Culture Overtakes Genes in Human Evolution

From epic poetry to recreation reveals, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, people have probably the most advanced cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this tradition performed a task in shaping the species’ survival and unfold. But over the many years, tradition’s affect on evolution has develop into more and more clear. We don’t simply study behaviors, language, and shared guidelines and programs from our neighbors and elders, or go on data and applied sciences to our children. We construct on these versatile cultural attributes throughout generations.

Now some scientists declare in a new paper that tradition has truly overtaken genetics because the main power shaping human evolution, marking a significant shift. Timothy Waring, an economist on the University of Maine, and Zachary Wood, Waring’s ecologist colleague, argue that our cultural practices now unfold quicker than our genes can, permitting us to rapidly adapt and problem-solve. Biology merely can’t sustain.

“Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast,” stated Wood in a statement. “It’s not even close.”

The researchers relied on proof from anthropology, biology, and historical past to assist their argument. Genetic change, they are saying, takes generations—from many years to centuries—whereas cultural forces can affect evolution in a matter of days or years. Humans also can select which concepts, behaviors, and applied sciences to undertake, which theoretically quickens the unfold of profitable cultural variations.  Culture can be self-correcting within the short-term, not like genetic inheritance, one thing strengthened by digital tradition, the researchers argue. And whereas genes typically profit solely people, tradition can profit (or drawback) whole teams.

“Ask yourself this: What matters more for your personal life outcomes, the genes you are born with, or the country where you live?” Waring stated. “Today, your well-being is determined less and less by your personal biology and more and more by the cultural systems that surround you—your community, your nation, your technologies. And the importance of culture tends to grow over the long term because culture accumulates adaptive solutions more rapidly.”

Many cultural variations now truly pre-empt genetic ones. Waring and Wood supply the examples of eyeglasses and surgical procedure that enable an individual with imaginative and prescient issues to thrive regardless of their genetic shortcoming, or fertility remedies that enable somebody with reproductive limitations to construct a household and go on their genes. Especially in contrast with our prehistoric ancestors, an individual’s survival and longevity at this time are extra reliant on group-level cultural programs like drugs and hospitals, training and public well being programs, than particular person intelligence or genetics. 

Waring and Wood additionally recommend that as tradition turns into more and more necessary to human survival and copy, we are going to evolve to develop into much more group-oriented and group-dependent, doubtlessly altering the human situation fully. If this occurs, we are going to develop into societal “superorganisms” that adapt by cultural change, they recommend.

The researchers say their principle is testable and suggest a system for measuring how rapidly the transition from genetic to cultural evolution is happening, by way of each human phenotypes and health. They additionally supply mathematical fashions to assist describe this course of. The examine is a part of a broader effort by Waring and his group on the University of Maine’s Applied Cultural Evolution Laboratory. Researchers there have been finding out patterns in human evolution to foster constructive social change.

If Waring and Wood are proper, our future as a species could also be written much less in our DNA than in our collective legal guidelines, medical remedies, and memes.

Lead picture: Rumka vodki / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Posted on September 17, 2025

  Kristen French is an affiliate editor at Nautilus.