One reason this blog exists is because I have a habit of setting out reading/learning goals for myself that I refer to as curriculums, a habit that extends back to high school (when a teacher's willingness to let me do some independent studies was pretty much the only way I graduated), the methodologies of which have changed with the times and my capacities. My approach to education and especially to the way I group subjects together is very informed by the beginning of my college years at Hampshire, where pretty much everything is interdisciplinary and there are no traditional majors. More traditional colleges, where I finished my degree and went on to grad school, seemed structured to limit the directions my learning took rather than to teach me to incorporate whatever ingredients I brought to the table -- obviously I realize the pragmatic reasons for this, but it's just not my constitutional makeup.
Then again, I'm not a scientist, or a history teacher, or an engineer. I'm a writer. There isn't really any subject that is completely irrelevant to my job.
So as part of this, I started sketching out curriculums (and yes, I consciously reject the Latin plural here) in roughly five year chunks, composed of a list of areas of fiction or specific authors I wanted to read, along with nonfiction areas I wanted to learn more about. These are intentionally sketchy, because part of the process is learning what there is to learn.
Which leads us up to now, and my Ocean Studies curriculum, and the marine biology component of that, which was inspired by my lifelong fear of sea monsters and a flurry of cool internet stories about squids and octopuses. For a variety of reasons -- parents who met at MIT, genre writing that benefits from scientific literacy, believing that science leads to wonder rather than demystifying the world -- I try to keep up with at least a basic level of science reading, whether it's as simple as reading Scientific American every month or a little more involved like this curriculum.
The latest book in that Ocean Studies curric? The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a much more interesting and solid work than the squid books that have gotten a lot of attention lately, and in addressing the possibility of various behaviors of specific cetacean species as culture, the authors also address larger questions of animal culture like: what exactly do we mean by "culture," especially when we're referring to nonhumans? What is the evolutionary role of culture? What are the prerequisites for culture?
All the arguments against cetacean culture are brought up and addressed, which is refreshing given how many animal culture books are just full of pseudoscience and wishful thinking -- and the extent to which dolphins especially are a lightning rod for that sort of thing. But one of the really interesting things for me as a genre writer was that last question: the prerequisites for culture. Of course we don't really know, but there are certain characteristics that, when possessed by a species, seem to indicate that that species will engage in behaviors that appear to be culture:
* Large brains
* Prolonged mother-infant dependency
* Menopause
* "Stupid" (that is, maladaptive) behavior
* Ecological success
* Wide-ranging habitats
* Large-scale cooperation
* Indication of coevolution of genes and culture
Obviously you could write a shitty Malcolm Gladwell book or shitty pro-tips for middle-managers book with this as your backbone, and thank God that's not my life. But it's food for thought for an sf writer.
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