The Essay
1500 words maximum, excluding the Bibliography.
Exceeding the word limit will result in a grade penalty.
Required Page Elements
No title page
Top of the first page: List your name (first name, surname), student number, title of the essay, and the date of submission
12-point Times New Roman or Arial typeface
At least 2.5cm margins all around
Double-space throughout
Number all pages
Use the style of citation (American Antiquity or otherwise) consistent with your Proposal.
No Quotations
You are not permitted to use quotations in your essay proposal or your essay, unless you are analyzing or commenting on the author’s wording of a text passage. In that case, you may use a quote, but only with your TA’s prior approval. Each unauthorized use of a quotation will result in an automatic, non-negotiable deduction of 10%. The reason why we are so strict about this is that we want you to learn to summarize ideas from other sources in your own words. This is an important skill to develop and leads to better writing. It also shows us (the reader) that you understand what you have read and can tell us what’s important about it.
Evolutionary Anthropology:
In 1960, Jane Goodall stunned the scientific community with her observations of chimpanzees making and using tools in the forests of east Africa. Until then, most anthropologists believed that only species in the genus Homo made and used tools. Despite years of debate and further observations of complex tool use in chimpanzees, considerable controversy still exists as to whether chimpanzees exhibit culture or simply evidence of social learning. Thus, the goal of your essay is to evaluate the proposition that chimpanzees have culture.
Assigned Readings:
Josep Call and Claudio Tennie, “Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Table MannersLinks to an external site.?” Current Biology, Volume 19 (2009): R981-R983.
Kevin Laland and William Hoppitt, “Do Animals Have Culture?Links to an external site.” Evolutionary Anthropology, Volume 12 (2003):150-159.
The other source I had to choose was; Langlitz, Nicholas
2020 Chimpanzee culture wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton University Press
My proposal form that I had to submit prior;
Indicate which essay question you will be answering:
SCL (A) [ ] SCL (B) [ ] EVO [ ] ARCH [X ] (0.5)
Using the required American Antiquity style, list the additional peer-reviewed source (other than the required one(s)) that you plan to use in your essay. Three lines only. (0.5)
Langlitz, Nicholas
2020 Chimpanzee culture wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton University Press
For both the required scholarly source(s) and the popular source you’ve listed above, summarize each article’s main argument or idea in the space below in your own words. (3.0)
Peer-Reviewed Source #1: It is critical to come to terms with how culture will be defined and examined within animals. And to keep in mind that it is essential not to hold the standards of culture-defining as harsh as humans’. (Laland and Hoppit 2003)
Peer-Reviewed Source #2: The debate as to whether chimpanzees have culture must be understood as a word of conflict, and the research, whether human or chimpanzee or inside a laboratory or in the wild, does not need to be conducted morally. (Langlitz 2020)
Popular Source: Although Gruber et al.’s findings had striking results, they did not end the debate on whether or not chimpanzees have cultures. With that being said, the research has paved the way for testing social learning in the wild as well as considering incorporating other aspects of human culture. (Gruber et al. 2009)
Write a brief paragraph briefly describing the focus of your essay and the position you will be developing or arguing. Three lines only. (3.0)
There is still a lot of disagreement over whether chimpanzees have culture or merely evidence of social learning. The purpose of this essay is to argue that there is no particular answer yet as to whether chimpanzees have culture and to combine years of debate and further findings of complicated tool usage in chimpanzees.
Describe one piece of evidence from each article that you will use to develop your own essay. Describe how it will fit into your essay (it might be an example that supports your argument, a counter-example that you need to address, or a point that you can further build on and elaborate). (6.0)
Evidence from the provided peer-reviewed source: Humans tend to gain vast quantities of knowledge from the parental generation, whereas purported animal societies are mostly based on short-lived horizontal transmission. (Laland and Hoppit 2003)
This will fit into my essay as follows: It is a harsh way of judging and determining how culture’s existence is questioned within animals, specifically chimpanzees as the way we know culture should not fit into the norms of animals.
Evidence from the provided popular source: Others have underlined the importance of social learning in human civilization. These writers claim that, regardless of how significant the distinctions between groups are, it is not justifiable to equate human and animal culture unless specific aspects of social learning are established. (Claudio and Tennie 2009)
This will fit into my essay as follows: The debate of whether chimpanzees have culture does not seem to have an objective way to determine it as there are sometimes too many comparisons to take into effect or sometimes many comparisons to exclude.
Evidence from the second required peer-reviewed source: One thing science studies scholars should have learned from the science wars is that moralizing and politicizing scientific facts is often possible, but rarely necessary—especially since every fact can be moralized and politicized in a variety of ways, and few, if any, of them are conducive to working with people of different perspectives. (Langlitz 2020)
This will fit into my essay as follows: Researchers would have to prove that the animal in question shows a variety of group-typical behaviour patterns in wild populations, as well as that these behaviour patterns are supported by social learning.
Compare and contrast the required article(s) and the additional article and explain how they relate to the focus of your essay. Examine the main ways they each present their arguments or interpretive frameworks, and how they use evidence to support them. You might compare differences in the authors’ conceptual approaches, in the kinds of evidence they use, or the kinds of conclusions they draw from their evidence. You do not need to state or argue your own opinion here, but you are encouraged to comment on the authors’ reasoning in the articles. Use 600 words or less. (7.0)
The book Chimpanzee Culture Wars written by Nicholas Langlitz pursues an observant approach around many conflicts circling the debate about whether chimpanzees have culture or not, hence why it is a suitable source to support my argument. Langlitz doesn’t intend to make a claim or pursue an argument, in contrast, he gathers all agreements surrounding the debate and tries to explain to his audience that there is no right or wrong answer. In terms of similarity between the three sources, pieces of arguments in each source that would fit my claim are evident. My argument is that there is no particular answer yet as to whether chimpanzees have culture and to combine years of debate and further findings complicated tool usage in chimpanzees. For instance, in Laland and Hoppit’s article written in 2003, authors begin by deeply analyzing the definition of culture and conclude that there is no sole definition among the scientific world. This suggests that unless there are concrete, scientific, and widely accepted shreds of evidence, it is hard to tell if chimpanzees have culture, and the interpretations may be researcher-based. Moreover, we can see the same confusion with determining a definition for culture in Claudio and Tennie’s article, which was written in 2009. All these sources raise the question of whether it is a culture that the chimpanzees are demonstrating or merely social learning. (Call and Tennie 2009)
In terms of comparing the sources, Langlitz looks at a wide variety of researches on the topic and provides scientific explanations. Langlitz takes Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists into account; therefore, his arguments are more solid and clearly a greater source in terms of evidence provision. In addition, although Claudio and Tennie’s article is a great introduction to the debate, it is a very short article and more like a summary. It lacks scientific evidence and interpretive framework; therefore is not a very strong source. Lastly, Laland and Hoppit’s article provides different aspects compared to Claudio and Tennie’s, such as the brain size, and dives deeper into the concept of social learning. Overall, Laland and Hoppit’s article is richer in the number of claims it makes and the pieces of evidence it provides than of Claudio and Tennie’s. However, when comparing Laland and Hoppit’s article to Langlitz’s book, there is far less explanation and evidence considering the length of both of these sources.
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