Man is endlessly inventive. But his greatest invention is non-invention, the skill of transmitting intact (完美无损的) and unchanged from one generation to the next the fundamental ways of doing things which he learned from the generation which preceded him.Children are conceived and reared, houses built, fish caught, and enemies killed in much the same way by most of the members of any society; and these patterns are maintained for relatively long periods of time. From the perspective of those in each new generation, and for the society as an enduring, historical entity ( 统一的), this process of cultural transmission yields enormous economy. Thanks to it, each generation need not rediscover at great cost in time and subject to great risk of failure, what those coming before have already learned. Not only is knowledge thus conserved,but the basis for communal life, resting on common information and understanding is thus established. Since all those in each generation receive more or less the same cultural heritage from the preceding generation, they can more easily relate to one another and more effectively coordinate their actions.
    The grand total of all the objects, ideas,knowledge, ways of doing things, habits values, and attitudes which each generation in a society passes on to the next is what the anthropologist often refers to as the culture of a group. The transmission of culture is man's substitute for the instincts(本能) whereby most other living creatures are equipped with the means for coping with their environment and relating to one another. Yet it is more flexible than instinct, and can grow; that is, it can store new information, infinitely more rapidly than the.process of mutation and biological evolution can enrich the instinctual storehouse of any other species.