The transmission of preferences, ideas, beliefs, and norms of behavior as a result of an interaction between biological predispositions and social interaction between and within generations.
In his landmark work, The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins describes living things as “survival machines” that do the work of our inherited genetic material (Dawkins 2006). Under this concept, these survival machines simply seek to survive and reproduce, a process that leads to the primary motivations of all living things, human, or otherwise.
If we are, as Dawkins says, merely survival machines for our genetic material, it suggests that we are not unique in any real way. However, that seems not to be the case, an admission that Dawkins makes freely. For Dawkins, “most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: culture” (Dawkins 2006, p. 189).
From a sociological perspective.
