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Dov Henis's picture

Culture

WHAT IS CULTURE

Culture, A Ubiquitous Biological Entity

A Recapitulation

1. General comprehension of evolutionary biology is an essential pre-requisite to the study and comprehension of cultural anthropology.

2. Culture is a basic biological entity. It is the ubiquitous elaboration- extension of the sensing of and reactions to, by the genome, to the goings-on beyond the outermost membrane of its housing, the cell, and of multicelled organisms, to the totality of their outer and inner environments.

Culture has been selected for survival of the genome as means of extending its exploitation capabilities of the out-of-cell circumstances, consequent to the earlier evolution and selection of the genome's organ, its outermost cell membrane (OCM), for control of the in-cell state of the environment.

3. Every cultural element is an organism's artifact that involves biological intra-/inter-cell expression and/or process. Biological and cultural domains are not ontologically distinct. Culture inheres in biology.

4. Culture And Intelligence

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1&p=247

The core (wordnet.princeton) definition of "intelligence" is "the ability to comprehend, to understand and profit from experience". These surviving abilities are different for the different phenotypes within a genotype, therefore each phenotype has its own meaning of "intelligence".

Intelligence is to culture approximately as essential amino acids are to proteins. Culture evolves in response to circumstances only by use of intelligence and to the extent and scope feasible by the extent and scope of intelligence.

5. In human cultures ethnocentrisms are phenotypic cases of anthropocentrism; biologically both are normal Darwinian biological survival phenomena. Ethnocultures are human phenotypic survival tools.

6. Life is a phenomenon of temporary energy constraint. It pops in out of its matrix, the energy constrained in Earth's biosphere by Earth's organisms, which are the many varieties of genomes, the communal interdependent life forms of the primal, once-independent, genes, the formers and conservers of life's energy on Earth.

7. Culture is the universal driver of genetic evolution

The major course of natural selection is not via random mutations followed by survival, but via interdependent, interactive and interenhencing selection of biased genes replication routes at their alternative-splicing-steps junctions, effected by the cultural feedback of the second stratum multicells organism or monocells community to their prime stratum genes-genome organisms.

8. Science is a human cultural artifact, a tool of human survival

During the recent several centuries in the course of human history Science has been evolving at an accelerating rate as a provider of convincing, ever closer approaching, approximate models of the real world. We understand that Science is one of the components of our Culture, the totality of our capabilities to observe the environment, react to it and exploit it for our satisfaction and survival. There is a distinct, even if still small, growing spreading tendency to accept the findings of evolving Science with ever increasing respect and appreciation, especially in the realms of all forms and types of its progenies - technology and life disciplines.

9. The crucial 21st century question facing humanity is how much further and into which additional disciplines may or should Science be welcome and adopted by society at large, with what hopes and with what expectations.

Which doctrine(s) may or should be welcome and adopted, with what plans or hopes and with what expectations?

Life is a temporary affair. It is temporary on all scales at all levels.

Life's purpose is ours to decide and ours to fulfil. The arguments about life's doctrines should ensue from our choices of life's purpose.

Dov Henis

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1

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