Where does culture come from?

I just finished writing a long comment in defense of a poorly-thought out throw-away line I had written in another comment on Jackie's blog. I don't want to revisit that too much but it got me thinking. Where do you think culture comes from most directly? It is a tough question because "culture" itself will need to be defined in any answer. I suggested that cut lure is a natural, extrinsic property of our biology, along the lines of what the evolutionary psychologists have been speculating. It is a purely hypothetical topic because I don't think any hypothesis or opinion on it is falsifiable (there never can be a control group for humanity). I have a few weak pieces of evidence that seem to suggest to me that culture (especially as it relates to issues of gender relations) is directly sourced in biology. I feel similarly about tool use and other basic behaviors. However I could easily be swayed by arguments that suggest culture is an ever evolving creation of humanity (like a house or a city or a non-profit organization) made with conceptual tools, and that participating in and influencing culture itself is not akin to using tools to build the house, city, or NPO.

Of course this gets a little bit into the meaning of "natural" too. Another word I've always had trouble with. Love and Rockets once sang a song with the following lyric, "You cannot go against nature, because when you do go against nature, it is a part of nature too". Calling something "natural" is to imply that it has not been interfered with by humans. This word and its use, by definition presumes that man is somehow an entity entirely divorced from nature, which is obviously absurd. The word "natural" has an absurdist meaning. Man is as much a part of nature as anything else, and every so-called "unnatural" action we may perform is in fact, just another part of the cycle of nature. Humans naturally build tools and use our big brains to do all kinds of things never seen before in nature. Army ants use their awesome powers of consumption to do things never before seen in nature before too (in their own way). It is the most wild act of anthropocentrism in my mind to suggest that the impact of achievements of humanity (subjectively good or bad) are somehow more or less significant than the changes wrought by any other creature on their particular environment. Everything needs to make changes to it's environment to survive, and all of it is natural.

Now I understand that this is mostly a philosophical point, but I just wanted to express it to perhaps better inform you on the root of my opinion that the origin of culture is biological. But maybe it isn't? For some reason I can't quite connect, but suspect is relevant is an observation I once heard was made by Carl Sagan. The observation was that there are essentially only three physical information storage media that exist in the world. The first is DNA, the second is the mind, and the third is a computer hard disk. The first information storage device encoded the creation if the second, and the second encoded the creation of the third. What kind of unimaginable information storage device will be encoded into existence by the computer? It makes me wonder if the Internet itself could be considered a new kind of mind? A very lonely mind. Wow, that was poetic and all but boy was it tangential. Sorry about that.

Unfortunately, since I won't be around to write any rebuttals to any comments I may get, feel free to assume I have answered in a certain way, just to keep the conversation going. ;)

Bedtime for me now.