Almost two decades after my father passed away, I was still reading and loving National Geographic stories when I discovered Craig Welch’s article, “The hidden world of whale culture,” in 2021.

Researchers have discovered that whales do not live by instinct alone. Orcas teach hunting techniques. Humpbacks carry songs across oceans. Sperm whale clans communicate in distinct dialects. Whales remember, imitate, and transmit.

National Geographic also produced a documentary series in 2021, “Secrets of the Whales.” One episode follows a young narwhal that appeared roughly 600 miles south of its usual Arctic range in Canada’s St. Lawrence River. There, it joined a group of young male belugas. Gray and speckled among their white bodies, with a tusk none of them possessed, it was unmistakably different. Yet researchers observed it swimming and playing with the belugas year after year, behaving as one of the pod.

The seed of culture is planted when the lesson of an experience outlives the individual who experienced it. A whale survives an attack, remembers the danger, and responds differently the next time. Other whales observe, and younger members imitate their elders. One whale’s memory becomes the group’s knowledge.

This leads to a second evolutionary track. Genetic evolution transmits information through bodies. Cultural evolution transmits it from mind to mind, across generations. Ideas, practices, and institutions are inherited, tested, altered, and abandoned as societies adapt.

You might wonder why an economist is writing about whales and culture. Economists are not known for shying away from other fields, but the connection is closer than you might think. Before Charles Darwin explained biological evolution, Adam Smith described how an astonishing social order could emerge from countless individual choices without anyone directing the whole. Historians have traced part of Darwin’s thinking about spontaneous order to Smith. Darwin himself credited another economist, Thomas Malthus, with the insight that unlocked natural selection, but neither understood yet how social evolution would help humanity escape so-called Malthusian traps.

Whales store culture primarily in living minds. Humans developed external memory. Books allowed the dead to teach the living. Newspapers carried ideas across communities. Photographs, recordings, radio, and film preserved images and voices. The internet placed much of humanity’s accumulated memory within reach of nearly anyone. Each medium added capacity to humanity’s long-term hard drive, creating something like a collective computer.

Yet storage is not transmission. A book can sit unopened, a recording unheard, and an archive unsearched. Much of culture is still passed along the whale-like way: parent to child, teacher to student, mentor to apprentice. One generation makes its memory available; another decides whether to receive it.

Receiving does not mean accepting blindly. Some inherited ideas are wrong, and cultural evolution requires both rejection and preservation. But we cannot make an intelligent choice about an inheritance we never received.

My father could place a magazine in front of me and require a written sentence, but he could not force me to carry its lessons forward. He could only make them available. He chose my long-term development over my short-term happiness. I did not appreciate it then. Children rarely recognize an investment while someone else is making it on their behalf.

He thought he was teaching me to summarize paragraphs. He was writing habits of attention, comprehension, and curiosity into my memory. Those habits helped make me a reader and, eventually, a professor. His lesson outlived those afternoons, and if I transmit it well, it may outlive both of us.

Evolution is sometimes presented as at odds with a higher power. But evolution and spontaneous order reveal how astonishing, orderly complexity can emerge from simple rules. Social evolution is especially awe-inspiring because each of us can play an intimate role in it. Parents and teachers cannot control what the next generation accepts, but we can try to make something valuable available to it.

My father’s guidance gave me the opportunity to discover the hidden world of whale culture, while the whales’ example offers us a glimpse of something larger: how memory becomes culture and carries lessons across generations. Perhaps “narwhaling” — giving something valuable the chance to outlive us by making it available to another mind — is part of God’s plan.

Gavin Roberts is an associate professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Weber State University. He is a recipient of the Gordon Tullock Prize from the Public Choice Society and regularly shares his research locally, nationally and internationally. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.