Pop Culture May Evolve at the Same Rate as Birds and Bugs
We like to think modern culture moves at a dizzying pace, fueled by a relentless parade of new works of music, literature, and technological design. Change in nature, by contrast, seems to follow a slower trajectory as genetic mutations over generations give animals bigger teeth, say, or a better camouflage. But maybe the opposite is true, and human culture doesn’t move so fast and we consumers are less eager to embrace change than we realize.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by a group of British researchers who analyzed rates of change for popular songs, English literature, scientific papers, and car design. Using metrics designed by evolutionary biologists, they compared the rates of cultural change to the rates of biological change for finches from the Galapagos Islands, two kinds of moths, and a common British snail. The result was kind of surprising: Biology and culture move at about the same speed.
“This tells you something profound about human psychology,” says Armand Leroi, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London. “We are surprisingly conservative about our choices, and what we like changes very slowly.”
The idea that culture evolves like animals and plants do has been around for a few decades. Most of the prior research, however, has looked at archaeological artifacts, such as the evolution of stone tools, arrowheads, or language. Leroi and his team wanted to look at the pace of change in modern cultural artifacts instead, to see if they could see differences between today and earlier civilizations.
Since its inception, The National Digest has been dedicated to providing authoritative and thought-provoking insights into trending topics and the latest happenings.
