New calculations have shown that the rate of development of modern culture does not exceed the rate of ordinary evolutionary changes in living nature.
Sometimes it seems that modern culture is developing at an unprecedented, even dizzying pace. New works, genres and styles are constantly emerging, fueled by rapid technological progress. In comparison, biological evolution looks like a slow and cumbersome process of accumulating mutations over a long change of generations.
However, in reality, human culture is still far from the pace of evolutionary changes that living organisms demonstrate. This conclusion was reached by Armand Leroi and his colleagues from Imperial College London, whose article was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Armed with standard evolutionary research tools, the authors analyzed the rate of development of popular music, English literature, scientific publications, and automobile design. These rates turned out to be approximately the same with which the biological objects studied by the authors - the winged Galapagos finches, as well as moths and even ordinary snails - accumulate changes.
For example, scientists analyzed 17,000 music tracks that hit the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Certain "signs" were chosen for them: the presence of a guitar rhythm or loss, characteristic of hip-hop staccato, and the like. In the case of automobiles, 16 different body design and performance parameters were considered. Finally, for 2,200 works by British and Irish writers of the 19th century, as well as for 170,000 articles from the British Medical Journal, 500 different topics were selected as "features" that describe their content.
Scientists have compared the rate of change of these "features" with the rate of evolutionary change in classical biological models. These include Galapagos finches, whose beak shape is able to quickly adapt to changes in diet, and moths, whose wings have become darker in order to better mask them on the bark of trees covered with soot due to industrialization (but again became light after emissions in the atmosphere became quite strictly controlled).
Such work showed that the rate of change was practically the same in both groups - both "cultural" and "biological". It is worth noting that the results contradict the data of Charles Perrault, who in 2012 calculated that culture develops about 50 percent faster than living organisms, which ensured the evolutionary success of our species.