“Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast.”
Scrolling lazily through my news feed one morning, this sentence caught my attention. It felt so real, so true, so very now. I intuitively grasped what the authors of this statement, two researchers in ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Maine, were getting at.
Our behaviors, attitudes, values, decisions, aptitudes, preferences, and more, are so radically influenced (shaped) by culture that the old Darwinian notions of glacially paced genetic evolution and natural selection, while still unfolding, are essentially immaterial.
We’re changing a lot, and fast, because of cultural pressures, not our physical environment, or competition for food, or even responses to climate change.
Our survival, at this point, does not depend on physical adaptations (e.g., the ability to digest milk enzymes or withstand high altitudes) so much as the cultural ones that redefine survival-of-the-fittest.
“Human evolution seems to be changing gears,” said cultural evolution researcher Tim Waring.
“When we learn useful skills, institutions, or technologies from each other, we are inheriting adaptive cultural practices. On reviewing the evidence, we find that culture solves problems much more rapidly than genetic evolution. This suggests our species is in the middle of a great evolutionary transition.”
The researchers go on to make the point that as we invent things to make our lives easier, we reduce the pressure on genetic adaptation as the crux of survival. Which, I infer, increases our dependence on culture to solve problems and keep us thriving (or functioning, at least).
Implications for creativity
For writers and other creatives, culture is reshaping our worlds, on scales both small and large, almost faster than we can process the changes. Topping the list is AI—a massively influential cultural product that will continue to reshape how creative work is conceived, developed, and shared in every medium. Heck, AI is going to contribute to altering how our neurons fire, I believe—perhaps creating a feedback loop between culture and genetic evolution that defies the researchers’ theory.
Then there’s the reshaping of the publishing landscape itself, as the power arguably splits between the traditional elite cadre that still wields outsized influence over what gets bought and marketed to whom and the burgeoning self-publishing army that is fragmenting readers, buyers, followers, and influencers into thousands of literary sub-cultures.
Closer to home, for countless creatives, the publishing culture and its expectations of success around sales and “buzz” and other signifiers is a significant—and rising—source of stress, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and, dare I say it? Self-doubt. That’s the power of culture to affect the psyche.
Culture has an awful lot to say about picking winners and losers in creative disciplines—and defining the terms for them. We have a perfect right to decide for ourselves what success looks and feels like, but culture is big and noisy—and adapting is a hell of a lot easier than fighting back. I might go so far as to suggest that we all suffer from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, where we accept and seek to emulate the values of power players (e.g., those who make books into bestsellers, even bad books) and denigrate everyone else.
More broadly speaking, we can blame culture for sidelining the arts as respected professions when it’s so damn hard to make a living as a painter, dancer, writer, and so forth. Culture prioritizes monetary gain and the profit motive in general.
I’m pretty sure my brain has stopped evolving at this point, but I feel the effects of culture’s pressures and whims every single day. As well as all the “inventions” designed to help me that may actually be harmful (looking at you, social media; and you, late-stage capitalism).
So culture wins. Genetic evolution loses.
And where does that leave us poor humans, really?
My new novel TENT CITY, is getting some amazing early reviews!
“In Tent City, Amy L. Bernstein revives the twentieth-century idea novel…Compassionate yet unsparing, Tent City reminds us that the distance between security and survival is far smaller than most of us dare to imagine.” –Liza Libes, founder, Pens and Poison
If you haven’t read WRANGLING THE DOUBT MONSTER: FIGHTING FEARS, FINDING INSPIRATION, you’re missing out on a book that writers tell me they keep on their bedside table! For real!
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