Abstract
It has become clear that the idiosyncratic properties of the human mind have a powerful effect on the evolution of culture. In some reciprocal manner as yet less easily grasped, culture has influenced the genetic evolution of the brain structures underlying the mind. Because this coevolution concerns both the biological and social sciences, efforts to construct provisional models and unify the still fragmentary evidence to explain it are of more than ordinary interest. With respect to the genesis of our own species, evolutionary biologists have begun to grapple with the fact that human beings were not created by the purely Darwinian evolution so relevant to other species. For the past several million years our ancestors have been shaped by biological evolution and cultural evolution proceeding together, in a manner still little understood. In each of 200000 or so generations two tracks of heritable information, one genetic and the other cultural, have met in the events of individual socialization. During this time biology does not appear to have overwhelmed culture and culture has not granted biology total independence from human affairs. The relationship resembles one of reciprocating interaction, in which culture is generated and shaped by biological imperatives while the course of genetic evolution shifts in response to cultural innovations.
Research support was provided in part through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), grant number A0393, and the Medical Research Council of Canada (MRC), grant number MA-8635. The author is a career Scholar of the MRC
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Lumsden, C.J. (1988). Gene-Culture Coevolution: Culture and Biology in Darwinian Perspective. In: de Kerckhove, D., Lumsden, C.J. (eds) The Alphabet and the Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_2
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