Two Researchers Say Humans Are In the Midst of an Evolutionary Shift Like Never Before. But Not Everyone Is Convinced

Humans are evolving faster through culture than through biology.

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.

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.

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.

So what’s going on?

Cultural Change Over Genetic Change

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

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.

“Human evolution seems to be changing gears,” Waring said when the paper was released.

“Culture is driving evolution at a pace genes simply can’t match,” 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.

×

Get smarter every day...

Stay ahead with ZME Science and subscribe.

Daily Newsletter
The science you need to know, every weekday.

Weekly Newsletter
A week in science, all in one place. Sends every Sunday.
No spam, ever. Unsubscribe anytime. Review our Privacy Policy.

Thank you! One more thing...

Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription.

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 “preempt” genetic evolution. Their paper gives cesarean sections and reproductive medicine as examples in which cultural practices may alter or relax genetic selection.

The shift from genetic to cultural evolution may not be as sudden or dramatic as flipping a switch. It’s 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.

But what Waring and Wood are proposing is that this trend is accelerating — so much so that culturally inherited solutions increasingly intervene before genetic adaptation has the opportunity to do so.

The Superorganism Claim

The boldest part of Waring and Wood’s argument is that humans may be moving toward something resembling a cultural “superorganism.”

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.

While the concept of human cultural evolution isn’t 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.

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.

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.

But whether this makes a society an evolutionary “individual” is exactly where the scientific disagreement begins.

In October 2025, another researcher, Nejad Kourki, 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’t 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.

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.

The Future of Human Evolution: A Cultural Superorganism?

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.

“We 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,” says Waring.

While this is still being debated, the implications the duo’s hypothesis are far-reaching. If human survival and well-being increasingly depend on cultural systems around us, what happens to individual genetic evolution?

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.

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.

But Nejad Kourki’s view is that the ETI framework itself may simply be the wrong explanatory tool for sociocultural change, even if human history contains genuine “major transitions” in organization, technology and cooperation.

No One Knows What Comes Next

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.

That empirical phase remains a work in progress. During a 2026 fellowship 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.

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.

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 “more evolved” or a hypothetical cultural superorganism as ethically superior.

“We are not suggesting that wealthier societies with better technology are ‘better’ than others,” says Wood. “Culture 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.”

RelatedPosts

Our early ancestors first metabolized alcohol 10 million years ago, a find that helps shape primate evolution
This Startup Is Using Ancient DNA to Recreate Perfumes from Extinct Flowers
These rare Italian bears have evolved to be surprisingly chill
Mice With a Human Gene Started Squeaking Differently. Could This Tiny Genetic Mutation Explain the Origin of Speech?

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.

What is not yet settled is whether those facts mark a true transition in evolutionary individuality — or whether the superorganism is a useful metaphor being asked to do too much biological work.

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.