There are several issues with the central argument of this article. The most fundamental is that the author never actually defines what constitutes culture. And because no such definition is offered, culture serves as a conceptual substitute for so many different things in this article: evolution, biology, physics, and economics, among others. The author credits so many things to culture and doesn't say what culture is -- essentially a very clever way of allowing culture to be anything and everything.



The statement 'humans are creatures of their own making' is quite astounding. I wonder if the author would claim that culture is also responsible for our basic needs: to eat food, to drink water, to breathe oxygen, to get sleep, to expel waste. All of these fundamental characteristics -- without which culture in any normal understanding of the term cannot exist -- were established by distant ancestors in the evolutionary tree of life. Culture is a product of biology and physics in action, as is the totality of human life. In the more local chain of causation, it's a product of geographical and ecological circumstances.



Finally, the author is very selective in choosing which academic studies to cite. The author cites a few things that could be contorted to support this particular position and ignores 99% of the evidence set, which says that the human brain evolved as an adaptation to external factors. These factors could include the use of basic tools, cooking food, environmental pressure, and competition with other animals. The full reasons for encephalization are still being worked out, but they have virtually nothing to do with an amorphous concept like 'culture.'