If behavior is an adaptation to the environment, then activity is an adaptation of the environment to one’s needs. The “needs trap” meant that proto-humans now had to again and again transform the environment, including their own organisms and behavior patterns, into means of self-reproduction based on the transmission and processing of social information. After this critical point was passed, the degree of adaptation to the environment, the degree to which the needs of proto-humans were satisfied, was determined not only by their animal instincts but also by the sociality and abstractness of their actions. Benjamin Schumacher noted that information is a paradox: on the one hand it is material, and on the other hand it is abstract. If we want to share information, we must give it the physical form of a signal—sound, light, electricity, etc. However, information is abstract in content: the messages transmitted by signals are not identical to the signals themselves (Schumacher 2015, p. 4).

As an elementary form of culture, meaning is social information in action, that is, an action (and its result) that has social, material and abstract properties. This active gist of culture is missing in most of its definitions, here is an example: “…Culture is information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such as imitation, teaching, or language” (Mesoudi 2011, pp. 2-3). In fact, culture cannot be reduced to information and methods of its transmission; culture is the aggregate of human actions and their results. Unlike genes, which are bound to organisms, meanings go beyond humans: they can exist not only in bodies, but also in events. However, going beyond humans, meanings can only exist in their actions. They are reproduced in human activity just as genes are reproduced in a living organism.

The self-reproduction of man as a cultural being is based on the evolution of all three aspects of human activity: abstract, social and material.

(1) The evolution of the abstract side of activity consists in the development of thinking (intelligence or reason), i.e. complex types of adaptation based on the repetition and specialization of signals (stimuli) and an enlargement of the brain. From this side, meaning is a reflection (description, mediation) of the immediate environment in the mind and activity of an animal, that is, an abstract action.

Human thinking evolved as an abstract act, but it remains a deeply emotional act rooted in animal instincts. Human activities are meaningful—they are based on gathering, sorting and processing information, accumulating knowledge and skills (experience), applying experience to solve problems. Collectively, this is called reason or intellect. But intelligence is only the tip of a vast array of dumb processes that grow out of cultural learning (cf. Henrich 2016, p. 12). We call practices those behaviors that are based on learning, such as morals, mores, techniques, customs, etc. Thousands and tens of thousands of generations of humans have produced practices that have proven to be “smarter” than the intelligence of any individual or even a group. Natural evolution affects simple processes—instincts—that allow animals to adapt to a complex natural environment. Cultural evolution also affects simple processes—practices—that allow humans to adapt to their complex natural and artificial environments. Instincts, practices and intelligence are three basic types of behavioral acts, the distinction between which goes back to the works of Darwin (Krushinsky 1986, p. 134; Zorina and Smirnova 2006, p. 42).