Has Culture Overtaken Genes in Human Evolution?

From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture played a role in shaping the species’ survival and spread. But over the decades, culture’s influence on evolution has become increasingly clear. We don’t just learn behaviors, language, and shared rules and systems from our neighbors and elders, or pass on knowledge and technologies to our kids. We build on these flexible cultural attributes across generations.

Now some scientists claim in a new paper that culture has actually overtaken genetics as the leading force shaping human evolution, marking a major shift. Timothy Waring, an economist at the University of Maine, and Zachary Wood, Waring’s ecologist colleague, argue that our cultural practices now spread faster than our genes can, allowing us to quickly adapt and problem-solve. Biology simply can’t keep up.

“Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast,” said Wood in a statement. “It’s not even close.”

Many cultural adaptations now actually pre-empt genetic ones. Waring and Wood offer the examples of eyeglasses and surgery that allow a person with vision problems to thrive despite their genetic shortcoming, or fertility treatments that allow someone with reproductive limitations to build a family and pass on their genes. Especially compared with our prehistoric ancestors, a person’s survival and longevity today are more reliant on group-level cultural systems like medicine and hospitals, education and public health systems, than individual intelligence or genetics. 

Waring and Wood also suggest that as culture becomes increasingly important to human survival and reproduction, we will evolve to become even more group-oriented and group-dependent, potentially changing the human condition entirely. If this happens, we will become societal “superorganisms” that adapt through cultural change, they suggest.

The researchers say their theory is testable and propose a system for measuring how quickly the transition from genetic to cultural evolution is occurring, in terms of both human phenotypes and fitness. They also offer mathematical models to help describe this process. The study is part of a broader effort by Waring and his team at the University of Maine’s Applied Cultural Evolution Laboratory. Researchers there have been studying patterns in human evolution to foster positive social change.

If Waring and Wood are right, our destiny as a species may be written less in our DNA than in our collective laws, medical treatments, and memes.

Lead image: Rumka vodki / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Posted on September 17, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.