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LAJW's picture

Cultual Change

 

I really enjoyed discussing about the similarities and differences between cultural evolution and biological evolution. Like rest of classmates agreed during the lesson, I found the continuity of our course. This aspect of course makes me feel excited to learn what the individual evolution would be. I think that cultural evolution is similar to biological evolution. But they are not the same. It takes a really long period of time for genetic changes to become phenotypical changes since most of our genes are non-coding. However, it is really fast for cultural change to occur. For example, Chinese people like to wear grey, black and dark blue clothes before Chinese government implementing reform and open-up policy. Just after merely 20 years, Chinese has totally changed their choices of color. In contrast, the genetic changes for humans occur over a few generations.

 

Regarding to cultural changes, there have been a large amount of cultural changes since industrial evolution. It is because that with the help of machines, people are able to free themselves from strenuous manual work and, thus, we could have extra time and money to search for different ways to improve our living standards. Moreover, human beings are intelligent creatures. Language is an important tool for human beings to transfer their knowledge and experiences from one generation to the next generation. By doing so, we are able to reserve our own culture and modify it to adapt to the new environment.

 

I think that women starting to take leadership positions is the most recent cultural changes experienced by us. I think that this example can well prove that cultural changes in our society are not really controlled by anyone in the top position. The change is driven by the big social environment. It is because that tertiary industries becomes more important than secondary manufacturing industries in most developed countries. Hence man's intrinsic strength is no longer important and required for service-based industries. However, women ,who are believed to have better communicative skills than men, are able to perform better than men. Hence, cultural change is just an inevitable trend.

 

 

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