We're on a road to nowhere: Culture and adaptation to the environment are driving human evolution, but the destination of this journey is unpredictable.

Abstract

It is tempting to believe that humans, owing to their technological prowess, have elevated themselves above the laws of biology and escaped natural selection. Indeed, some think that humans have stopped evolving at all. Another view holds that Homo sapiens has not isolated itself from the influences of the physical and biological world but that our species is just a special, extreme case of niche constructors. This view is based on the so‐called Niche Construction Theory, a development within evolutionary biology to describe how humans—and many other organisms—modify their environment—or niche—in a way that alters environmental pressures and therefore natural selection. Thus, rather adapting to a pre‐existing environment, “organisms drive environmental change and organism‐modified environments subsequently select organisms” (https://synergy.st-andrews.ac.uk/niche/niche-construction-and-evolution/) (Box 1). ### Culture‐driven evolution “[All] organisms adapt to their environment, and in humans much of our environment is defined by our culture. Hence, cultural change can actually spur on adaptive evolution in humans”, wrote evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA. [1]. Following this argument, culture, social learning and technology have not replaced biological adaptation. Rather, human evolution is driven by the environmental conditions we created ourselves through culture, a process that has been accelerating since the beginning of agriculture and urban civilization. In other words, cultural niche construction is a major cause of recent human evolution. However, there are other factors than natural selection, such as genetic drift and gene flow, that influence human evolution [1]. Nonetheless, even the effects of these random, non‐adaptive forces on human genetic variation are somehow altered by cultural trends, namely increased urbanization and greater mobility. As a consequence, drift is diminishing and gene flow is increasing, a process that would eventually culminate into a single “species‐wide” gene pool characterized by high levels of genetic variation. > [C]ulture, …