CONCEPT
Gene-Culture Coevolution
Wilson and Lumsden's framework for the dynamic interaction between biological inheritance and cultural achievement—the recognition that genes shape what cultures humans tend to build and that culture, in turn, shapes the selective environment in which genes evolve, forming a single coevolving system now being accelerated to crisis by artificial intelligence.
Gene-culture coevolution was
E. O. Wilson's answer to the charge of genetic determinism leveled against
sociobiology: human nature is real and biological, but it is not fixed, because culture is a powerful, semi-autonomous force that varies enormously atop the evolved base and feeds back, over generations, to reshape that base. Developed with the physicist Charles Lumsden in
Genes, Mind, and Culture (1981), the framework models human behavior as the product of a dynamic interaction: genes set biases and predispositions—the directions in which the organism finds things natural, learnable, attractive, or repellent—and culture works within, against, and upon those biases, moving far faster than genes can. The resulting system is neither biologically determined nor infinitely plastic; it is constrained plasticity, shaped at the slow end by
Paleolithic emotions that change at evolutionary pace and at the fast end by cultural arrangements that can transform within a lifetime.