Culture has influenced how humans survive and evolve for millenia. According to Waring and Wood, the combination of both culture and genes has fueled several key adaptations in humans such as reduced aggression, cooperative inclinations, collaborative abilities and the capacity for social learning.
Due to the group-orientated nature of culture, they also concluded that human evolution itself is becoming more group-oriented. In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.
Biological evolution, as demonstrated by Kimura and Goodenough, accelerated the birth of new species by favoring the genetic isolation of small populations. Cultural evolution had the opposite effect, erasing differences between related species and bringing them together.
We often associate culture with the tools and artifacts early hominids produce. These are in fact an expression of their culture, but more fundamentally represent ideas that were shared between peoples. Cultural & Biological Evolution: Cultural and biological evolution have influenced each other.
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission".
Our culture shapes the way we work and play, and it makes a difference in how we view ourselves and others. It affects our values—what we consider right and wrong. This is how the society we live in influences our choices. But our choices can also influence others and ultimately help shape our society.
Cultural capacities as adaptations: Culture, cultural transmission, and cultural evolution arise from genetically evolved psychological adaptations for acquiring ideas, beliefs, values, practices, mental models, and strategies from other individuals by observation and inference.
Cultural evolutionary theory has led to significant advances in our understanding of the effects of nonrandom mating, revealing that the transmission and dynamics of cultural traits can be sensitive to both phenotypic and environmental assorting (41).
Transfer of information in biological evolution is vertical and unidirectional, unlike cultural evolution where it is vertical and bidirectional, oblique or horizontal – mesh-like in other words. Biological evolution operates at the species level.
Modern Homo sapiens first appeared about 200,000 years ago; however, socio-cultural evolution only began about 10,000 years ago, when early hunter–gatherer societies began to change their simple forms of segmentary social differentiation during the so-called Neolithic revolution, which was mainly caused by the ...
Culture increasingly became the main way that human ancestors adapted to the environment. It allowed them to move out of the tropics and live in colder climates without developing biological adaptations to the cold. The ability of people to share their culture depends on language.
Biological evolution cannot be separated from cultural evolution. Cultural trends, population demographics and the differing use of technologies in human cultural groups will all play a role in the continuing evolution of the human species.