Mexican Culture: Customs & Traditions

Mexico City is one of the most populous cities in the world, with 8.8 million people.

Credit: ChameleonsEye | Shutterstock

The culture of Mexico has undergone a tremendous transformation over the past few decades and it varies widely throughout the country. Many Mexicans live in cities, but smaller rural communities still play a strong role in defining the country’s collective vibrant community. 

Mexico is the 14th largest country in the world, according to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook. According to the CIA, Mexico consists of several ethnic groups. The mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) group accounts for 60 percent of the population. Amerindian people or predominantly Amerindian people account for 30 percent, while 9 percent of the population is white. These groups create a culture that is unique to Mexico. Here is an overview of Mexican culture.

Languages of Mexico

The overwhelming majority of Mexicans today speak Spanish. According to the CIA, Spanish is spoken by 92.7 percent of the Mexican population. About 6 percent of the population speaks Spanish and indigenous languages, such as Mayan, Nahuatl and other regional languages. Indigenous Mexican words have even become common in other languages, including English. For example, chocolate, coyote, tomato and avocado all originated in Nahuatl. 

Religions of Mexico

"Much of Mexican culture revolves around religious values and the church, as well as the concept of family and inclusiveness," said Talia Wagner, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. Around 82 percent of Mexicans identify themselves as Catholic, according to the CIA, although many have incorporated pre-Hispanic Mayan elements as part of their faith. Christian denominations represented include Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists and Anglicans. There are also small communities of Muslims, Jews and Buddhists. 

Values of the Mexican People

Mexicans put a high value on hierarchy and structure in business and family matters. Especially outside of cities, families are typically large and Mexicans are very conscious of their responsibilities to immediate family members and extended family such as cousins and even close friends.

Hosting parties at their homes plays a large part of Mexican life and making visitors feel comfortable is a large part of the values and customs of the country.

"Family units are usually large, with traditional gender roles and extensive family involvement from the external members who assist one another in day to day life," Wagner told Live Science. There is a strong connection between family members. "Parents are treated with a high degree of respect, as is the family in general and there may be constant struggle, especially for the growing children between individual wants and needs and those wants and needs of the family," added Wagner.

Mexican food

Mexican culinary norms vary widely based on income level and social class. The diet of working-class Mexicans includes staples such as corn or wheat tortillas, along with beans, rice, tomatoes, chili peppers and chorizo, a type of pork sausage. Empanadas, which are handheld pasty pockets, can contain savory or sweet fillings. Many Mexicans love spicy foods full of heat. 

The diets of middle- and upper-income Mexicans are more closely aligned with diets of Americans and Europeans and include a wide variety of food items prepared in wide range of culinary styles.

Mexico is known for its tequila, which is made from agave cactus that is well suited to the climate of central Mexico. Soda is a very popular drink in Mexico, as the country has a well-developed beverage industry.

Mexican art and literature

Clay pottery, embroidered cotton garments, wool shawls and outer garments with angular designs, colorful baskets and rugs are some of the common items associated with Mexican folk art.

The country is closely associated with the Mariachi style of folk music. Originated in the southern part of the state of Jalisco sometime in the 19th century, it involves a group of musicians — playing violins, guitars, basses, vihuelas (a five-string guitar) and trumpets — and wearing silver-studded charro suits and elaborate hats. "La Cucaracha" is a well-known Mariachi staple.

Two of Mexico's most famous artists are Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Their paintings include vibrant colors and depictions of life in Mexico. 

Mexican clothing

Many may not think of Mexico as a place that fosters high fashion, but many fashion designers hail from Mexico, such as Jorge Duque and Julia y Renata. There is also a Mexico Fashion Week. In the cities, fashion in Mexico is influenced by international trends, so the typical urban Mexican dresses similar to people in Europe and the United States.

In more rural areas, a typical woman’s wardrobe includes skirts, sleeveless tunics called huipils, capes known as quechquémitls and shawls called rebozos. 

One distinguishing article of traditional men’s clothing is a large blanket cape called a sarape. Boots are also a wardrobe staple.

Some traditional clothing, now typically worn for celebrations and special occasions, include sombreros and the charro suits worn by Mariachi bands.

Holidays and celebrations

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is celebrated on Dec. 12, is a major Mexican holiday celebrating the appearance of the Virgin Mary to an Indian man in the first years of Spanish rule. She is the patron saint of the country.

The Day of the Dead, celebrated on Nov. 2, is a day set aside to remember and honor those who have died, according to the University of New Mexico. Carnival is also celebrated in many communities throughout Mexico to mark the period before Lent.

Independence Day, marking the country’s separation from Spain in 1810, is celebrated on Sept. 16. Cinco de Mayo, which marks a Mexican military victory over the French in 1862, is more widely celebrated in the United States (as a beer promotion) than it is in Mexico.

Italian Culture: Facts, Customs & Tradition

A panoramic view of Rome from St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Credit: Boris Stroujko | Shutterstock

Italian culture is steeped in the arts, family, architecture, music and food. Home of the Roman Empire and a major center of the Renaissance, culture on the Italian peninsula has flourished for centuries. Here is a brief overview of Italian customs and traditions.

Population of Italy

About 96 percent of the population of Italy is Italian, though there are many other ethnicities that live in this country. North African Arab, Italo-Albanian, Albanian, German, Austrian and some other European groups fill out the remainder of the population. Bordering countries of France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia to the north have influenced Italian culture, as have the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Sicily and Sardinia.

Languages of Italy

The official language of the country is Italian. About 93 percent of the Italian population speaks Italian as native language, according to the BBC. There are a number of dialects of the language spoken in the country, including Sardinian, Friulian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Venetian and Calabrian. Milanese is also spoken in Milan. Other languages spoken by native Italians include Albanian, Bavarian, Catalan, Cimbrian, Corsican, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Slovenian and Walser.

Family life in Italy

"Family is an extremely important value within the Italian culture," Talia Wagner, a Los Angeles based marriage and family therapist, told Live Science. Their family solidarity is focused on extended family rather than the west's idea of "the nuclear family" of just a mom, dad and kids, Wagner explained.

Italians have frequent family gatherings and enjoy spending time with those in their family. "Children are reared to remain close to the family upon adulthood and incorporate their future family into the larger network," said Wagner.

Religion in Italy

The major religion in Italy is Roman Catholicism. This is not surprising, as Vatican City, located in the heart of Rome, is the hub of Roman Catholicism and where the Pope resides. Roman Catholics make up 90 percent of the population, though only one-third of those are practicing Catholics, while the other 10 percent is composed of Protestant, Jewish and a growing Muslim immigrant community, according to the University of Michigan.

Art and architecture in Italy

Italy has given rise to a number of architectural styles, including classical Roman, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical. Italy is home to some of the most famous structures in the world, including Colosseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The concept of a basilica — which was originally used to describe an open public court building and evolved to mean a Catholic pilgrimage site — was born in Italy. The word, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is derived from Latin and meant "royal palace." The word is also from the Greek basilikē, which is the feminine of basilikos which means "royal" or basileus, which means "king."

Florence, Venice and Rome are home to many museums, but art can be viewed in churches and public buildings. Most notable is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, painted by Michelangelo sometime between 1508 and 1512.

Opera has its roots in Italy and many famous operas — including "Aida" and "La Traviata," both by Giuseppe Verdi, and "Pagliacci" by Ruggero Leoncavallo — were written in Italian and are still performed in the native language. More recently, Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti made opera more accessible to the masses as part of the Three Tenors.

Italy is home to a number of world-renowned fashion houses, including Armani, Gucci, Benetton, Versace and Prada.

Italian cuisine

Italian cuisine has influenced food culture around the world and is viewed as a form of art by many. Wine, cheese and pasta are important part of Italian meals. Pasta comes in a wide range of shapes, widths and lengths, including penne, spaghetti, linguine, fusilli and lasagna. 

For Italians, food isn't just nourishment, it is life. "Family gatherings are frequent and often centered around food and the extended networks of families," said Wagner.

No one area of Italy eats the same things as the next. Each region has its own spin on "Italian food," according to CNN. For example, most of the foods that Americans view as Italian, such as spaghetti and pizza, come from central Italy. In the North of Italy, fish, potatoes, rice, sausages, pork and different types of cheeses are the most common ingredients. Pasta dishes with tomatoes are popular, as are many kinds of stuffed pasta, polenta and risotto. In the South, dishes are dominated by tomatoes, either served fresh or cooked into sauce, and also includes capers, peppers, olives and olive oil, garlic, artichokes, eggplant and ricotta cheese.

Doing business in Italy

Italians are known for their family-centric culture, and there are a number of small and mid-sized businesses. Even many of the larger companies such as Fiat and Benetton are still primarily controlled by single families. "Many families that immigrated from Italy are traditionalists by nature, with the parents holding traditional gender roles. This has become challenging for the younger generations, as gender roles have morphed in the American culture and today stand at odds with the father being the primary breadwinner and the undisputed head of the household and the mother being the primary caretaker of the home and children," said Wagner. 

Meetings are typically less formal than in countries such as Germany and Russia, and the familial structure can give way to a bit of chaos and animated exchanges. Italian business people tend to view information from outsiders with a bit of wariness, and prefer verbal exchanges with people that they know well.

Italian holidays

Italians celebrate most Christian holidays, including Christmas and Easter. Pasquetta, on the Monday after Easter, typically involves family picnics to mark the beginning of springtime.

November 1 commemorates Saints Day, a religious holiday during which Italians typically decorate the graves of deceased relatives with flowers.

Many Italian towns and villages celebrate the feast day of their patron saint. September 19, for example, is the feast of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Napoli.

The celebration of the Epiphany, celebrated on January 6, is much like Christmas. Belfana, an old lady who flies on her broomstick, delivers presents and goodies to good children, according to legend. 

April 25 is the Liberation Day, marking the 1945 liberation ending World War II in Italy in 1945.

Definition of Culture

By Kim Ann Zimmermann, Live Science Contributor

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

The Center for Advance Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, it can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.

The word "culture" derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin "colere," which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture. "It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth," Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London, told Live Science.

Jazz music, which originated in the United States, has spread to other cultures. In this photo, the Soil & Pimp Sessions band plays at the Jazzystan Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Credit: Kristina Postnikova / Shutterstock.com

Many countries are largely populated by immigrants, and the culture is influenced by the many groups of people that now make up the country. This is also a part of growth. As the countries grow, so does its cultural diversity.

Western culture

The term "Western culture" has come to define the culture of European countries as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as the United States,according to Khan University. Western culture has its roots in the Classical Period of the Greco-Roman era and the rise of Christianity in the 14th century.

Other drivers of Western culture include Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Hellenic ethnic and linguistic groups. Today, the influences of Western culture can be seen in almost every country in the world.

Eastern culture was heavily influenced by religion. This giant statue of Buddha overlooks Hong Kong.

Credit: Konstantin Sutyagin Shutterstock

Eastern culture

Eastern culture generally refers to the societal norms of countries in Far East Asia (includingChina, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea) and the Indian subcontinent. Like the West, Eastern culture was heavily influenced by religion during its early development, but it was also heavily influenced by the growth and harvesting of rice, according to the book "Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures" by Dorian Q. Fuller. In general, in Eastern culture there is less of a distinction between secular society and religious philosophy than there is in the West.

Latin culture

Many of the Spanish-speaking nations are considered part of the Latin culture, while the geographic region is widespread. Latin America is typically defined as those parts of the Central America, South America and Mexico where Spanish or Portuguese are the dominant languages. Originally, the term “Latin America” was used by French geographers to differentiate between Anglo and Romance (Latin-based) languages, according to the University of Texas. While Spain and Portugal are on the European continent, they are considered the key influencers of what is known as Latin culture, which denotes people using languages derived from Latin, also known as Romance languages.

The El-Deir Monastery at Petra, Jordan, is an example of traditional Middle Eastern culture.

Credit: ZurijetaShutterstock

Middle Eastern culture

The countries of the Middle East have some but not all things in common. This is not a surprise, since the area consists of approximately 20 countries, according to PBS. The Arabic language is one thing that is common throughout the region; however, the wide variety of dialect can sometimes make communication difficult. Religion is another cultural area that the countries of the Middle East have in common. The Middle East is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

African culture

The continent of Africa is essential to all cultures. Human life originated on this continent and began to migrate to other areas of the world around 60,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museum. 

Africa is home to a number of tribes, ethnic and social groups. One of the key features of this culture is the large number of ethnic groups throughout the 54 countries on the continent. Nigeria alone has more than 300 tribes, for example.

Currently, Africa is divided into two cultural groups: North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is because Northwest Africa has strong ties to Middle East, while Sub-Africa shares historical, physical and social characteristics that are very different from North Africa, according to the University of Colorado. The harsh environment has been a large factor in the development of Sub-Saharan Africa culture, as there are a number of languages, cuisines, art and musical styles that have sprung up among the far-flung populations.

Constant change

No matter what culture a people are a part of, one thing is for certain, it will change. Culture appears to have become key in our interconnected world, which is made up of so many ethnically diverse societies, but also riddled by conflicts associated with religion, ethnicity, ethical beliefs, and, essentially, the elements which make up culture," said De Rossi. "But culture is no longer fixed, if it ever was. It is essentially fluid and constantly in motion." This makes it so that it is difficult to define any culture in only one way.

Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force

Genes enabling lactose tolerance, which probably resulted in more surviving offspring, were detected in cultures like this Kenyan shepherd’s. CreditPer-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.

Because of this buffering action, culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light.

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Dr. Laland is an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The idea that genes and culture co-evolve has been around for several decades but has started to win converts only recently. Two leading proponents, Robert Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Peter J. Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have argued for years that genes and culture were intertwined in shaping human evolution. “It wasn’t like we were despised, just kind of ignored,” Dr. Boyd said. But in the last few years, references by other scientists to their writings have “gone up hugely,” he said.

The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood.

Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome. Presumably the extra nutrition was of such great advantage that adults able to digest milk left more surviving offspring, and the genetic change swept through the population.Continue reading the main story

This instance of gene-culture interaction turns out to be far from unique. In the last few years, biologists have been able to scan the whole human genome for the signatures of genes undergoing selection. Such a signature is formed when one version of a gene becomes more common than other versions because its owners are leaving more surviving offspring. From the evidence of the scans, up to 10 percent of the genome — some 2,000 genes — shows signs of being under selective pressure.

These pressures are all recent, in evolutionary terms — most probably dating from around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, in the view of Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Biologists can infer the reason for these selective forces from the kinds of genes that are tagged by the genome scans. The roles of most of the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome are still poorly understood, but all can be assigned to broad categories of likely function depending on the physical structure of the protein they specify.

By this criterion, many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease. Genes that cause paler skin in Europeans or Asians are probably a response to geography and climate.

Maasai tribesman are among a culture with adult lactose tolerance. CreditRadu Sigheti/Reuters

But other genes seem to have been favored because of cultural changes. These include many genes involved in diet and metabolism and presumably reflect the major shift in diet that occurred in the transition from foraging to agriculture that started about 10,000 years ago.

Amylase is an enzyme in the saliva that breaks down starch. People who live in agrarian societies eat more starch and have extra copies of the amylase gene compared with people who live in societies that depend on hunting or fishing. Genetic changes that enable lactose tolerance have been detected not just in Europeans but also in three African pastoral societies. In each of the four cases, a different mutation is involved, but all have the same result — that of preventing the lactose-digesting gene from being switched off after weaning.

Many genes for taste and smell show signs of selective pressure, perhaps reflecting the change in foodstuffs as people moved from nomadic to sedentary existence. Another group under pressure is that of genes that affect the growth of bone. These could reflect the declining weight of the human skeleton that seems to have accompanied the switch to settled life, which started some 15,000 years ago.

A third group of selected genes affects brain function. The role of these genes is unknown, but they could have changed in response to the social transition as people moved from small hunter-gatherer groups a hundred strong to villages and towns inhabited by several thousand, Dr. Laland said. “It’s highly plausible that some of these changes are a response to aggregation, to living in larger communities,” he said.

Though the genome scans certainly suggest that many human genes have been shaped by cultural forces, the tests for selection are purely statistical, being based on measures of whether a gene has become more common. To verify that a gene has indeed been under selection, biologists need to perform other tests, like comparing the selected and unselected forms of the gene to see how they differ.

Dr. Stoneking and his colleagues have done this with three genes that score high in statistical tests of selection. One of the genes they looked at, called the EDAR gene, is known to be involved in controlling the growth of hair. A variant form of the EDAR gene is very common in East Asians and Native Americans, and is probably the reason that these populations have thicker hair than Europeans or Africans.

Still, it is not obvious why this variant of the EDAR gene was favored. Possibly thicker hair was in itself an advantage, retaining heat in Siberian climates. Or the trait could have become common through sexual selection, because people found it attractive in their partners.

A third possibility comes from the fact that the gene works by activating a gene regulator that controls the immune system as well as hair growth. So the gene could have been favored because it conferred protection against some disease, with thicker hair being swept along as a side effect. Or all three factors could have been at work. “It’s one of the cases we know most about, and yet there’s a lot we don’t know,” Dr. Stoneking said.

The case of the EDAR gene shows how cautious biologists have to be in interpreting the signals of selection seen in the genome scans. But it also points to the potential of the selective signals for bringing to light salient events in human prehistory as modern humans dispersed from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa and adapted to novel environments. “That’s the ultimate goal,” Dr. Stoneking said. “I come from the anthropological perspective, and we want to know what the story is.”

With archaic humans, culture changed very slowly. The style of stone tools called the Oldowan appeared 2.5 million years ago and stayed unchanged for more than a million years. The Acheulean stone tool kit that succeeded it lasted for 1.5 million years. But among behaviorally modern humans, those of the last 50,000 years, the tempo of cultural change has been far brisker. This raises the possibility that human evolution has been accelerating in the recent past under the impact of rapid shifts in culture.

Some biologists think this is a possibility, though one that awaits proof. The genome scans that test for selection have severe limitations. They cannot see the signatures of ancient selection, which get washed out by new mutations, so there is no base line by which to judge whether recent natural selection has been greater than in earlier times. There are also likely to be many false positives among the genes that seem favored.

But the scans also find it hard to detect weakly selected genes, so they may be picking up just a small fraction of the recent stresses on the genome. Mathematical models of gene-culture interaction suggest that this form of natural selection can be particularly rapid. Culture has become a force of natural selection, and if it should prove to be a major one, then human evolution may be accelerating as people adapt to pressures of their own creation.

Early Humans: Evolution of Australopithecines

Nearly five million years ago in Africa, an apelike species evolved with two important traits that distinguished it from the apes. This species had small canine teeth (next to the four front teeth), and it was bipedal , meaning it could walk on two legs instead of four. Scientists refer to these earliest human species as australopithecines, or australopith for short.

The fossil record shows that there is not an orderly sequence leading from one form to another. Several groups lived at the same time and characteristics developed at different rates; therefore the human family tree suggests a long and complex past.

Fossils from several early australopith species that lived between four million and two million years ago clearly demonstrate a variety of adaptations that mark the transition between ape to human. Prior to four million years ago, fossil remains are scarce and incomplete; where available, however, they do show a primitive combination of ape and human features.

Most of the key characteristics that stand out as distinctly human are related to their bipedal stance. The australopiths had an S-shaped spine that allowed for balance when standing. The opening through which the spinal cord attached to the brain was positioned more forward, allowing for the head to be balanced over the upright spine. The pelvic bone was shorter and broader than in apes, giving the pelvis a bowl shape that supported the internal organs when standing or walking upright. The upper legs angled inward allowing the knees to support the body while standing or walking. Shorter and less flexible toes functioned as rigid levers for pushing off the ground with each step.

Most early species had small canine teeth, a projecting face, and a small brain. They weighed between 22 and 37 kilograms (60 to 100 pounds), and were 0.9 to 1.5 meters (3 to 5 feet) tall. Males were generally larger than females. Both had curved fingers and long thumbs with a wide range of movement. The apes, in comparison, have longer, more curved, and stronger fingers that make them well adapted for hanging and swinging from branches. Apes also have short thumbs, which limits their ability to manipulate small objects.

Why Haven't All Primates Evolved into Humans?

Humans did not evolve from apes, gorillas or chimps. We are all modern species that have followed different evolutionary paths, though humans share a common ancestor with some primates, such as the African ape.

The timeline of human evolution is long and controversial, with significant gaps. Experts do not agree on many of the start and end points of various species. So this chart involves significant estimates.

To say we are more "evolved" than our hairy cousins is just wrong. (See how long you last naked in the Congo Heartland, and then tell me who's got the evolutionary upper hand.)

Thinking that a species evolves in order to survive is to put the cart before the horse. Genetic mutations happen all the time, without fanfare and often without any measurable change in the organism's lifestyle. In general, the mutations most likely to be passed to future generations are those that prove useful to either individual or species survival.

The "usefulness" of a mutation depends largely on shifting environmental factors like those of food, predators, and climate, and also on social pressures. Evolution is a matter of filling ecological and social niches. African apes are still around because their environment has encouraged the reproductive success of individuals with different genetic material than ours.

Evolution is an ongoing process of trial and error, of which all modern primates are still a part.

Culture is learned

Human infants come into the world with basic drives such as hunger and thirst, but they do not possess instinctive patterns of behavior to satisfy them.  Likewise, they are without any cultural knowledge.  However, they are genetically predisposed to rapidly learn language and other cultural traits.  New born humans are amazing learning machines.  Any normal baby can be placed into any family on earth and grow up to learn their culture and accept it as his or her own.  Sinceculture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.

	North American children informally learning the culture of their parents

Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies.  The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations.  As a result, culture is cumulative.  Due to this cumulative effect, most high school students today are now familiar with mathematical insights and solutions that ancient Greeks such as Archimedes and Pythagoras struggled their lives to discover.

Cultural evolution is due to the cumulative effect of culture.  We now understand that the time between major cultural inventions has become steadily shorter, especially since the invention of agriculture 8,000-10,000 years ago.  The progressively larger human population after that time was very likely both a consequence and a cause of accelerating culture growth.  The more people there are, the more likely new ideas and information will accumulate.  If those ideas result in a larger, more secure food supplies, the population will inevitably grow.  In a sense, culture has been the human solution to surviving changing environments, but it has continuously compounded the problem by making it possible for more humans to stay alive.  In other words, human cultural evolution can be seen as solving a problem that causes the same problem again and again.  The ultimate cost of success of cultural technology has been a need to produce more and more food for more and more people.

Parallel Growth of the Human Population and Cultural Technology

The invention of agriculture made it possible for our ancestors to have a more controllable and, subsequently, dependable food supply.  It also resulted in settling down in permanent communities.  This in turn set the stage for further developments in technology and political organization.  The inevitable result was more intensive agriculture, new kinds of social and political systems dominated by emerging elite classes, the first cities, and ultimately the industrial and information revolutions of modern times.  City life brought with it the unexpected consequence of increased rates of contagious diseases.  Large, dense populations of people make it much easier for viruses, bacteria, and other disease causing microorganisms to spread from host to host.  As a result, most cities in the past were periodically devastated by epidemics.

Agriculture based ancient city (Thebes, Egypt)		Modern post-industrial city (New York)

The rate of cultural evolution for many human societies during the last two centuries has been unprecedented.  Today, major new technologies are invented every few years rather than once or twice a century or even less often, as was the case in the past.   Likewise, there has been an astounding increase in the global human population.  It is worth reflecting on the fact that there are people alive today who were born before cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, antibiotics, and even airplanes.  These now elderly individuals have seen the human population double several times.  The world that was familiar to them in their childhood is no longer here.  It is as if they have moved to a new alien culture and society.  Not surprisingly, they often have difficulty in accepting and adjusting to the change.  The psychological distress and confusion that accompanies this has been referred to as future shock.

Culture relates to nature (our biology and genetics) and nurture (our environment and surroundings that also shape our identities).

Culture and Biology

Human beings are biological creatures. We are composed of blood and bones and flesh. At the most basic level, our genes express themselves in physical characteristics, affecting bodily aspects such as skin tone and eye color. Yet, human beings are much more than our biology, and this is evident particularly in the way humans generate, and live within, complex cultures.

Defining Culture

Culture is a term used by social scientists, like anthropologists and sociologists, to encompass all the facets of human experience that extend beyond our physical fact. Culture refers to the way we understand ourselves both as individuals and as members of society, and includes stories, religion, media, rituals, and even language itself.

It is critical to understand that the term culture does not describe a singular, fixed entity. Instead, it is a useful heuristic, or way of thinking, that can be very productive in understanding behavior. As a student of the social sciences, you should think of the word culture as a conceptual tool rather than as a uniform, static definition. Culture necessarily changes, and is changed by, a variety of interactions, with individuals, media, and technology, just to name a few.

The History of Culture as a Concept

Culture is primarily an anthropological term. The field of anthropology emerged around the same time as Social Darwinism, in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Social Darwinism was the belief that the closer a cultural group was to the normative, Western, European standards of behavior and appearance, the more evolved that group was. As a theory of the world, it was essentially a racist concept that persists in certain forms up to this day. If you have ever heard someone reference people of African descent as being from, or close to, the jungle, or the wilderness, you've encountered a type of coded language that is a modern incarnation of Social Darwinist thought.

During the late 19^th and early 20^th century time period, the positivist school also emerged in sociological thought. One of the key figures in this school, Cesare Lombroso, studied the physical characteristics of prisoners, because he believed that he could find a biological basis for crime. Lombroso coined the term atavism to suggest that some individuals were throwbacks to a more bestial point in evolutionary history. Lombroso used this concept to claim that certain individuals were more weak-willed, and more prone to criminal activity, than their supposedly more evolved counterparts.

In accordance with the hegemonic beliefs of the time, anthropologists first theorized culture as something that evolves in the same way biological organisms evolve. Just like biological evolution, cultural evolution was thought to be an adaptive system that produced unique results depending on location and historical moment. However, unlike biological evolution, culture can be intentionally taught and thus spread from one group of people to another.

Initially, anthropologists believed that culture was a product of biological evolution, and that cultural evolution depended exclusively on physical conditions. Today's anthropologists no longer believe it is this simple. Neither culture nor biology is solely responsible for the other. They interact in very complex ways, which biological anthropologists will be studying for years to come.

There is only one human culture

People often speak of culture in the plural (“cultures”) because they believe that there are many different cultures in the world. At one level, this is of course true; the American culture is different from the Chinese culture, both of which are different from the Egyptian culture, and so on. However, all the cultural differences are on the surface; deep down, at the most fundamental level, all human cultures are essentially the same.

Yes, culture and socialization do matter for human behavior, to a certain extent. But the grave error of traditional sociologists and others under the influence of the Standard Social Science Model (a term attributable to the co-founders of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) is to believe that human behavior isinfinitely malleable, capable of being molded and shaped limitlessly in any way by cultural practices and socialization. Available evidence shows that this view is false. Human behavior, while malleable, is not infinitely malleable by culture, because culture is not infinitely variable. In fact, despite all the surface and minor differences, evolutionary psychologists have shown that all human cultures are essentially the same.

To use a famous metaphor, coined by the cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris, it is true that, at the surface level, people in some societies consume beef as food and worship pigs as sacred religious objects, while those in others consume pork as food and worship cows as sacred religious objects. So there is cultural variety at this concrete level. However, both beef and pork are animal proteins (as are dogs, whales, and monkeys), and both pigs and cows are animate entities (as are Buddha, Allah, and Jesus). And people in every human society consume animal proteins and worship animate entities (as I explained in an earlier post). At this abstract level, there are no exceptions, and all human cultures are the same. There is no infinite variability in human culture, in the sense that there are no cultures in which people do not consume animal protein or worship animate entities.

To use another example, it is true that languages spoken in different cultures appear completely different, as anyone who ever tried to learn a foreign language knows. English is completely different from Chinese, neither of which is anything like Arabic. Despite these surface differences, however, all natural human languages share what the linguist Noam Chomsky calls the “deep structure” of grammar. In this sense, English and Chinese are essentially the same, in the sense that beef and pork are essentially the same.

Any developmentally normal child can grow up to speak any natural human language. Regardless of what language their genetic parents spoke, all developmentally normal children are capable of growing up to be native speakers of English, Chinese, Arabic, or any other natural human language. In fact, when a group of children grow up together with no adults to teach them a language, they will invent their own natural human language complete with grammar. This does not mean, however, that the human capacity for language is infinitely malleable. Human children cannot grow up to speak non-natural language like FORTRAN or symbolic logic, despite the fact that these are far more logical and easier to learn than any natural language (no irregular verbs, no exceptions to rules). Yes, a developmentally normal child can grow up to speak any language, as long as the language is a product of human evolution, not a recent invention of computer scientists or logicians.

Pierre van den Berghe, a pioneer sociobiologist at the University of Washington, puts it best when he says

Certainly we are unique, but we are not unique in being unique. Every species is unique and evolved its uniqueness in adaptation to itsenvironment. Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture too evolved biologically.

Despite all the surface differences, there is only one culture, because culture, like our body, is an adaptive product of human evolution. The human culture is a product of ourgenes, just like our hands and pancreas are.

Biologically, human beings are very weak and fragile; we do not have fangs to fight predators and catch prey or fur to protect us from extreme cold. Culture is the defense mechanism with which evolution equipped us to protect ourselves, so that we can inherit and then pass on our knowledge of manufacturing weapons (to fight predators and catch prey) or clothing and shelter (to protect us from extreme cold). We don’t need fangs or fur, because we have culture. And just like -- despite some minor individual differences -- all tigers have more or less the same fangs and all polar bears have more or less the same fur, all human societies have more or less the same culture. Fangs are a universal trait of all tigers; fur is a universal trait of all polar bears. So culture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.