The Capacity for Cultural Transmission

The capacity for cultural transmission has been hardwired into the brain by millions of years of evolution. But we've also evolved a way of modifying those genetic patterns to a much more dramatic degree than cats or allosaurs did in the process of learning language. A young human absorbs a distinctive way of constructing the world. And that cultural pattern pushes, pulls and prods the inherited world structure shared by all human beings into a culturally distinct form. The content of cultural transmission thus varies from culture to culture and from person to person. We have an unbounded capacity to transmit cultural knowledge. That's just a soluble problem, soluble by knowledge creation.