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.