Feedback
Feedback loops are everywhere in nature, especially when it comes to consciousness and the incentive structures that regulate our behavior in a society.
The quintessential book on the subject, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid makes the case that feedback loops are the key to understanding mathematics, art, and consciousness. More on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems here.
Self-reference and recursion, at the heart of the feedback loop, is also the central principle of the fractal. The "meta" prefix also refers to these.
Since feedback and recursion are necessary prerequisites to understanding metaculture, you should at least familiarize yourself with the concepts on the Feedback Wikipedia page, and if you really want to understand it then read Godel, Escher, Bach.
Feedback Loops, Nature and Nurture
The question of nature versus nurture is a prime example of how understanding feedback loops helps us understand important natural and philosophical concepts. How genes are expressed depends significantly on their environment. For example, you may have a gene that increases your likelihood of developing alcoholism, but it's unlikely to be expressed if you grow up in rural Afghanistan where the nearest bottle of booze is over a thousand kilometers away. That gene will have a much different impact on someone living in Las Vegas.[1][2][3]
Men and women share an X chromosome, but the presence of male and female hormones determines which of those genes are turned on and which are turned off. The resulting physiological differences are significant and obvious.
Vulnerability to various genetic diseases depends heavily on diet and other lifestyle choices.[4]
Pigmentation on Himalayan rabbits changes depending on the temperature of the climate it is raised in.[5]
The interplay between genes and environment is an elegant dance that results in traits that are more emergent than constructed. Genes tend to impact the probability of these traits more than providing a direct causal effect.
The nature versus nurture question is one of the biggest ongoing debates in all of philosophy, As with many such debates, advances in science have given us evidence-based answers to questions once thought to be subjective. As with most dichotomies in philosophy, the ultimate answer is both.