Well, first how do you define culture?
[QUOTE]In his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture anthropologist Leslie White famously defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." His goal was to bring some consistency to a field that had 164 separate definitions of "culture" being used interchangeably in the anthropological literature (which, predictably, made cross-cultural comparisons challenging at best). Today, this view has expanded beyond the human animal and a widely accepted definition is from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's celebrated work Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:
Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.
By information, we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
acquired or modified by social learning, and affects behavior[/QUOTE
The above info comes from this link, it discusses some of the issues/debate around defining culture and animal inclusion
Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber : The Primate Diaries
This issue is being heavily debated in the scientific literature, it is really interesting imo
So what do you think?
[QUOTE]In his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture anthropologist Leslie White famously defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." His goal was to bring some consistency to a field that had 164 separate definitions of "culture" being used interchangeably in the anthropological literature (which, predictably, made cross-cultural comparisons challenging at best). Today, this view has expanded beyond the human animal and a widely accepted definition is from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's celebrated work Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:
Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.
By information, we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
acquired or modified by social learning, and affects behavior[/QUOTE
The above info comes from this link, it discusses some of the issues/debate around defining culture and animal inclusion
Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber : The Primate Diaries
This issue is being heavily debated in the scientific literature, it is really interesting imo
So what do you think?
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