The Significance of Culture Only culture accounts for the success of human beings. We create culture, but ‘ culture in turn creates us. We are no longer the helpless victims of the natural environment. We make our own social environment, inventing and sharing the rules and patterns of behaviour that shape our lives. We use our knowledge to modify the natural environment as well. Without a culture transmitted from the past, each new generation would have to solve the most elementary problems Of human existence over again. It would be obliged to devise a family system, to invent a language, to discover fire, to create the wheel, and so on. Cultural inventions enable us to be insulated from the cold of the Arctic, to travel in outer space, and to live in submarinesall with|ut any recourse to physical evolution. Unlike other animals, we can self-consciously adapt to our environments and […]