{"id":860743,"date":"2026-09-25T23:56:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T23:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860743\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T23:56:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T23:56:14","slug":"two-researchers-say-humans-are-in-the-midst-of-an-evolutionary-shift-like-never-before-but-not-everyone-is-convinced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860743\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Researchers Say Humans Are In the Midst of an Evolutionary Shift Like Never Before. But Not Everyone Is Convinced"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/a>AI-generated illustration. Credit: ZME Science\/Midjourney.<\/p>\n

Some scientists say humans may be entering a new phase of evolution, one in which culture is becoming more powerful than genes in shaping our survival and future. <\/p>\n

At the heart of that idea is a provocative idea from University of Maine researchers Timothy Waring and Zachary Wood. They argue that cultural systems, from medicine and education to technology and institutions, are increasingly doing the adaptive work that natural selection once did alone. <\/p>\n

But a subsequent peer-reviewed critique challenges whether this really amounts to an evolutionary transition comparable to the rise of multicellular life or eusocial insects.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n

Cultural Change Over Genetic Change<\/p>\n

In their 2025 paper published in BioScience<\/a>, Waring and Wood introduce a striking hypothesis: human beings may no longer be primarily evolving through genetic means, but increasingly through cultural inheritance. <\/p>\n

They argue that cultural systems, farming techniques, legal institutions, medicine and technology, can respond to many adaptive problems much more quickly than genetic evolution can.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman evolution seems to be changing gears,\u201d Waring said when the paper was released.<\/p>\n

\u201cCulture is driving evolution at a pace genes simply can\u2019t match,\u201d says Wood, underscoring the argument that technological and cultural advancements can adapt to environmental challenges in a fraction of the time it would take genetic mutations to do the same. <\/p>\n

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Take medical interventions like eyeglasses or cesarean sections. These are cultural solutions that can change the consequences of biological variation without waiting for genetic mutations to spread through a population. Waring and Wood argue that such adaptations can therefore \u201cpreempt\u201d genetic evolution. Their paper gives cesarean sections and reproductive medicine as examples in which cultural practices may alter or relax genetic selection.<\/p>\n

\"Diagram <\/a>A coupled evolutionary transition in inheritance and individuality caused by the role of culture in long-term human evolution is characterized by a positive feedback between the power of culturally organized groups and the adaptive capacity of culture relative to genetic evolution. Credit: Waring and Wood.<\/p>\n

The shift from genetic to cultural evolution may not be as sudden or dramatic as flipping a switch. It\u2019s a gradual process that has been ongoing for thousands of years. From the rise of agriculture to the development of modern institutions, culture has been a major driving force in human history.<\/p>\n

But what Waring and Wood are proposing is that this trend is accelerating \u2014 so much so that culturally inherited solutions increasingly intervene before genetic adaptation has the opportunity to do so.<\/p>\n

The Superorganism Claim<\/p>\n

\"Diagram <\/a>Cultural inheritance is not parallel or analogous to genetic inheritance. While genetic material is physically replicated and directly transmitted, cultural memory is neither replicated nor transmitted. Instead cultural traits are transmitted via their influence on the observable phenotype (e.g. behavior), and active processes of inference and imitation on the part of the learner. Credit: Waring and Wood.<\/p>\n

The boldest part of Waring and Wood\u2019s argument is that humans may be moving toward something resembling a cultural \u201csuperorganism.\u201d <\/p>\n

As people become increasingly dependent on shared institutions, technologies and systems of cooperation, they suggest that the group could become a more important unit of adaptation. In that sense, human societies might begin to resemble highly integrated biological collectives such as ant or bee colonies, where survival depends heavily on the functioning of the whole. <\/p>\n

While the concept of human cultural evolution isn\u2019t entirely new, the idea that we are witnessing something that changes the very nature of what it means to be human is far more ambitious.<\/p>\n

Waring and Wood suggest that the shift in inheritance may be coupled with a change in human individuality. Basically, much like how formerly independent cells became integrated into multicellular organisms, they propose that culturally organized human groups could acquire an increasingly important evolutionary role.<\/p>\n

Human societies certainly display some suggestive features: extensive cooperation among non-relatives, elaborate divisions of labour, specialized institutions and dependence on shared infrastructure. The BioScience paper argues that an increasing fraction of human life is mediated by culturally evolved group-level practices and technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But whether this makes a society an evolutionary \u201cindividual\u201d is exactly where the scientific disagreement begins.<\/p>\n

In October 2025, another researcher, Nejad Kourki<\/a>, published a peer-reviewed critique of attempts to apply the evolutionary-transitions-in-individuality framework to human societies. His central objection is that biological evolutionary transition in individuality (ETIs) don\u2019t merely involve cooperation, specialization or dependence. The newly formed collective also becomes an entity that reproduces and participates in natural selection at the higher level. Human societies, he argues, generally do not possess this autonomous group-level reproduction.<\/p>\n

On that view, a nation, institution or society might behave in organism-like ways without literally becoming an evolutionary individual analogous to a multicellular animal or an ant colony.<\/p>\n

The Future of Human Evolution: A Cultural Superorganism?<\/p>\n

Waring and Wood are aware of this longstanding problem. Their hypothesis attempts to sidestep it by arguing that humans are undergoing a special transition in both inheritance and individuality. Cultural inheritance can accumulate adaptive information at the group level even without the sort of genetic group selection found in classic biological transitions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may be entering a future where cultural evolution is so advanced that it starts to control not just the environment we live in, but the very way we reproduce and evolve,\u201d says Waring. <\/p>\n

While this is still being debated, the implications the duo\u2019s hypothesis are far-reaching. If human survival and well-being increasingly depend on cultural systems around us, what happens to individual genetic evolution?<\/p>\n

The researchers envision a possible long-term trajectory in which culture assumes an ever larger role in determining human outcomes. Genetic engineering and assisted reproductive technologies already show one way cultural institutions can directly intervene in biological reproduction, although these technologies themselves depend on highly specialized scientific and social infrastructure.<\/p>\n

But none of this demonstrates that humanity is destined to become a superorganism. Even Waring and Wood explicitly describe the future portion of their proposal as speculative and say that whether such a transition will ever be completed is beyond present scientific ability. They also stress that nothing about human evolution makes the outcome inevitable.<\/p>\n

But Nejad Kourki\u2019s view is that the ETI framework itself may simply be the wrong explanatory tool for sociocultural change, even if human history contains genuine \u201cmajor transitions\u201d in organization, technology and cooperation.<\/p>\n

No One Knows What Comes Next<\/p>\n

Waring and Wood originally outlined a programme for testing their hypothesis quantitatively. Their proposed measures ask, among other things, how much heritable phenotypic variation is increasingly attributable to culture rather than genes and how much individual evolutionary success depends on group-level systems.<\/p>\n

That empirical phase remains a work in progress. During a 2026 fellowship<\/a> at the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Waring described a project aimed at developing formal models, testing the theory against deep-time and modern datasets, and devising unbiased estimates of those transition metrics. His accompanying talk acknowledged that empirical research on human evolutionary transitions remains limited.<\/p>\n

This is important because many observations invoked by the theory (growing social complexity, dependence on medicine, falling fertility, expanding institutions) can have multiple explanations. Showing that these trends occur is not, by itself, enough to establish that they are manifestations of one overarching evolutionary transition. The distinctive predictions of ETII still need to outperform competing explanations.<\/p>\n

Waring and Wood also caution that evolutionary language should not be confused with moral progress. Their paper explicitly rejects treating technologically richer nation-states as \u201cmore evolved\u201d or a hypothetical cultural superorganism as ethically superior.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not suggesting that wealthier societies with better technology are \u2018better\u2019 than others,\u201d says Wood. \u201cCulture evolves in both positive and negative directions, and it is important not to assume that this transition will always result in a more just or more equitable society.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ultimately, the theory remains intriguing for the same reason it remains unsettled. Culture clearly changes the environments in which human genes succeed or fail, and human lives depend to an extraordinary degree on knowledge and institutions inherited from other people.<\/p>\n

What is not yet settled is whether those facts mark a true transition in evolutionary individuality \u2014 or whether the superorganism is a useful metaphor being asked to do too much biological work.<\/p>\n

Updated September 25, 2026: This article was originally published on September 19, 2025. It has been revised to include a subsequent peer-reviewed critique of applying evolutionary-transition theory to human societies, the status of ongoing efforts to test the hypothesis empirically, and additional context on comparisons between cultural and biological rates of change.<\/p>\n


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