III. Shared culture ↑
20. Culture acts as the operating system for a group.
I wrote earlier about the importance of human groups.
Humans are flexible enough to operate in many different kinds of groups, for a variety of purposes.
But how does each group know how to function? What are each group’s rules for how members interact with each other, and how each group interacts with other groups?
Well, unlike other sorts of groups formed by other species, such rules are not hard-wired into our DNA. Nor are they necessarily handed down from a mountaintop.
Instead each group has some sort of culture that functions as a sort of operating system for the group.
A group’s culture includes knowledge, customs, languages, technology, narratives and artifacts that are shared between group members, and passed on from one generation of members to the next.
And these group cultures are malleable, and can be developed and improved over time.
Words from Others on this Topic
The Heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Yuval Noah Harari, 2015, from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
With this perspective, you can begin to think of yourself as not just a product of your genes, and not just a product of your personal experience, but also as one of many members of your culture who collectively contain a vast repository of information learned and passed down from previous generations. This makes you part of something larger than yourself. The information has not just been passed down, but it has also been winnowed through the generations, leaving us with a set of beliefs and practices that helped us to cohere as groups.
David Sloan Wilson, 2019, from the book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution
The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative. That is, hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking know-how, and edible-plant knowledge began to improve and aggregate—by learning from others—so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation. After several generations, this process produced a sufficiently large and complex toolkit of practices and techniques that individuals, relying only on their own ingenuity and personal experience, could not get anywhere close to figuring out over their lifetime.
Joseph Henrich, 2016, from the book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter