ABSTRACT
Highly selective construction of culture occurs because, like other creatures, we have brains that respond sensitively to environmental variations that bear on our ability to avoid predation and exploitation, eat well reliably, and reproduce. Employment cultures, party cultures, and some school cultures often come with more significant consequences for departures from dress norms. The absence of consequences for dress variations in public school cultures, by contrast, creates much dress variation. Because not wearing clothes brings with it significant consequences everywhere outside of nudist camps, however, everyone wears clothes. Cultures shape the behavior and ideas of the people born into them in powerful ways. But cultures don't consist of static things. Some things are not really bad or good, except in particular circumstances or due to idiosyncratic whim, so beyond those concerns it doesn't matter whether we learn them or not. Things that we could learn and did learn are things that have a large balance of good-to-bad consequences.
