Becoming Wild
How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
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4.4 • 16 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Discover the rich cultures of non-human beings in Earth's remaining wild places, as revealed by bestselling author Carl Safina.
In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Carl Safina, New York Times bestselling author, brings readers close to three non-human cultures—what they do, why they do it, and how life is for them. Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace is a revelatory account of how animals function beyond our usual view, from sperm whales to scarlet macaws to chimpanzees.
Alongside genes, culture is a second form of inheritance, passed through generations as pools of learned knowledge. As situations change, social learning—culture—allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes can adapt. Safina shows that for non-humans and humans alike, culture comprises the answers to the question, "How do we live here?" It unites individuals within a group identity, though cultural groups often seek to avoid, or even be hostile toward, other factions.
By illuminating why these cultural tensions remain maddeningly intractable despite the arbitrariness of many of our differences, Safina takes readers behind the curtain of life on Earth, to witness from a new vantage point the most world-saving of perceptions: how we are all connected. A New York Times Notable Book of 2020, Becoming Wild offers a radically different way of looking at the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Safina (Beyond Words), a science writer, proposes in his eloquent treatise that numerous species throughout the animal kingdom form complex societies in their interactions with each other. He focuses on three: sperm whales in the Caribbean, scarlet macaws in the Peruvian Amazon, and chimpanzees in Uganda. Having spent weeks in the field with researchers studying each species, he has plenty of examples of how culture, as well as biology, shape behavior. Sperm whales worldwide, for example, are "basically one genetic stock,' " yet individual groups each manifest their own distinctive sonar clicks to communicate. He constantly demonstrates nonhuman animals' capacity for activities often assumed to be solely the domain of Homo sapiens. While it's well-known that many animals learn by observation, Safina points out examples of those that can actually teach complicated tasks for instance, female chimps correcting their offspring's nut-opening technique. The text, written in an accessible style, is rich in similarly fascinating zoological tidbits. This revelatory work sheds as much light on what it means to be human as it does on the nature of other species.
