Journal
TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
Volume 23, Issue 9, Pages 486-493Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2008.05.008
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- BBSRC
- Wellcome Trust
- Royal Society
- EU
- Pembroke College Cambridge
- NERC
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Many species are known to acquire valuable life skills and information from others, but until recently it was widely believed that animals did not actively facilitate learning in others. Teaching was regarded as a uniquely human faculty. However, recent studies suggest that teaching might be more common in animals than previously thought. Teaching is present in bees, ants, babblers, meerkats and other carnivores but is absent in chimpanzees, a bizarre taxonomic distribution that makes sense if teaching is treated as a form of altruism. Drawing on both mechanistic and functional argument we integrate teaching with the broader field of animal social learning, and show how this aids understanding of how and why teaching evolved, and the diversity of teaching mechanisms.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available