wolfhnd wrote:Zeitgeist
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ the movie has to be one of the worst films I have ever watched :-) If you want to know why read this
http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/ ... zeitgeist/The idea that there are shared patterns between diverse cultures is however a legimitate observation. My personal explanation for the phenomenon would be that it is linked to a common genetic heritage. I'm interested in what other people think?
What do you mean by "shared patterns"? Care to provide a few examples?
People have been seeking biological reasons for cultural patterns for a very long time. All cultures have families (but the family structures are sometimes wildly different, not to mention the norms and values about what a "good" family should be and act like). All cultures have authority structures (which vary wildly). Humans smile (but some see a smile as something we do with our mouths and some that we smile with our eyes). Heck, growing up with one language can make it so that the person cannot distinguish the differences in spoken sound that other language speakers hear clearly. If hearing is all about biology, we should all hear the same thing, right? But we don't, our culturally based language deafens us to some things.
For most everything, I think the genetic argument fails at explaining social patterns. There is too much variation between cultures. There is too much variation within cultures for that matter. Look at how the US culture (especially the young) views gay people today. Our genes have not changed in 40 years, but our culture has, seemingly on it's way to a complete 180. Genes are pretty much a constant over these kinds of time frames, so how do they explain variation?
What I would say is that our biology produces our drives. Food, sex, etc. Universal drives. But the environment can produce different structures to fulfill those drives. A culture that develops on the plains versus the seaside versus a desert versus high mountains pushes people to different solutions to those drives over time. Solutions that each culture tends to view as "natural".
And don't forget that in addition to the physical environment, the social environment also affects those structures. Are there neighbors, or is the culture isolated? Is there a lot of trade between cultures, or very little? Regular conflicts, or none? Historically, this has driven cultural change, both in constructive and destructive ways.
So for something to be genetic in cause, it must be truly universal. We need to eat, so all societies have ways of producing and allocating food. From what I see, the variation is pretty large though, so I would put the majority of cause for the PATTERNS not on the genetics, but on other factors.