Somebody asked this question on r/evolution. Read their full question here. Below is my response.

An evolutionary biologist once told me – though I didn’t fact check this – that the grooming behavior of cats is not inborn but passed down from parent to kitten. If true, that means a kitten raised in isolation will not groom itself.

I would expect any somewhat social group of animals with a sufficiently sophisticated imitation algorithm to have some sort ‘culture’ because they will imitate each other. As long as the imitations aren’t perfect, variations in behavior will arise, and some of those variations will spread better, if only because they’re easier to imitate. (On the flip side, many of those imitation algorithms are rather poor and indiscriminate, resulting in some outrageous behaviors, such as cats ‘using’ computers or different animals interacting with each other like AIs would, see here under “Animals indiscriminately imitate people”.)

The unit of replication in cultural evolution is the meme, as Richard Dawkins calls it. Some animals do have memes, yes. Grooming behavior in cats is memetic, not genetic. Some apes have memes, too. Those spread through a process discovered by animal-behavior researcher Richard Byrne called ‘behavior parsing’. You can read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, chapter 15, to learn more about that.

Do note that animal memes are pathetically simple compared to those of humans and spread by utterly different means, as Deutsch explains.