Human planetary colonization rests on culturally learned adaptations, not just genetics.

Evidence

In their landmark book Not by Genes Alone, Pete Richerson and Robert Boyd show how profoundly important the cultural inheritance system is for understanding the peculiarities of human evolution. As they explain, we human beings possess an evolved psychology that bundles together genetic adaptations with a sophisticated repertoire of genetically evolved cultural learning skills. These skills help us explain two key things: one, the fact that our species has managed to colonize the entire planet by adapting to radically different habitats in a timescale that is not even a mere second in evolutionary time; and two, the cultural features of these particular human groups that populated the globe favored the group’s stability, survival, and expansion, at the expense of less successful rivals. The story of how prosocial religious beliefs and practices got off the ground, and swiftly populated the earth, is part of this same logic, and is best understood as a joint product of both cultural and genetic evolution working in tandem. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 125

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to dual inheritance theory the reader may know from other sources on gene-culture coevolution and ritual adaptation.

Related

• Cultural learning skills drove rapid human adaptation across all habitats (similarity 0.91)
• Cultural evolution has been the central driver of human genetic evolution for eons. (similarity 0.81)
• Cumulative cultural adaptations cannot be improvised by individuals in years. (similarity 0.78)
• Natural selection shaped psychological mechanisms that determine which cultural beliefs persist. (similarity 0.78)