New study puts the hypothesis that cultural evolution “eating genetic evolution to breakfast”: we are evolving to become superorganisms. Covid-19 pandemic was an example.
And if the popular image of human evolution that sequence that begins with a monkey and ends in an erect modern human being – is it… wrong?
According to a new study in Bioscience magazine by researchers at the University of Maine, the evolution of our species is far from ending and could actually enter a new phase totally different: a transition to a form of form of more collective and cultural organizationsimilar to what is observed in superorganisms such as ant or hive colonies.
Tim Waring, an associate professor of economics and sustainability and one of the study’s authors, already in a 2021 that “the importance of culture is accelerating” and that could be the engine of an unprecedented evolutionary change.
The central idea is that humans are moving from essentially genetic organisms to integrated cultural groups, as if they were a single organism. This hypothesis, which has been explored by Waring and co -author Zachary Wood, argues that our social groups are increasingly interconnected and interdependentwith a level of cooperation that goes beyond individual interest.
Researchers point to as a recent example of collective behavior. In almost every country, populations have reacted as a kind of “national immune system”, cooperating in mass to protect society from the virus. For Waring, this is proof that the metaphor for “society as an organism” may no longer be just a metaphor, but an emerging reality. This evolution did not happen overnight: it was built throughout social and cultural development millennia.
The process will have started with the agriculturewhich allowed more organized and stable societies, and continued to create public infrastructures in antiquity, such as roads, aqueducts and sanitation systems. In recent centuries, advances have multiplied-from vaccines in the nineteenth century, which saved millions of lives to current genetic editing technologies that can correct lethal diseases shortly after birth. Each of these achievements did not result from genetic changes, but rather from cultural transmission and accumulated knowledge.
As Wood summarizes, quotes, “Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution to breakfast.”
For the authors, this capacity for cultural adaptation is today so powerful that it even prevents genetic problems. For example, more than three quarters of the world population wears glasses to correct vision and about one third of US births are by caesarean section – cultural and medical solutions that allow the survival of individuals who, under natural conditions, could not resist. This change, the authors say, is making the place where we live and the societies where we grow more determinants for our well-being than the genes we were born with.
But researchers warn that this transformation does not mean moral progress or superiority of some societies over others: evolution, whether genetic or cultural, can produce both beneficial solutions as brutal results. The goal, they argue, is to understand this process to avoid the most destructive aspects of evolution.
To test this hypothesis, the team is developing mathematical and computational models that allow measuring the speed with which humanity is moving from a species shaped mainly by genetics to another dominated by culture and social organization. If this trend continues, they conclude, the future of the species may depend more and more on the strength, cohesion and ability to adapt our societies.
