Although it might be argued that a few of the higher animals (chimps, dolphins, parrots) have transmissible cultures, for the most part, information acquired during an organism's lifetime is not transmitted to the next generation. Information transfer in human cultures, however, can be several orders of magnitude faster...I've had multiple teachers, read hundreds of books, visited thousands of websites and assimilated a tremendous amount of information mostly by people now dead. Human culture is intentional in a way that interrupts nature's stochastic processes and is thus "artificial." Any argument against this is to fall into the genetic fallacy which confuses what a thing now essentially is with what its historical origins once were. There is great danger in saying humans are part of nature in a way that would allow factories discharging toxic chemicals into a river to claim the chemicals are as natural as the fishes. We need to see the difference in being human first (and I think culture is a good place to start) and only then acknowledge that though we evolved out of nature and find ways for human culture to live in harmony with nature.
Most of the above is regurgitated from an Environmental Philosophy class I took as a graduate student years ago. Anyone interested in pursuing the nature-culture dialectal might look up some titles by Holmes Rolston, III or pick up any issue of the journal of *Environmental Philosophy* ** * cordially, Adam Herbert American International School Cariari, Costa Rica “The puzzle of the times is that science is so outspoken against thought control by other men and yet it unwittingly embraces thought control by money and machines.” R.G.H. Siu *
