Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows

But Nina Jablonski, chair of the Anthropology Department at Pennsylvania State University, said she is sold on the research. "This paper is revolutionary in its approach ... one of the most significant papers to be written in anthropology in the last 20 years," she said.

Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems.

"People studying climate change, population growth, poverty, racism and the threat of plagues all know what the problems are and what we should be doing to solve them," said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford.

Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and other books on dilemmas facing contemporary human society, said he does not understand why more effort is not going into urgently needed solutions. "What we don't know, and need to learn, is how cultures change and how we can ethically influence that process," he said.

Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford, said their findings demonstrate that "some cultural choices work while others clearly do not."

"Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term," she said. "We need to begin aligning our culture with the powerful forces of nature and natural selection instead of against them."

Examples of cultural approaches that are putting humans at risk include "everything from the economic incentives, industrial technologies and growth mentality that cause climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, to the religious polarization and political ideologies that generate devastating conflict around the globe," Rogers said. "If the leadership necessary to undertake critically needed cultural evolution in these areas can't be found, our civilization may find itself weeded out by natural selection, just like a bad canoe design."

Deborah S. Rogers and Paul R. Ehrlich are affiliated with the Center for Conservation Biology.