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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The mythology of culture as an external force that perpetuates itself on its own motion is just that.

The only coherent definition of cultural expression is that of genetic material expressing itself in an environment. If you drastically change the environment you change the culture. On top of that, genetic expression can change environment in a feedback loop. But as soon as you change the genes, such as can be seen with, for example, Pakistanis in Britain, you get a massive shift where it becomes obvious where the non-Pakistani genes were doing the work and where the environment was modulating behavior.

There is also a hidden assumption here I find wrong. That, because someone in the past was using primitive tools or technology they must be 'primitive' in comparison to a modern human, that their modes of behavior and emotion were somehow primitive or different in a way that would distinguish them from the emotional expressions of a modern human. There is no reason to assume that the people of the past differ from the people of the present. I am in fact quite sure that a lot of people from the past would become quite docile if they lived in the same luxury modern people live in. And they would modulate their behavior accordingly if their luxurious lifestyle was threatened by them stepping out of line. In fact, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise given this is where the modern man came from. Even if the transformation wasn't without some culling of volatile genetic material, there is no reason to assume that the all the volatility of the past was culled, and that it did not instead modulate to a more prosperous future.