Debates about nature vs nurture create divisions and place limitations on how we can be thinking about ourselves, others and the world around us. A more interesting way of viewing how and why we are here is through a combined and fluid lens of nature and nurture. Questions about how we evolved to this point in time and why some of us survive and others don’t remain, but there are interesting scientific developments that seem to be getting us closer to some answers. In this regard the NYT has an interesting article titled ” Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force.” Here is an excerpt:

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Dr. Laland is an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The idea that genes and culture co-evolve has been around for several decades but has started to win converts only recently. Two leading proponents, Robert Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Peter J. Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have argued for years that genes and culture were intertwined in shaping human evolution. “It wasn’t like we were despised, just kind of ignored,” Dr. Boyd said. But in the last few years, references by other scientists to their writings have “gone up hugely,” he said.

(Find the chart above here.)