Demographics or culture?

Two new links, at right, shall allow our readers to face off on this meaningless question: which is more definitive of a place, demographics or culture? Assumptions in the query include culture existing not as a product of a mixture of people--that is, demographics--but as a thing apart, with a life of its own; that all American places, large and small, have a culture to speak of; that anyone views demographics as a necessary tool for analysis; that areas outside of the 50 largest cities deserve to live, either in our consciousnesses, or in fact.

Can we learn anything from looking at population data, or is it all just one damn set of numbers after another?