Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics | Hacker News Reader

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics

phys.org

85 pointspseudolus29 comments

So the headline seems to be false or at least hyperbolical. Probably for the clicks. The first line says: "...culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics". So culture doesn't drive evolution, it drives adaptation. Perhaps this slows down genetic change or influences it in another way, and hence evolution (my interpretation), but I don't see how it follows that it drives evolution more than genetics.

Pretty sure I encountered a similar idea when reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which was written 45 years ago.

In fact, Dawkins coined the word meme in that book, referring to a unit of culture which propagates through imitation and repetition. He clearly recognized the tremendous influence memes can have on the behavior of descendants outside of any genetic factors:

“But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.”

I always thought the notion that genetics drives anything is mistaken.

Genes are a unit of selection, but even before culture it was the environment which drives evolution, genes just store information. To me the idea that genes drive anything sounds like saying that my hard disk controls my word processor. Despite software being instantiated in hardware, or culture being in some sense instantiated in genes, it's still the software or the culture that is the unit of control and it reconfigures its substrate.

Seems perfectly possible that humans at some point replace genes altogether through some method of engineering and then it should be obvious that they weren't really doing anything.

To use your analogy, consider that the hard drive has to store some “repertoire of responses,” some code snippets, that your control unit can pick from in order to solve the problem in front of it.

It still very much matters what is and is not stored on that hard drive, even if the bulk of the lifting is done by the control unit and even if (in humans’ case) the control unit can be extremely creative in combining existing snippets into new responses.

Is it unreasonable to say that bacteria, spiders, and frogs are genetically driven to exhibit certain behaviors? If not, why should the line be cut at humans?

Replacing a thing with something else that performs the same function by other means does not demonstrate that the first thing was doing nothing.

I was just about to make that comment. Faulty reasoning on the part of the commenter.

I wasn't saying that genes do nothing. If they did nothing, they probably wouldn't exist. I said they're a store of information, but not a driver of behavior. They don't exercise any control in the way that is commonly associated with gene-centric views is my argument.

If culture or technology at some point completely replaces genetics in a literal sense, I don't think it's even necessarily required to reproduce any of the current functions of genes at all.

> If culture or technology at some point completely replaces genetics in a literal sense, I don't think it's even necessarily required to reproduce any of the current functions of genes at all.

Now that you have clarified that genes are a store of information, this passage seems to imply that genes could be replaced in a way that makes no use of a store of the sort of information genes store.

I can't prove it, but I very much doubt that is possible, unless you mean specifically that whatever information store this replacement needs is not precisely identical with that in a genome - but that is trivially true, given that no two genomes are identical in all respects.

Identity arguments are the hobgoblin of the philosophy of the mind, IMHO, keeping one of its feet chained to its vitalist past through tendentious modal arguments about concievability - but I digress.

Culture also stores information.

Culture is just evolution with new substrates.

That is true, however some previously acquired genetic mutation, that was insignificant to organisms survival or reproduction, may provide advantage (or disadvantage) when environment changes.

It's more complicated ... it's "multifactorial". To expand on it, I'll quote from a short review of 'Behave', by the inimitable Robert Sapolsky, that I wrote on a previous thread[1]:

The most important idea in the book: "when you explain a behaviour with one of the various disciplines [biology, psychology, culture, et al], you are implicitly invoking all the disciplines [...] A 'neurobiological' or 'genetic' or 'developmental' explanation for a behaviour is just a shorthand for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective."

Six hundred pages into the book, Sapolsky restates the central thesis: the biology of human behaviours that interest us, in all cases, is "multifactorial". What does it mean? There's a dizzying array of factors that influence our behaviour; too many enumerate, but a quick few: blood glucose levels; the socio-economic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid [a key stress-signaller] levels; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, and so on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25559890

Nevertheless, these factors are separable, and it is necessary to distinguish between them if we are to understand, in detail, how they work together. Here, by equivocating and muddying the waters over the term 'evolution', broadening it to encompass learned methods of coping and thriving, the authors are impeding a clear understanding of how the factors work together.

From the perspective of Richard Dawkins / The Selfish Gene, there are two distinct incarnations of evolution, driven by the same force (natural selection).

Genetic; unit of selection is the gene, substrate is DNA: responsible for our biological development; our eyesight, innate cognitive capacity, etc. Responsible also for the past ~4 billion years of exponential growth in biological complexity. Survival of the gene drives natural selection, so it requires embodied survival.

Memetic; unit of selection is the idea/“meme”, substrate is our brains: responsible for civilization, invention, cultural development. Responsible for the last ~20,000 years (or within that order of magnitude) of the development of culture, science, and civilization. Survival of the idea is what drives natural selection, not of the biological phenotype/person/brain carrying it.

The first humans would have been the survivors and thrivers in the long-established pre-human enviroment from which they arose.

That wouldn't have been easy and the incredible amount of time it would take can be calculated but is still difficult to fathom.

Seems like "survival of the fittest" could have been very fitting at the time, and there would be insignificant diversity in genetics and culture to begin with, compared to today.

Once humans come along, then starts another huge period of gradual change in humanity itself.

What could lead to greater diversity than gradual isolation of cultures in highly disparate environments for incredible amounts of time?

Especially when humans are self-selecting for environment and culture more so than other earthlings by orders of magnitude.

And time can do so much.

So memes > genes?

Assuming there is no free will, one can consider genetics as the internal stochastic engine of human behavior, and culture as ‘all external stochastic inputs’.

Clearly there are more external inputs than internal, due to the unbounded complexity of external interactions.

This headline is is like saying drivers drive cars more than gas does. Which is nonsense.

They mean cultural evolution helps us adapt faster than genetic evolution. Which... we didn't need research for, it's blatantly obvious and easy to derive.

Isn't this more about epigenetics? Your environment does control how the future generations evolve.

What fascinates me is how living things can practically "will" a gene mutation that would help the offsprings adapt to a changing environment, the most vivid example of that being Darwin's finches:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2017/09/06/how-do...

Great book on the topic of culture-gene coevolution: “The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter” by Joseph Henrich.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "The Secret of Our Success" by Joseph Henrich yet. It discusses this line of research in more detail, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Just an opinion -- "I'm surprised that no one ..." is becoming a cliche on HN and could be avoided. :-)

This is super obvious to anybody comparing fertility rates over time and between different ethnic and religious groups.

It is ironic that most cultures believe that genetics drive human evolution.

Humour aside, I don't think this is accurate. I recall reading many years ago that geneticists were debating whether natural or sexual selection were bigger drivers of speciation, and that sexual was starting to win out. This was something like 15 years ago, so my memory likely changed details on me.

Are you referring to this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway

> Culture, however, [helps people adjust to their environment] more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.

But genes are the hardware upon which culture is written.

I don't think they're saying this isn't true. The primary takeaway from this study, for me, is that when a species gains the necessary "hardware" to create and propogate culture, it hits a tipping point, and then the culture becomes the primary force for adaption.

I think certain birds and cetaceans are near this cusp, but their "culture" may be very difficult to understand or study especially as it pertains to adaptibility, with perhaps the exception of crows.

Unfalsifiable nonsense.

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