What is culture?

Politicians and the media do not seem quite clear about the meaning of culture. When people talk about the world of culture, they usually refer to issues as diverse as pop music shows, bullfighting, opera, theater, cinema, museums, university... This is an abuse of language that mixes four things quite different, though related: culture, shows, entertainment and education.

The Cambridge dictionary defines thus these four terms (in each case I have chosen the meaning closest to what I am speaking about, because there are others):

·      Culture: music, art, theatre, literature, etc.

·      Education: process of teaching or learning, or the knowledge you get from this.

·      Show: a theatre performance or a television or radio program that is entertaining rather than serious.

·      Entertainment: public shows, performances or other ways of enjoying yourself.

Let us call things by their names. A cultural act should be a public celebration where attendees try to increase their culture, to get knowledge that will improve their critical judgment. A classical music concert, the presentation of a book, a visit to a museum, are cultural events. Conversely:

1. Except in a few cases, we do not watch a movie to increase our culture, but to enjoy ourselves (entertainment).
2. A pop festival or a bullfight are not cultural events, but shows.
3. We can go to the opera or the theater to improve our culture, but the performance itself may not be a cultural act, but a show, especially when the stage directors distort a classic work to express their originality or to shock the public.
4. University professors can be considered a part of the world of culture if they perform popularization, but that is not their main activity. Education and research are.

When the media talk about the world of culture and put there actors, pop musicians (some of whom confess that they do not know music), and even DJs, they are really talking about the world of entertainment.

Let us call things by their name.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Is man just an animal?

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Modern biologists frequently say that man is not special, that we are just a species among many. Thus, for instance, Colin Tudge writes this:

Phylogenetically we are an outpost, a tiny figment of life, just as Earth is a cosmological nonentity that no other intelligent life-form in the Universe would bother to put in their celestial maps.

(The variety of life, Oxford University Press, 2000).

This is just the indiscriminate application of a pseudo-scientific dogma that few biologists would dare contradict, which can be expressed in one of the following equivalent ways:

• All species of living beings are equivalent; no one is superior to the others.
• There are no criteria that make it possible to compare the importance of different species.
• Man is not superior to chimps, ants, bacteria...
• Evolution has no direction.

Cultural evolution and biological evolution

Cultural and biological evolution are similar because natural selection acts in both cases. Cultural productions compete against one another and many become extinct. As in the case of living beings, not always the best win. Chance has an influence. In this way, for instance, Windows-95 threw OS-2 out of the market, even though at that time the second operating system was better. Another example is the result of the war between the three competing models of video recording: Betamax, 2000 and VHS.

In the same way that living beings exhibit genetic variability (many varieties of the same gene co-existing in the same population), there is also a cultural variability, represented by the co-existence of old and new makes and models of the same product. At times of big change in the environment (we are just now experiencing one) a cultural product may escape extinction thanks to its variability, by combining versions and producing something new, better adapted to the new circumstances.

The parallel is quite impressive. What we call a species in the biological world, may be considered similar to a civilization. But there are also deep differences between both phenomena.

While studies about biological evolution get back in time to one century and a half ago, those about cultural evolution are more recent: not even half a century. One of its pioneers, Richard Dawkins (who invented the term meme for cultural elements equivalent to genes) made the mistake of considering biological and cultural evolution as identical processes, forgetting their differences. Cultural evolution is almost exclusively typical of man and exhibits new phenomena, emergent features that make it quite different from biological evolution: