(1) Culture, generically speaking, is the distinctive feature of human as opposed to animal life, and forms part of the subject-matter of so-called philosophical anthropology. It denotes the whole realm of thought and behaviour whose patterns are not genetically, but socially, transmitted. Thus while the social animals interact (even when their behaviour is learnt) in more or less rigid, species-determined ways, human societies, over and above whatever ‘natural’ endowment their common characteristics may indicate, show almost infinite variability. Animal behaviour is explicable directly in terms of its biological function; but, while human behaviour may have a biological foundation (humanity being an animal species), it is not clear that it invariably has a biological explanation (as, for example, sociobiology postulates).