Page 13 - Core Beliefs For Intentional Community

attempts to link human behavioral systems to simple geographic or genetic factors

have always failed. This is because man's major behavioral adaptation is culture.
Culture is learned and shared. It is rooted in biology. But although this is true (the
capacity for culture is part of a normal human‛s brain structure), culture frees man
to an unprecedented degree from strictly biological controls over the development
and maintenance of behavioral systems. Culture is biologically adaptive. That is,
human populations imbedded, like all animal populations, in specific environments
adjust to these environments largely through culture.

Man is born with a capacity to learn culture, not with culture.
This does not mean that all human behavior is freed of

biological programming. Individuals are born different. The
outcome of heredity and experience will lead to differences in
temperament and ability which make it possible for the ·
human group to function as a social entity.

The human being has been shaped by evolution. His size, the fact that he walks on
two feet, his relative lack of body hair, and the fact that he can and does talk are all
products of the evolutionary process. What man does and also what he believes are
also products of evolution. But those elements which depend
upon culture are not inherited biologically. In part, man adapts
biologically to his environment in a non-biological way -
through culture.

Since man is one of the most widely distributed of species
occupying a vast array of environments ranging from deserts
to swampland, from plains to mountains, from inland to the
sea, and because his social and technological environment varies as widely, we should
not be surprised to find a range of behavioral variation adjusted to specific
environments…

…Humans, as members of social groups, may exhibit behaviors which parallel
instinctual behaviors in lower animals but which have their origin in culture.

Variations, cultural or biological, are all subject to selection through the action of
the environment. If a variation (physical or behavioral, genetic or learned) has an
advantage over other existing forms in a specific environment, it can be selected for
in that environment…

…culture, which is a product of man's biological past, and which
is man's major way of adapting, is not dependent upon genetic
variation for change. Aggressive or passive behavior (and
combinations of these) are both possibilities within the
behavioral capacities of man. What kind of behavioral system
emerges must conform to man's biological capacities, but since
these are wide, the capacities alone tell us little about real systems undergoing the

selective process.
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