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Looking back at Human Biocultural and Social Evolution

CONCEPTS OF EVOLUTION

1.Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Diversity Paradox.

2.Motoo Kimura (1924-1994): Smaller Populations Evolve Faster.
3.Ursula Goodenough (1943- ): Nature Plays a High-Risk Game.
4.Herbert Wells (1866-1946): Varieties of Human Experience.
5.Richard Dawkins (1941- ): Genes and Memes.
6. Svante Pääbo (1955- ): Cousins in the Cave.

1. Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The Diversity Paradox.

Until recently, evolution was considered to be a biological process, driven by the slowly acting
forces of speciation and extinction. Speciation is the birth of new species by splitting of an
existing species into genetically isolated populations that do not interbreed. Extinction is the
disappearance of a species that dies out without leaving descendants. Our first character,
Charles Darwin, published his great work, The Origin of Species, in 1859. He demonstrated, with
a wealth of evidence, from observations of species in the wild and from the effects of selective
breeding of plants and animals, that natural selection is [a] powerful force driving evolution.
His book made a stronger statement, that natural selection is [the] cause of evolution. The
difference between [a] and [the] was hardly noticed by the readers of his book. His theory
triumphed and became for a hundred years the view of evolution accepted by almost all
biologists and by the majority of educated people. (Natural selection is the differential survival
and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of
evolution, the change in the heritable trait characteristic of a population over generations. )
(In genetics, the phenotype is the set of observable characteristics or traits of an organism. The
term covers the organism's morphology or physical form and structure, its developmental
processes, its biochemical and physiological properties, its behavior, and the products of
behavior)

Darwin himself was well aware that nature contains many mysteries that his theory does not
easily explain. There is a mismatch between the real world, with its amazing richness of diverse
species, many of them obviously burdened with superfluous flowers and feathers, and the
theoretical world of Darwinian evolution in which only the fittest should survive. Naively, we
should expect Darwinian evolution to result in a world with a much smaller number of species,
each selected by superior fitness to be a winner in the game of survival. All through his life,
Darwin was puzzled by the abundance of weird and wonderful species that look like losers but
still survive. I call this abundance the diversity paradox. If only the fittest survive, we should
expect to find a few hundred superbly fit species adapted to live in various habitats. Darwin
looked at the real world and found an extravagant display of species, with a great diversity of
superficial differences. He saw elaborate structures that are expensive to maintain. The theory
of evolution by natural selection should tend to keep creatures plain and simple, but nature
appears to prefer structures that are elegant and complicated.

Darwin understood that sexual reproduction is a powerful cause of diversity of species. For a
sexual species to exist and survive, it is advantageous to have distinctive ornamentation of
one sex, usually the male, and a strong preference of the other sex for a mate with that
particular ornament. The mating system causes the population possessing it to be genetically
isolated from other related populations. The mating system becomes a genetic barrier,
creating a new species and maintaining its identity. A species like the bird of paradise with an
elaborate mating system may derive enough advantage from the uniqueness of the system
to pay for the cost of the feathers. Another cause of diversity of species is symbiosis, enabling
two or more species to help each other to survive or to reproduce. A conspicuous example of
symbiosis leading to diversity is the simultaneous evolution of flowering plants and insects.
Another example is the coral reef and the reef-fish. Darwin concluded that sexual selection
and symbiotic coevolution would explain the overall diversity of natural ecologies. But he had
no hard evidence to justify this conclusion. We now know that he was mistaken. Another cause
of diversity, of which he had no conception, also plays a dominant role in natural evolution.
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Darwin knew nothing of genes. He was unaware of the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian
monk who worked in his monastery garden and did experiments on the inheritance of pod-
color in peas. Mendel discovered that heritable traits such as pod-color are inherited in
discrete packages which he called genes. Any act of sexual reproduction of two parents with
different genes results in offspring with a random distribution of the parental genes. Heredity in
any population is a random process, resulting in a redistribution of genes between parents
and offspring. The numbers of genes of various types are maintained on the average from
generation to generation, but the numbers in each individual offspring are random. Mendel
made this discovery and published it in the journal of the Brünn Natural History Society, only
seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Mendel had read Darwin's book, but
Darwin never read Mendel's paper. In 1866, the year when Mendel's paper was published,
Darwin did a very similar experiment, using snap-dragons instead of peas, and testing the
inheritance of flower-shape instead of pod-color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of
plants, and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation.
Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of the mathematics of statistical variations. He used
only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the ratio of normal to star-
shaped offspring. This result did not suggest any clear picture of the way flower-shapes are
inherited. He stopped the experiment and explored the question no further. Darwin did not
understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a statistically significant result.
Mendel understood statistics. His sample was sixty-four times larger than Darwin's, so that his
statistical uncertainty was eight times smaller. He used 8023 plants.

Mendel's essential insight was to see that sexual reproduction is a system for introducing
randomness into inheritance. In peas as in humans, inheritance is carried by genes that are
handed down from parents to offspring. His simple theory of inheritance carried by genes
predicted a ratio of three between green and yellow pods in the third generation. He found
a ratio of 3.01 with the big sample. This gave him confidence that the theory was correct. His
experiment required immense patience, continuing for eight years with meticulous attention
to detail. Every plant was carefully isolated to prevent any intruding bee from causing an
unintended fertilization. A monastery garden was an ideal place for such experiments.
Unfortunately, his experiments ended when his monastic order promoted him to the rank of
abbot. Obedient to his vows, he ceased to be an explorer and became an administrator. His
life-work lay hidden in an obscure German-language journal in Brünn, the city that later
became Brno and is now in the Czech Republic.

The idea of genes remained generally unknown to biologists until twenty years after Darwin's
death. Darwin imagined various ways of mixing inherited traits of parents and distributing them
to offspring, but he never imagined genes. Without the concept of genes, it was impossible
for him to calculate correctly the rates of speciation and extinction in any natural population.
He never attempted such calculations. If he had made such calculations with a model of
inheritance based on mixing, he would have got drastically wrong answers. He had the good
sense not to make such calculations without a verified model of inheritance. Without
experimental knowledge of the statistics of inheritance, he had no way to guess reliably how
effective natural selection could be in creating new species and exterminating old ones.

2. Motoo Kimura (1924-1994). Smaller Populations Evolve Faster.

Motoo Kimura, author of the book, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, published in
1983, more than a hundred years after Darwin's masterpiece. Kimura was a Japanese
geneticist who came as a student to work with Sewall Wright at the University of Wisconsin.
Sewall Wright was one of the biologists who explored the evolutionary implications of Mendel's
discovery after Mendel's paper was rediscovered in 1900. Wright understood that the
inheritance of genes would cause a fundamental randomness in all evolutionary processes.
The phenomenon of randomness in evolution was called Genetic Drift. Kimura came to
Wisconsin to learn about Genetic Drift, and then returned to Japan. He built Genetic Drift into
a mathematical theory which he called the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.
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After the discovery of the structure of DNA molecules by Crick and Watson in 1953, Kimura
knew that genes are molecules, carrying genetic information in a simple code. His theory
applied only to evolution driven by the statistical inheritance of molecules. He called it the
Neutral Theory because it introduced Genetic Drift as a driving force of evolution independent
of natural selection.

Kimura did not prove that Darwin's theory was wrong. He proved that Darwin's theory was
incomplete. Darwin missed Genetic Drift, which was sometimes important and sometimes
unimportant. The evolutionary effects of natural selection are generally independent of the
size of the evolving population, while the effects of genetic drift depend strongly on
population size. Other things being equal, the rate of genetic drift is proportional to the inverse
square-root of population size. The inverse square-root is a simple consequence of the statistics
of independent random variables. The average of any N independent random variables
varies at a rate inversely proportional to the square-root of N. For any firmly established species
with a population measured in millions or billions, genetic drift is negligible, natural selection is
dominant, and the Darwin theory is accurately valid. For a newly emerging or endangered
species with population measured in tens or hundreds, genetic drift dominates, selection is
relatively unimportant, and the Kimura theory is valid. The random jumps of genes in a small
population produce evolutionary change much faster than the gentle push of natural
selection. Kimura understood that genetic drift is the main driving force in the quick jumps
when species are created or extinguished.

Kimura's theory explains the diversity paradox that puzzled Darwin. Why are we surrounded
by such an astonishing diversity of birds and insects and microbes? From the point of view of
Darwin, a small number of dominant species would have been sufficient. Kimura explains the
mystery by invoking the power of genetic drift, which becomes suddenly rapid and effective
just when it is needed, when small populations can vary fast enough to become genetically
isolated and form new species.

Genetic drift in local enclaves gives to every large established species the power to diversify
into a family of new species. At the ragged edges of small populations, where random jumps
prevail, speciation is driven by Kimura's neutral theory. Darwin's theory is still true away from the
edges, where selection has time to operate on big populations.

3. Ursula Goodenough (1943- ). Nature Plays a High-Risk Game.

After Kimura, Ursula Goodenough, a biologist born in 1943 and still active at Washington
University in St. Louis entered into the picture. Like Darwin and unlike Kimura, she is an observer
and experimenter. She gave us another important insight into the mystery of diversity. She
analyzed published reports on the rate of random genetic mutation in genes of various kinds
in many different sexually reproducing species, from algae to mammals. She and others noted
that in a large number of species there are two families of genes that have mutation-rates
much higher than average genes. The two families both have specialized functions. One
family is genes involved with the immune system. There is an obvious reason for immune-
function genes to mutate rapidly, since they must respond rapidly with production of fresh
antibodies to detect and kill invading microbes.

The other rapidly mutating family of genes is involved with sexual mating systems.
Goodenough observed a systematic tendency for genes active in the rituals of mating to
mutate fast. The reason for this accelerated variation of mating genes is not obvious. Nature
is forcing genetic drift to move faster in mating systems than in other bodily functions. If this is
generally true, as Goodenough observes, it means that genetic drift in mating systems must
have a special importance as a driving force of evolution. She proposes a general theory to
explain the facts. In the big picture of life evolving over billions of years, established species
with large populations evolve slowly and have a mainly conservative effect on the balance
of Nature. The big jumps in evolution occur when established species become extinct and
new species with small populations diversify. The big jumps, made by new species, are driven
by genetic drift of small populations.
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For small populations to form new species, they must become genetically isolated. Rapid
change of mating systems is a quick road to genetic isolation. Goodenough concludes that
the rapid mutation of mating-system genes is Nature's way of achieving big jumps in large-
scale evolution. Rapidly evolving mating systems gave us the diversity of species that
astonished Darwin. Twenty years ago, Goodenough wrote a paper with the title, "Rapid
Evolution of Sex-related Genes", describing her observations and conclusions.

The picture of Nature revealed by Kimura and Goodenough is new and striking. Nature loves
to gamble. Nature thrives by taking risks. She scrambles mating-system genes so as to increase
the risk that individual parents will fail to find mates. The increase of risk of sterility of individuals
is a part of Nature's plan. She imposes the increased risk on the whole population, so that a
rare event will occur with greater probability, when a pair of lucky parents, whose names might
happen to be Adam and Eve, are born with matching mating-system mutations. That rare
event gives a pair of parents a chance to give birth to a new species. Nature knows how to
play the odds. By putting her thumb on the mating-system mutation scale, she increases the
risk of sterility of all parents, and increases the chance that a lucky pair will start a new species.
Nature knows that, in the long run, established species are expendable and new species are
essential. That is why Nature is ruthless to the individual parent and generous to the emerging
species. Risk-taking is the key to long-term survival and is also the mother of diversity.

4. Herbert Wells (1866-1946). Varieties of Human Experience.

Herbert Wells, born in 1866, educated as a biologist but using his knowledge to give us a fresh
view of evolution. The first three characters thought of evolution as a biological process,
governed by the rules of inheritance from parent to offspring. Wells knew that biological
evolution is only half of a bigger story. The other half of the story is cultural evolution, the story
of changes in the life of our planet caused by the spread of ideas rather than by the spread
of genes. Cultural evolution had its beginnings as soon as animals with brains evolved, using
their brains to store information and using patterns of behavior to share information with their
offspring. Social species of insects and mammals were molded by cultural as well as biological
evolution. But cultural evolution only became dominant when a single species invented
spoken language. Spoken language is incomparably quicker than the language of the genes.

Wells saw that we happen to live soon after a massive shift in the history of the planet, caused
by the emergence of our own species. The shift was completed about ten thousand years
ago, when we invented agriculture and started to domesticate animals. Before the shift,
evolution was mostly biological. After the shift, evolution was mostly cultural. Biological
evolution is usually slow, when big populations endure for thousands or millions of generations
before changes become noticeable.

Cultural evolution can be a thousand times faster, with major changes occurring in two or
three generations. It has taken about two hundred thousand years for our species to evolve
biologically from its origin in Africa until today. It has taken only about two hundred years of
cultural evolution to convert us from farmers to city-dwellers, and to convert a large part of
North America from forest to farmland.

Besides his expert knowledge of biology, Wells had a deep interest in the lives of ordinary
human beings, with their destiny governed by ancient human emotions of love and hate, fear
and greed. He began his professional life as a novelist, telling stories and bringing his
characters vividly to life. His view of the human condition can be seen more clearly in his novels
than in his biology. One of his novels is Tono-Bungay, written in 1912. The narrator is George
Ponderevo, a young and capable crook who is at home in the chaotic world of twentieth
century capitalism. The chief character is uncle Teddy Ponderevo, an amiable swindler who
invented the wonder-drug Tono-Bungay, guaranteed to cure all diseases and to bring us
health and happiness. George knows how to keep the cash flowing, with raucous advertising
campaigns and sales of shares in fraudulent companies.
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For a while, the Tono-Bungay bubble makes them rich. Then the bubble bursts, and they are
hunted criminals. Uncle Teddy dies in the crash of a home-made air-ship. George escapes in
a private war-ship that he happens to own. The last chapter is entitled, "Night and the Open
Sea", with George's ship swiftly and silently slicing through the dark waves. Wells is writing with
a premonition of the horrors of World War One, which broke out two years later, destroying
millions of people who would sacrifice their lives to the tribal gods of Empire and Country. The
owners of war-ships would survive to find new victims.

Another novel, The Time Machine, is concerned directly with evolution. The Time Traveler finds
himself in the future, eight hundred thousand years from now. Wells draws one of the bleakest
pictures of the future ever imagined. Humans have evolved downhill into two degenerate
species, predators and prey, with diminished bodies and minds. The predators are the
Morlocks, living like rats in the cellars of ruined buildings. The prey are the Eloi, living aimless
lives on the surface in beautiful surroundings, tended like cattle by the Morlocks as a source of
meat. The Time Traveler befriends an Eloi girl who gives him two flowers to take home with him.
The story ends with the Time Traveler vanished on another trip into the future, leaving behind
the two withered flowers. The flowers are our proof that, even after the spark of reason has
been extinguished, friendship and gratitude can live on in the human soul.

Wells' biggest work is Outline of History, published in 1920, a picture of cultural evolution as the
main theme of history since the emergence of our species. He begins with a proud claim: "This
Outline of History is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole
story of life and mankind so far as it is known today." The next fifty pages describe biological
evolution up to the rise of two human species, Modern Man and Neanderthal Man. A famous
picture by the illustrator John Horrabin shows Wells' literary rival George Bernard Shaw as a
Neanderthal emerging from a cave, with the caption, "Our Neanderthal Ancestor, Not a
Neanderthal Man but a Parallel Species". The recent discovery of a substantial fraction of
Neanderthal genes in modern Europeans shows that Wells' joke came close to the truth. After
the Neanderthals come the cave-painters in France and Spain. Cultural evolution has begun
and dominates the story from that time onward.

Half-way through the history comes the birth of the great world religions, Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity, Islam. Wells tells the story of these religions with a sympathetic eye, recognizing
their crucial importance to cultural evolution in the last two thousand years. He gives an
evocative account of the life and death of Jesus, with a memorable Horrabin illustration, three
crosses on the hill of Golgotha in evening twilight. The caption reads; "The darkness closed
upon the hill; the distant city set about its preparation for the Passover; scarcely anyone but
that knot of mourners on the way to their homes troubled whether Jesus of Nazareth was still
dying or already dead". From Golgotha the story continues with empires rising and falling, wars
and pestilences raging, wealth and industry growing, and always quietly in the background
the great religions with their holy books preserving the words of the prophets, raising the hopes
of powerless people with visions of a better world.

The history ends with the catastrophe of World War One, and with the abortive attempt, still in
progress while Wells was writing, to establish a League of Nations with effective power to keep
the world at peace. Here is the message of the Outline of History as Wells saw it. "Life begins
perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of
the universe, unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom and with
knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and
eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amid
the stars."

As a result of cultural evolution, a single species now dominates the ecology of our planet,
and cultural evolution will dominate the future of life so long as any species with a living culture
survives. When we look ahead to imagine possible futures for our descendants, cultural
evolution must be our dominant concern. But biological evolution has not stopped and will
not stop. As cultural evolution races ahead like a hare, biological evolution will continue its
slow tortoise crawl to shape our destiny.
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We have detailed knowledge of our cultural evolution only for the last few thousand years in
Europe and Asia from which written records survive. In Western culture we see a series of
creative events occurring in small urban communities: Jerusalem around 1000 BC inventing
monotheistic religion, Athens around 500 BC inventing philosophy and drama and democratic
government, Florence around 1500 AD inventing modern art and science, Manchester around
1750 AD inventing modern industry. In each case, a small population produced a star-burst of
pioneers who permanently changed our way of thinking. Genius erupted in groups as well as
in individuals. It seems likely that these bursts of creative change were driven by a combination
of cultural with biological evolution. Cultural evolution was constantly spreading ideas and
skills from one community to another, stirring up conservative societies with imported novelties.
At the same time, biological evolution acting on small genetically isolated populations was
causing genetic drift, so that the average intellectual endowment of isolated communities
was rising and falling by random chance.

Over the last few thousand years, genetic drift caused occasional star-bursts to occur, when
small populations rose to outstandingly high levels of average ability. The combination of
imported new ideas with peaks of genetic drift would enable local communities to change
the world.

The big uncertainty in this picture of genetic drift as a driving force of human progress is the
genetic isolation of small communities. We have no reliable information about the mating
habits of the populations in Jerusalem and Athens and Florence and Manchester during the
centuries before they became creative. They were to some extent isolated geographically,
but they were also divided into tribes and hereditary classes that were isolated socially. Class
prejudice and snobbery were probably the most powerful causes of genetic isolation, and
these are not measurable quantities. The contribution of genetic drift to cultural evolution
remains a speculative hypothesis.

When we look to the future of evolution, it is convenient to divide the future into near and far.
The near future is the next century, for which we can make some reliable predictions. The far
future is everything beyond the next century. In the near future, we can be sure that genetic
drift is fading rapidly as a driving force of change. All over the world, humans are moving from
villages into big cities where genetic drift is negligible. In the populations that are still
geographically isolated, humans are becoming less socially isolated by barriers of race and
class. It is unlikely that any small town in the next century can be another Athens or another
Jerusalem. Wells ended his Outline with a glimpse of the far future, where nothing is certain,
and all predictions are guesswork. In the far future, it is likely that humans and other forms of
life will be spread out to great distances in the universe, as Wells imagined. If our destiny takes
us to the stars, our descendants will again be genetically isolated, and genetic drift will resume
its ancient power to mold life into new patterns of diversity.

Before we can embark on grand voyages to the stars, we must navigate the mundane
hazards of the twenty-first century. The most important achievement of the twenty-first century
is likely to be the emergence of China as a rich country and a world power. The rise of China
is a return to the political patterns of the past, when China was a great empire ruled by a
conservative Confucian bureaucracy. The intervening five hundred years, when China was
left behind and impoverished by aggressively expanding Western cultures, were an
unfortunate departure from the older stable equilibrium. The rise of China in this century will be
a restoration of traditionally organized society after centuries of turmoil. The big problem for
Western societies will be to learn how to coexist peacefully with the new Celestial Kingdom.
Fortunately, we will have the powerful force of cultural evolution erasing differences between
East and West. Cultural evolution must battle against the divisive forces of nation and race
and political ideology.
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The strongest driving force of cultural evolution today is science. Science is the international
enterprise that brings us together most powerfully in a common purpose, requiring us to share
ideas and tools, economic resources and material benefits. The task of East and West in this
century will be to work together as friends in science and technology, while respecting our
differences in politics and culture.

When we look to the future beyond one or two centuries, expansion of the domain of life into
the universe will be inevitable and also desirable for many reasons. Inevitable because
biotechnology and space technology will provide the means for life to make the big jump.
Desirable because the cultural evolution of creative new societies requires more elbow-room
than a single planet can provide. Creative new societies need room to take risks and make
mistakes, far enough away to be effectively isolated from their neighbors. Life must spread far
afield to continue the processes of genetic drift and diversification of species that drove
evolution in the past. The restless wandering that pulled our species out of Africa to explore
the Earth will continue to pull us beyond the Earth, as far as our technology can reach.

5. Richard Dawkins (1941- ). Genes and Memes.

Wells was at heart a novelist, portraying history as a story of human beings with ideas and
emotions as well as neurons and genes. Dawkins is a biologist who began his career with a
study of animal behavior, only later transferring his attention to humans. Dawkins published his
great work, The Selfish Gene, in 1976, He is interested in general patterns of behavior rather
than in individual humans. His book portrays human society as a mechanical system of agents
with behavior governed by genes, similar to a collection of machines with behavior governed
by computer programs. The selfish gene is a device with a single purpose, to achieve its own
survival and replication. It is not concerned with our welfare or with our human needs. Dawkins
caused a revolution in our thinking about genes with his insight that the selfish behavior of
genes can explain the unselfish behavior of humans. His book is a classic because he makes
a convincing case for a paradoxical conclusion, that selfish genes can orchestrate the
evolution of cooperation, generosity and self-sacrifice in humans. He succeeds brilliantly in
reducing our high moral principles and our ethical beliefs to the action of unthinking and
uncaring molecules of DNA.

(The fundamental argument that The Selfish Gene makes is that the natural selection process
in the evolution of living beings is not about making the species, community or group secure.
It is about making the individual secure, and the individual is merely a vehicle for its genes.)

In the final chapter of his book, Dawkins turns his attention away from biological evolution to
cultural evolution and introduces another innovation to our thinking about human behavior.
The new idea is the meme, the cultural analog to the gene. A meme is a unit of cultural
behavior, just as a gene is a unit of biological behavior. Examples of memes are ideas,
customs, slogans, fashions in dress or in hair-style, skills, tools, laws, religious beliefs and political
institutions. Memes spread through human populations by social contact far more rapidly than
genes spread by sexual contact. Just as our behavior at the individual level is controlled by
selfish genes, our behavior at the social level is controlled by selfish memes.

Dawkins's vision of human society, as the visible face of an invisible network of selfish genes
and memes, is to a large extent true. His book gave us a new understanding of the evolution
of morality and religion. Like Darwin's view of nature, Dawkins’s vision may be incomplete. It is
reasonable to accept his view of genes and memes as powerful agents of human behavior,
but to reject his view that they explain everything.

6. Svante Pääbo (1955- ). Cousins in the Cave.

Svante Pääbo, born in 1955 and now a world leader in the study of human genomes, comes
to the stage with startling news. After long struggles, his team of paleontologists and chemists
have developed the technology for sequencing ancient DNA degraded and contaminated
with modern DNA. They have succeeded in sequencing accurately the genomes of our
Neanderthal cousins who lived in Europe about fifty thousand years ago. They also sequenced
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genomes of our own species who lived in Europe around the same time, and genomes of a
third species, called Denisovans because they were found in Denisova cave in Siberia. He
published the story of the sequencing and the surprising results in his book, Neanderthal Man:
In Search of Lost Genomes, in 2014.

(JEE-nome) The complete set of DNA (genetic material) in an organism. In people, almost
every cell in the body contains a complete copy of the genome. The genome contains all of
the information needed for a person to develop and grow.)

When he compared the ancient genomes of the three species with modern human genomes,
he saw abundant evidence of mixing. Modern humans originating in Europe and Asia carry
several percent of Neanderthal genes. Modern humans in Papua New Guinea carry several
percent of Denisovan genes. The ancient genomes come from times when the severe climate
of the last ice age prevailed in Europe and Northern Asia. Humans and their cousins were
precariously surviving in caves, where they probably sat huddled around the cave-fire to keep
warm, cooking dinners and telling stories. It now appears that the three species frequently sat
around the cave-fires together rather than separately. They mated and raised families
together. Our species had the larger share of the populations and supplied most of the genes
to the mixed offspring. But the Neanderthals and Denisovans never became extinct. They
simply merged their genomes with ours. They survive as a part of our genetic inheritance.

The discoveries of Svante Pääbo show that as early as fifty thousand years ago the transition
from biological to cultural evolution was already far advanced. Biological evolution, as
demonstrated by Kimura and Goodenough, accelerated the birth of new species by favoring
the genetic isolation of small populations. Cultural evolution had the opposite effect, erasing
differences between related species and bringing them together. Cultural evolution happens
when cousins learn each other's languages and share stories around the cave-fire. As a
consequence of cultural evolution, biological differences become less important and cousins
learn to live together in peace. Sharing of memes brings species together and sharing of genes
is the unintended consequence.

In the long-range history of life, the transition from biological to cultural evolution was an event
of transcendent importance. We became aware of its importance only recently, as a result of
the discoveries of Svante Pääbo and his colleagues. The transition caused a reversal of the
direction of evolution from diversification to unification, from the proliferation of diverging
species to the union of species into a brotherhood of man. We see a small-scale example of
this transition in the recent history of racism. Until recently, racism was a force of nature favoring
the diversification of species. Humans traditionally hated and despised people of a different
skin color. The natural evolutionary consequence would have been the division of our species
into three new species, one pink, one black and one yellow. Only in the last few centuries, a
strong reaction against racism has emerged, inter-racial marriage has become respectable,
and the cultural unification of our species has pushed us toward biological unification. This is
a small step in the long history of the transition of human societies from incessant warfare to
brotherhood.

Our first task is to make human brotherhood effective and permanent. Our second task is to
preserve and enhance the rich diversity of Nature in the world around us. Our new
understanding of biological and cultural evolution may help us to see more clearly what we
have to do.

Nature's tool for the creation and support of a rich diversity of wildlife is the species produced
in abundance by the rapid genetic drift of small populations according to Kimura, and in even
greater abundance by the rapid mutation of mating-system genes according to
Goodenough. In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology
which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless
or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species
meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of
species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife
as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the
homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.
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Unfortunately, the first of our two tasks, the nurture of a brotherhood of man, has been made
possible only by the dominant role of cultural evolution in recent centuries. The cultural
evolution that damages and endangers natural diversity is the same force that drives human
brotherhood through the mutual understanding of diverse societies. Wells' vision of human
history as an accumulation of cultures, Dawkins's vision of memes bringing us together by
sharing our arts and sciences, Pääbo's vision of our cousins in the cave sharing our language
and our genes, show us how cultural evolution has made us what we are. Cultural evolution
will be the main force driving our future.

Our double task is now to preserve and foster both biological evolution as Nature designed it
and cultural evolution as we invented it, trying to achieve the benefits of both, and exercising
a wise restraint to limit the damage when they come into conflict. With biological evolution,
we should continue playing the risky game that nature taught us to play. With cultural
evolution, we should use our unique gifts of language and art and science to understand each
other, and finally achieve a human society that is manageable if not always peaceful, with
wildlife that is endlessly creative if not always permanent.

Author:

FREEMAN DYSON is an emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. In addition to fundamental contributions ranging from number theory to quantum
+electrodynamics, he has worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism,
astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully
applied. His books include Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope, Infinite in All
Directions, Maker of Patterns, and Origins of Life. [2.19.19]