Learning by Observation

Creatures that can learn by observation have an important advantage over those who can’t: The hard lessons learned by one individual can be readily copied by others. Infants can learn what foods to eat, what foods to avoid, what animals are dangerous predators, what animals are prey, and so on. By learning from the experience of others, animals avoid many of experiences’ most dear lessons.

Numerous animals have been found to learn from observation, including Chimpanzees, Dolphins, birds such as the Jackdaw, and others. Different groups of animals in distinct regions have distinctive habits, and might be said to have primitive cultures. Indeed, the ability to learn from observation is probably a cornerstone of culture; without such an ability, it is unlikely a culture might develop. Of course, human culture depends on other learning mechanisms beyond simple learning by observation, but here is a conjecture for you:

Gary’s Conjecture on Culture: Any species that can learn from observation can develop a culture.

One way to examine such a conjecture is to examine various species, to determine which animals are capable of learning by observation, and which have a culture. Clearly even a perfect correlation would not "prove" the conjecture to be true (there could be a third factor that is the true cause of the correlation), but it would be a start. Let’s take a look at what we have discovered about learning by observation in different species!