Biocultural Evolution - View of Culture

View of Culture

People have defined the word "culture" to describe a large set of different phenomena. A definition that sums up what is meant by "culture" in DIT is:

Culture is information stored in individuals' brains that is capable of affecting behavior and that got there through social learning.

This view of culture emphasizes population thinking by focusing on the process by which culture is generated and maintained. It also views culture as a dynamic property of individuals, as opposed to a view of culture as a superorganic entity to which individuals must conform. This view's main advantage is that it connects individual-level processes to population-level outcomes.

Read more about this topic:  Biocultural Evolution

Famous quotes containing the words view of, view and/or culture:

    From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
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