Scientists have long argued about whether natural selection affects humans. For evolution to continue, it is necessary, firstly, to experience the pressure of the environment, and secondly, to produce enough offspring - so that evolution has plenty to choose from.
The biological evolution of humanity is not over. Despite the technical achievements of civilization and the almost complete victory of monogamy, we, like other higher animals, continue to evolve under the influence of natural and sexual selection, European biologists state.
Among biologists, as well as sociologists and evolutionary psychologists who study the behavior of Homo sapiens over long periods of time, one can find diametrically opposite judgments about whether natural selection continues to operate in the modern human population - a random and undirected process of selection of characters that leads to the survival of individuals, the most adapted to the given environmental conditions.
Some believe that with the onset of the Holocene era, the transition to a stable producing economy and a monogamous family, that is, the last about 10 thousand years, the effect of natural selection came to naught and the biological evolution of man stopped, giving way to social, cultural, and in the future, as they believe supporters of the theory of technological singularity, and purely informational superfast evolution with the transfer of consciousness to non-biological carriers.
Others believe that a productive economy, monogamy, and nongenetic transmission of information to descendants do not in any way cancel natural and sexual selection, and humans continue to evolve biologically along with other organisms.
Despite the fact that the natural selection mechanism is well understood in the example of animals, the process of natural selection in the modern human population is ridiculously poorly studied.
The fact that the most evolutionarily successful mammalian species somehow fell out of sight of biologists studying natural selection is partly due to the complexity of the collection of statistics. But this statistics is enough to follow the evolution of a geographically isolated group of people over a fairly long period of time spanning many generations (compared to most mammals, humans are a real long-liver, which greatly lengthens the observation period, if, of course, they are carried out in real time).
However, the ideological dogma that excludes the sapiens, who are able to transmit information in a non-genetic way, from under the influence of selection, has also worked here, although its reputation has recently been greatly shaken.
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Thus, there is more and more evidence that some animals (monkeys, whales, dolphins) are also able to transmit information to their descendants through social learning, or memes. An interesting conclusion follows from this that the flourishing and domination of our, sapient, culture is associated with the gradual selection of more effective methods of accumulating and transmitting memes than in other higher animals, while the very nature of this phenomenon is a nongenetic transfer of information in higher animals and the person is the same.
Simultaneously with how the phenomenon of "culture" began to be considered more broadly, having ceased to be the exclusive monopoly of Homo sapiens, biologists finally began to study the question of whether natural selection, this indisputable "monopoly of animals", continues to operate within the human population after the Neolithic revolution, when humanity passed from the “wild” appropriating to the “cultural” producing and accumulating economy, which gave rise to the modern technological civilization with its developed infosphere.
The results of one such study, carried out by Finnish biologists in collaboration with their colleagues at the University of Sheffield (UK), were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To find out whether the effect of natural and sexual selection on the population of people has decreased as a result of demographic, cultural and technological innovations caused by the Neolithic coup, the authors of the article analyzed the data of parish books, where records of baptism, weddings, deaths and property status of 5,923 men, women and children - residents of several Finnish villages, born in the period from 1760 to 1849.
Using these data, the researchers tried to find out whether the process of natural selection had an impact on the life cycle of these individuals and their offspring, covering four key (for assessing the effect of selection) positions: achievement of reproductive age (survival to adulthood), access to the choice of a mate (mate access), mating success, and fertility rate.
Each of the nearly 6 thousand Finns, whose main milestones in their lives were dispassionately recorded in the books of four Lutheran parishes, these positions were implemented in different ways.
Someone did not live up to adulthood, someone lived, but remained a boar, and someone, having acquired a dozen offspring, was more successful in passing on their genes to the next generations than someone who got two, or someone who got married, but died without heirs.
All of these milestones mark different levels of reproductive success - the ability of individuals to pass on their genes to descendants.
As the analysis has shown, in the aforementioned group of people living in four compact territories in pre-industrial Finland (in the villages of Hittinen, Kustavi, Rymaattylaa and Ikaalinen Island), the same natural selection of characteristics that allowed some individuals to go through this cycle took place as in animal populations. more successful than other tribesmen.
Neither strict monogamy, nor the possession of cultural skills, nor property and social inequality had any effect on this process - it went exactly the same way as in the wild in animals.
Thus, despite monogamy, which prohibits changing the mating partner, the reproductive success of males varied in a wider range than that of females, in full accordance with the rule of sexual selection, according to which females carrying high reproductive risks are subject to less evolutionary variability than males. Ultimately, in accordance with the main principle of natural selection, the most successful members of the study group were those who managed to live longer and become more fertile, that is, they were able to pass on their genes to the greatest number of offspring, which, in turn, were distinguished by greater vitality and greater fertility. than their fellow countrymen from the same generation.
Interestingly, the level of "socio-cultural quickness" (the difference in property and social status) did not in any way affect the natural evolutionary filter of biologically more successful individuals: regardless of whether they were landowners controlling vital resources or tenants, the natural selection filter worked equally, cutting off the biologically less adapted, regardless of how much "non-genetic" information (skills, property, social role) they owned.
Moreover, the natural selection of the more fit Finns was statistically more pronounced than in the measurements obtained previously by American researchers who studied data on the first settlers in the Wild West and several isolated coastal villages in the northeastern United States.
This suggests that the action of natural selection in a human population is universal and does not depend on geographic, cultural and economic factors.
“We showed that cultural advances did not negate the fact that our species continued to evolve in the Holocene, like all other creatures living 'in the wild.' The point of view that human biological evolution took place once upon a time, in the era of hunter-gatherers, and is now over, is a common misconception,”summarizes the research leader, biologist Virpi Lummaa.
“We showed that natural selection took place in a group of people who lived relatively recently, and, most likely, it continues to this day,” adds Lummaa.
Despite the fact that over the past 200 years, the standard of living has increased, and a real revolution has taken place in medicine, which has reduced infant mortality and mortality of women during childbirth, technological advances and a different quality of life do not negate the fact that people are preserved as a species thanks to a biological mechanism that arose long before the emergence of civilization. It is possible that information conveyed in a non-genetic way influences the process of natural selection of the fittest, but the degree of this influence (vanishingly small, according to this study, dealing with a pre-industrial society) has yet to be determined.
Be that as it may, the nongenetic transfer of cultural memes does not change the essence of biological processes, so the spontaneous biological evolution of Homo sapiens, like all other animals, continues, and we cannot predict its course: natural selection is a blind uncontrollable process, absolutely indifferent to someone's wishes, claims and beliefs.