[member="Countess Xyhn"]
1: Fair enough.
2: I humbly disagree with you.
I've compiled a list, from universities such as TAMU (Texas A & M) and UMN (University of Minnesota) that describes culture. And while they all differ, it shows that they can applied to any species, even one such as Reapers and thus your species, as it goes towards the development of the species in a way that is exclusive from genes.
- Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving (TAMU).
- Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people (TAMU).
- Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning (TAMU).
- A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next (TAMU).
- Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions (TAMU).
- Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action (TAMU).
- Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation (TAMU).
- Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another (TAMU).
- For the purposes of the Intercultural Studies Project, culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group (UMN)
Now, if you are willing to admit that your species has no shared behavioral traits (which you explicitly mention that they do), interactions, cognitive constructs, effective and grouped understanding, no cumulative deposition of knowledge, no experience, no values, no attitudes, no universal meanings or purpose, no notions of times or roles, no spatial relations, no concepts of the universe; then I am willing to admit that this species has no culture. And if you admit this, then I can't accept your species as Sentient and will require you to change it to Non-Sentient. Otherwise, you will need to remove the line that says "Voidstalkers do not have culture" and replace it with a sentence of similar length, noting that they do in fact have a culture.
Otherwise, the submission will be denied as it stands.
