A Quote by Hal Whitehead

What I mean by it, and roughly what most biologists who talk about culture mean by it, is either behavior itself, or information that leads to behavior. Information that is picked up through social learning - so, from being with, watching, being taught by others. It's a way that individuals behave or get information about how they will behave that comes directly from the behavior of others.
That's how a nation's manners are going to be taught - from watching others' behavior and learning from the effects of that behavior.
It's crazy to me that in this world of electronic medical records Walmart has so much information about how we shop, but no one has that information about our health. Why can't my doctor say, 'Wow, Anne, based on your lifestyle and behavior, you're five years from being diabetic.' But I can go to Target, and they know exactly what I'm going to buy.
Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.
The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.
If we allow the United States to set the precedent that national borders don't matter when it comes to the protection of people's information, other countries are watching. They're paying attention to our examples and what is normative behavior in terms of dealing with digital information.
One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics.
We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.
I don't think in biology it's very controversial at all. Whether certain behavior is culture or is not culture is argued. I think virtually all biologists would agree that some animal behavior is culture. Bird song is a good example.
An important verity about knowledge is that the brain works most effectively with consciously retained information. We more easily remember what we want to recall later. When we feed our fourteen billion brain cells with information that will enrich us and help others, we are really learning to Think Big.
Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place.
Being honest means being forthright about information, no matter how painful disclosing that information might be.
I'm an information junkie, and I don't mean that in snobby way. I'm not talking about world information. I just like to know what's going on, especially pop-culturally. It interests me.
The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior - verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.
I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.
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