Learn about the effects of human culture on human evolution in this article at Seed Magazine. [1] Yes, it appears to be a two-way street; biological evolution affects human culture and human culture affects human biological evolution. This article includes a detailed analysis of an oft-cited example: the spread of genes for lactose tolerance (the ability to digest milk products) in Europe (though not in Asia or Africa).
The take-home argument is that we didn’t stop evolving when mass culture blossomed. “Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.” In fact, there is new evidence that culture is propelling human evolution at breakneck speed. According to John Hawks, “Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.”
Consider, also, this quote from Spencer Wells, director of National Geographic’s Genographic Project: [2]
“The biggest change in our lifestyle as a species has happened in the past 10,000 years,” Wells says. “We spent most of the past million or so years of evolution living as hunter-gatherers, hunting game on the African savannas, or gathering shellfish on the coast, gradually moving out to Eurasia. Then, suddenly, in the past 10,000 years, we become a species that settles down. The diversity of food sources drops precipitously from over 100 in the hunter-gatherer diet to fewer than 10 in the average agricultural diet. And then, of course, you build up the population densities and disease takes off.”
Click here [3]for a previous DI post on this topic (linking to a Scientific American article).
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