Living organisms constantly exchange information with their environment.

Then where is the difference between ‘us’ and the rest of the living creatures?
Information-wise, of course!

Language…

As far as we know, humans are the only critters currently living on Earth which are interested in how other creatures learn. Or teach…

“An individual actor A can be said to teach if it modifies its behavior only in the presence of a naive observer, B, at some cost or at least without obtaining an immediate benefit for itself. A’ behavior thereby encourages or punishes B’s behavior, or provide B with experience, or sets an example for B. As a result, B acquires knowledge or learns a skill earlier in life or more rapidly or efficiently that might otherwise do, or that it would not learn at all.” Caro and Hauser, 1992

In the 20 odd years since Caro and Hauser have set the bar for what teaching means quite a number of species have been found to do it. To fully or at least suggestively cross all the necessary t-s. From ants to primates.

Interestingly enough, all of those species have a clear ‘collective’ behavior.
All individuals belonging to a species collaborate, of sorts, towards the survival of that species. This goes without saying.
But in some species this collaboration is more intense than in others.
Ants and bees versus most other insects.
Elephants versus cheetahs. Or leopards.
Even chimpanzees versus orangutans…

OK, for some species hand to hand collaboration between generations is impossible. Most parent insects are dead when their offspring hatch. Orangutans live in forests where food is too scarce for more than 1 individual to forage.
Others have found their niches. Where the individual approach is good enough for them to survive. Cheetahs, leopards. Bears, even…

Charles Darwin taught us about evolution. Merging individual lives into the survival of the species those individuals belong to.

Life, as I see it from a “functional and mechanistic perspective“, is yet another manner in which matter is organized. Yet another ‘state of matter‘.
For life to be present, three conditions have to be met.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging, in a controlled manner, substances with their environment. To ingest nutrients and to excrete the by-products of their metabolism.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging information with their environment. And with their interior. Otherwise the exchange of substances would no longer be controlled by the individuals.
– Individual organisms have be passing to the next generation the pertinent information needed for the species to survive. In the kind of life we are familiar with, that would be ‘the genetic information’.

Considering the above, I dare to make a difference between what Caro and Hauser consider to be teaching and what we, humans, do.
Intent!

I doubt that any of the ‘animal teachers’ do it under their own volition.
After all, nobody has yet identified an animal con-artist who cons the members of their own species… as we do!
As far as we currently know, ‘teaching behavior’ is displayed inside species which collaborate more closely than other species. Which suggests that that kind of behavior is somehow innate to those species. A ‘habit’, not a choice. As it is with us.

What makes it possible? This difference?
Our special kind of conscience and our use of language.
The fact that we are the only species – as far as we know – capable of building a ‘virtual image’ of the surrounding reality. Capable to select certain aspects of what surrounds us and codify them using various forms of ‘notation’.
And to do this according to our own, individual, interests!
Sometimes even against the interests of the community/species to which we belong.