Genetic and 'cultural' similarity in wild chimpanzees
Genetic and 'cultural' similarity in wild chimpanzees
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2010.1112
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发表时间：
2011-02-07
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Vigilant, Linda
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Langergraber, Kevin E.;Boesch, Christophe;Vigilant, Linda
动物是否拥有“文化”或“传统”的问题继续引起广泛的理论和实证兴趣。对野生黑猩猩的研究在这一讨论中占有突出地位，因为用于识别野生动物文化的主要方法首先应用于它们。这个过程，即“排除法”，首先记录不同群体之间的行为差异，然后通过排除对其发生的生态解释来推断文化的存在。这种方法的有效性一直受到质疑，因为群体之间的遗传差异并没有明确排除是导致群体之间行为差异的一个因素。在这里，我们通过分析九组野生黑猩猩的遗传和行为数据来直接调查这个问题。我们发现，群体之间的遗传和行为差异的总体水平在统计上是高度显著相关的。另外的分析表明，只有极少数的行为在基因相似的群体之间有所不同，并且没有明显的模式表明哪一类行为（例如，工具使用与交流）的分布与群体间基因差异的模式相匹配。这些结果表明，不能排除遗传差异在产生黑猩猩行为的群体差异中起主要作用。
The question of whether animals possess 'cultures' or 'traditions' continues to generate widespread theoretical and empirical interest. Studies of wild chimpanzees have featured prominently in this discussion, as the dominant approach used to identify culture in wild animals was first applied to them. This procedure, the 'method of exclusion,' begins by documenting behavioural differences between groups and then infers the existence of culture by eliminating ecological explanations for their occurrence. The validity of this approach has been questioned because genetic differences between groups have not explicitly been ruled out as a factor contributing to between-group differences in behaviour. Here we investigate this issue directly by analysing genetic and behavioural data from nine groups of wild chimpanzees. We find that the overall levels of genetic and behavioural dissimilarity between groups are highly and statistically significantly correlated. Additional analyses show that only a very small number of behaviours vary between genetically similar groups, and that there is no obvious pattern as to which classes of behaviours (e. g. tool-use versus communicative) have a distribution that matches patterns of between-group genetic dissimilarity. These results indicate that genetic dissimilarity cannot be eliminated as playing a major role in generating group differences in chimpanzee behaviour.