed. Studying culture in cetaceans could therefore directly inform some highly contentious moral debates.” In your 2011 article, for example, you note the calls to include cultural animals in “an extended moral community.”

Hal Whitehead: The work we’ve done has considered culture in groups. In some species, including the whales that I study, culture is, I think, vital for the existence of individuals and the species as a whole. As for individual members of a species with the capacity for culture in contexts where they’re denied this, I’m reminded of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work. When she asked bonobos what they want, they apparently told her that, among other things, important for their welfare was “transmitting their cultural knowledge to their offspring.”

Helena Feder: I’m very glad you mentioned Savage-Rumbaugh. Sadly, her work on Pan/Homo culture has been discontinued, and bonobos now seem to be studied at the renamed facility in Iowa largely to “uncover the origins of human language, cognition, and behavior.”

While culture tends to create and propagate adaptive behavior it may, as with humans, be maladaptive, for example, creating conformism that can be dangerous (e.g., whale beaching or cetacean stranding). Your 2019 article, “The reach of gene-culture co-evolution in animals,” notes that what is true of humans is true of nonhumans, that “culture favors genes enhancing adaptations for culture.” How do we square the “cultural intelligence hypothesis” with maladaptive cultural behavior? Or this the wrong question?

Hal Whitehead: There’s a range of ways that culture can be maladaptive, such as young human males running as close as they can to an oncoming train or elephants raiding crops. And then there are the puzzles, like mass whale strandings. It’s a weird one because it’s not a new thing (an example was discussed by Aristotle) and it’s not dependent on humans. A number of seemingly healthy whales running up onto the beach at the same time makes little evolutionary sense, but could be partially driven by culture as when humans behave maladaptively, becoming Kamikaze pilots or joining celibate religious orders.

Helena Feder: Thinking of the mysteries of this work, I’ve noticed that cultural biologists always say social learning, perhaps because it does not prescribe intent. What do you think of “teaching” instead? Does it presuppose Theory of Mind (ToM), that is, the idea that another being has a consciousness, one that might be tricked or, in this case, taught?

Hal Whitehead: Biologists have a very clear operational definition of teaching which gets around the issue of Theory of Mind. Teaching is when an individual changes their behavior, doing something at some cost or without benefit to the teacher, so that another individual might learn the behavior (and the learner benefits).

Helena Feder: Doesn’t the concept of teaching imply Theory of Mind—the notion that one individual acts with an intent based on the idea that another individual can learn? I do not ask to draw a line to keep some animals “out”—to reserve this attribute for our species or close relatives—but to suggest that Theory of Mind may be more common than is commonly thought.

Hal Whitehead: Ants teach, meerkats teach, some birds teach, killer whales seem to teach. There is no evidence that I know of for great apes teaching. Teaching is clearly restricted to highly social and cooperative species, not necessarily ones with large brains, which makes sense. I am not sure where Theory of Mind fits in.
 

 
Helena Feder: Okay. One more question along these lines. The same 2019 article explores the fascinating idea that “culture may drive early phases of speciation,” noting that bird species provide the best evidence because “song learning increases rates of species diversification.” In a 2022 article, you and the other authors make a compelling case for comparing bird and whale song, highlighting similar physiological processes. Do you speculate about culture driving speciation in cetaceans? 

Hal Whitehead: Yes! The best example is in killer whales, where matrilineally-based pods of killer whales start specializing on particular ways of making a living, and this becomes their culture. It may be effective, and their numbers grow. Then, the crucial step (not seen in sperm whales or humans): they become extremely xenophobic, and only mate within their cultural group. Then speciation is beginning.

Helena Feder: What are the biggest challenges to cetacean field research today? Pollution? Climate change?

Hal Whitehead: The paramount threat to whales was commercial hunting, but this largely ended in the early 1980s. Some effects linger, such as damaged social systems and loss of the knowledge held by killed individuals. However, most species have shown some recovery since whaling ended. There are now a range of serious threats, many of which are growing. There is increasing underwater noise, collisions with ships, interactions with fishing gear, growing plastic pollution, and climate change. Whales face a tough future.

Helena Feder: It would be wonderful if there was a wider audience for your work on culture, for this sense of multiculturalism and its implications for human culture, including our obligations to the other cultures of nature that have been damaged or diminished by human activity.

Hal Whitehead: Since you mentioned it, Luke Rendell and I are updating our 2014 book with the University of Chicago Press, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins.

Helena Feder: I look forward to the update, and what follows.

Helena Feder has published essays, interviews, and poems in venues including North American Review, The Georgia Review, Radical Philosophy, Orion, ISLE, ASAP/Journal, The Writer’s Chronicle, Another Chicago Magazine, After the Art, Guernica, Green Letters, Western American Literature, Tikkun, and Critical Read. Helena is co-editor of Tar River Poetry and professor of environmental humanities at East Carolina University; she’s the author of Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (Routledge) and editor of several journal issues and two books: You Are the River (NCMA) and Close Reading the Anthropocene (Routledge).

Header photo by Will Falcon, courtesy Shutterstock.