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A seismic shift in the selection pressures acting on humans may have brought us to a major turning point in our evolutionary journey.
According to multiple teams of scientists, human culture – technology, medicine, and our remarkable collaborative problem-solving skills – may now be shaping human evolution more than environmental pressures and the limitations of our bodies.
This is because the solutions we invent to make our lives easier, from central heating to contact lenses, can solve biological challenges far faster than evolution can, reducing the pressure for genetic adaptation.
"Human evolution seems to be changing gears," said cultural evolution researcher Tim Waring of the University of Maine, who co-authored a study on the subject published in September 2025.
"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."
Evolution – the process by which living organisms gradually change through inherited genetic variation – is usually slow, unfolding over many generations. It's typically shaped by environmental pressures that select which genes are more likely to get passed down to future generations.
A well-known example in humans involves malaria. In tropical regions where malaria is common, sickle cell genes are also more frequent. That's because people who carry one copy of the sickle cell gene gain protection against malaria, making them more likely to survive and pass the gene to their children.
Throughout known human history, culture has also exerted selection pressures. The ability to digest lactose into adulthood likely arose in early pastoralist cultures. In the isolated French-Canadian population of Île aux Coudres, the age at which women first have babies has decreased over the course of 140 years – an evolutionary shift reflected at the genetic level.
Humans are still evolving, and environmental pressures still shape much of that evolution. But Waring and his co-author, evolutionary ecologist Zachary Wood of the University of Maine, have argued that culture has now become the dominant influence on those selection pressures.
"Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast," Wood said. "It's not even close."
That doesn't necessarily mean culture is producing new genetic adaptations. In many cases, it simply removes pressures that might once have shortened an individual's lifespan.
In ages past, mothers may have died in childbirth in cases where the baby was too large for the birth canal; now, cesarean sections allow such mothers to survive and perhaps even go on to have additional large babies in future.
There are now cures for diseases such as plague, but the pandemic that ravaged 14th-century Europe left a mark still discernible on the genomes of descendants of survivors.
Waring and Wood developed a testable theory proposing that because culture evolves far faster than genes, it could be driving a gradual shift in how human traits are shaped. They then developed quantitative ways to measure how quickly this shift might be unfolding.
Their results suggest that this transition may already be underway, and could even be accelerating.
"Ask yourself this: What matters more for your personal life outcomes, the genes you are born with, or the country where you live?" Waring said.
"Today, your wellbeing is determined less and less by your personal biology and more and more by the cultural systems that surround you – your community, your nation, your technologies. And the importance of culture tends to grow over the long term because culture accumulates adaptive solutions more rapidly."
Some researchers argue that this shift could have deeper consequences. If technology continues to shield humans from natural selection, it may also alter how evolution operates over the long term.
According to a paper published in June 2025, from an international team led by microbiologist Arthur Saniotis of Cihan University-Erbil in Iraq, humans have been so successful at reducing external selection pressures that we may have weakened our own evolutionary trajectory.
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He and his colleagues suggest that humanity may need various medical and technological enhancements to offset what they call the "deleterious effects to human phenotypes due to relaxed natural selection."
In other words, by using culture and technology to improve our lives, we may have created a feedback loop in which we must continue using them for survival.
It's a controversial idea, touching on concepts that echo the troubling history of eugenics, and raising difficult questions about how far humans should go in using technology to shape our own biology. However, the solution may not lie in technology at all.
"Cultural organization makes groups more cooperative and effective," Waring explained. "If cultural inheritance continues to dominate, our fates as individuals, and the future of our species, may increasingly hinge on the strength and adaptability of our societies."
Waring and Wood's paper was published in Bioscience.
English (US)