Becoming Wild : : how Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace

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Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Animals / Miscellaneous
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Animals / Miscellaneous	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. You receive it from thousands of individuals, from pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. The light of knowledge needs adjusting as situations change, so a capacity for learning, especially social learning, allows behaviors to adjust, to change much faster than genes alone could adapt. Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among non-human animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this book offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of Life on Earth, and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Good but Repetitive submitted by lola.b on July 30, 2021, 8:18pm Similarly to some of Safina's other books, he weaves a scientific narrative about animal cognition and behavior that is educational and accessible! However, at times, this book felt overly repetitive and tedious. A good and solid read if you're interested in this field but wasn't particularly outstanding.