Human cultural evolution found to be just as slow as biological evolution
Jan 2020, phys.org
I can't read the paper for paywall, so I'm copying Bob Yirka's review at phys.org:
To compare the rate at which human culture changes to rates of biological evolution, the researchers assigned variables to characteristics of several cultural artifacts—whether or not guitars were the major instrument in the average song, for example, or how car features such as size and power change over time, or the way references are tagged in scientific papers. Similar metrics for measuring the speed of evolutionary change have already been identified and measured by multiple scientific studies. The researchers chose to use some of the most well-known, such as the study of finches on the Galapagos Islands and moths changing color during the early industrial period in England in response to soot-covered tree bark.
The comparative analysis involved applying the Haldanes metric—it showed that human culture changed at very nearly the same pace as biological evolution. The researchers even suggest that cultural artifacts in a given society could be viewed as similar to organisms living in a given environment. Artifacts such as scientific papers, they note, when carried into society at large, either survive and become a part of the culture, or they die—just like natural selection. They acknowledge that there are instances in both cultural and biological evolution that change very quickly, such as smartphones or finch beaks, but overall, the rates come out nearly evenly.I put this here to remind us that Kevin Kelly was saying the same thing in his 2010 book What Technology Wants, which said that Technology (as a cultural artifact) is an extension of the Tree of Life, and shares many similarities with a living organism under the pressures of natural selection.
image source: aero-mag
Notes
The pace of modern culture
Ben Lambert et al. Nature Human Behaviour (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0802-4
