Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis

How did human societies evolve to become a major force of global change? What dynamics can lead societies on a trajectory of global sustainability? The astonishing growth in human population, economic activity and environmental impact has brought these questions to the fore. This theme issue pulls together a variety of traditions that seek to address these questions using different theories and methods. In this Introduction, we review and organize the major strands of work on how the Anthropocene evolved, how evolutionary dynamics are influencing sustainability efforts today, and what principles, strategies and capacities will be important to guide us towards global sustainability in the future. We present a set of synthetic insights and highlight frontiers for future research efforts which could contribute to a consolidated synthesis. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions

We propose that the global environmental crises of the Anthropocene are the outcome of a ratcheting process in long-term human evolution which has favoured groups of increased size and greater environmental exploitation. To explore this hypothesis, we review the changes in the human ecological niche. Evidence indicates the growth of the human niche has been facilitated by group-level cultural traits for environmental control. Following this logic, sustaining the biosphere under intense human use will probably require global cultural traits, including legal and technical systems. We investigate the conditions for the evolution of global cultural traits. We estimate that our species does not exhibit adequate population structure to evolve these traits. Our analysis suggests that characteristic patterns of human group-level cultural evolution created the Anthropocene and will work against global collective solutions to the environmental challenges it poses. We illustrate the implications of this theory with alternative evolutionary paths for humanity. We conclude that our species must alter longstanding patterns of cultural evolution to avoid environmental disaster and escalating between-group competition. We propose an applied research and policy programme with the goal of avoiding these outcomes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.

Integrating evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene

The rapid, human-induced changes in the Earth system during the Anthropocene present humanity with critical sustainability challenges. Social-ecological systems (SES) research provides multiple approaches for understanding the complex interactions between humans, social systems, and environments and how we might direct them towards healthier and more resilient futures. However, general theories of SES change have yet to be fully developed. Formal evolutionary theory has been applied as a dynamic theory of change of complex phenomena in biology and the social sciences, but rarely in SES research. In this paper, we explore the connections between both fields, hoping to foster collaboration. After sketching out the distinct intellectual traditions of SES research and evolutionary theory, we map some of their terminological and theoretical connections. We then provide examples of how evolutionary theory might be incorporated into SES research through the use of systems mapping to identify evolutionary processes in SES, the application of concepts from evolutionary developmental biology to understand the connections between systems changes and evolutionary changes, and how evolutionary thinking may help design interventions for beneficial change. Integrating evolutionary theory and SES research can lead to a better understanding of SES changes and positive interventions for a more sustainable Anthropocene. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.

Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture

It has been proposed that climate adaptation research can benefit from an evolutionary approach. But related empirical research is lacking. We advance the evolutionary study of climate adaptation with two case studies from contemporary United States agriculture. First, we define 'cultural adaptation to climate change' as a mechanistic process of population-level cultural change. We argue this definition enables rigorous comparisons, yields testable hypotheses from mathematical theory and distinguishes adaptive change, non-adaptive change and desirable policy outcomes. Next, we develop an operational approach to identify 'cultural adaptation to climate change' based on established empirical criteria. We apply this approach to data on crop choices and the use of cover crops between 2008 and 2021 from the United States. We find evidence that crop choices are adapting to local trends in two separate climate variables in some regions of the USA. But evidence suggests that cover cropping may be adapting more to the economic environment than climatic conditions. Further research is needed to characterize the process of cultural adaptation, particularly the routes and mechanisms of cultural transmission. Furthermore, climate adaptation policy could benefit from research on factors that differentiate regions exhibiting adaptive trends in crop choice from those that do not. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Source-sink behavioural dynamics limit institutional evolution in a group-structured society

Social change in any society entails changes in both behaviours and institutions. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual behaviour occurs in parallel with the selection of group-level institutions. We consider a cooperative behaviour that generates collective benefits for groups but does not spread between individuals on its own. Groups exhibit institutions that increase the diffusion of the behaviour within the group, but also incur a group cost. Groups adopt institutions in proportion to their fitness. Finally, the behaviour may also spread globally. We find that behaviour and institutions can be mutually reinforcing. But the model also generates behavioural source-sink dynamics when behaviour generated in institutionalized groups spreads to non-institutionalized groups and boosts their fitness. Consequently, the global diffusion of group-beneficial behaviour creates a pattern of institutional free-riding that limits the evolution of group-beneficial institutions. Our model suggests that, in a group-structured society, large-scale beneficial social change can be best achieved when the relevant behaviour and institutions remain correlated.

Limited Scope for Group Coordination in Stylistic Variations of Kolam Art

In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation. Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3, 139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in art can be mapped onto caste boundaries, migration and neighborhoods. Since the kolam art system with its sequential drawing decisions can be described by a Markov process, we characterize variation in styles of art due to different facets of an artist's identity and the group affiliations, via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models. Our results reveal that stylistic variations in kolam art only weakly map onto caste boundaries, neighborhoods, and regional origin. In fact, stylistic variations or patterns in art are dominated by artist-level variation and artist expertise. Our results illustrate that although art can be a medium of communication, it is not necessarily marked by group affiliation. Rather, artistic behavior in this context seems to be primarily a behavioral domain within which individuals carve out a unique niche for themselves to differentiate themselves from others. Our findings inform discussions on the evolutionary role of art for group coordination by encouraging researchers to use systematic methods to measure the mapping between specific objects or styles onto groups.

Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition

It has been suggested that the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). But there is disagreement about how to apply the ETI framework to our species, and whether culture is implicated as either cause or consequence. Long-term gene-culture coevolution (GCC) is also poorly understood. Some have argued that culture steers human evolution, while others proposed that genes hold culture on a leash. We review the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans and find a set of common themes. First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance and is probably driving human evolution. The evolutionary impact of culture occurs mainly through culturally organized groups, which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Thus, research on GCC should focus on the possibility of an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

Designing cultural multilevel selection research for sustainability science

Humans stand out among animals in that we cooperate in large groups to exploit natural resources, and accumulate resource exploitation techniques across generations via cultural learning. This uniquely human form of adaptability is in large part to blame for the global sustainability crisis. This paper builds on cultural evolutionary theory to conceptualize and study environmental resource use and overexploitation. Human social learning and cooperation, particularly regarding social dilemmas, result in both sustainability crises and solutions. Examples include the collapse of global fisheries, and multilateral agreements to halt ozone depletion. We propose an explicitly evolutionary approach to study how crises and solutions may emerge, persist, or disappear. We first present a brief primer on cultural evolution to define group-level cultural adaptations for resource use. This includes criteria for identifying where group-level cultural adaptations may exist, and if a cultural evolutionary approach can be implemented in studying a given system. We then outline a step-by-step process for designing a study of group-level cultural adaptation, including the major methodological considerations that researchers should address in study design, such as tradeoffs between validity and control, issues of time scale, and the value of both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. We discuss how to evaluate multiple types of evidence synthetically, including historical accounts, new and existing data sets, case studies, and simulations. The electronic supplement provides a tutorial and simple computer code in the R environment to lead users from theory to data to an illustration of an empirical test for group-level adaptations in sustainability research.

Cultural evolution and US agricultural institutions: a historical case study of Maine's blueberry industry

This paper presents a study of the emergence of environmental management institutions in Maine's blueberry industry. We follow a cultural evolutionary approach to understand the factors that influenced the emergence of these institutions in environmental collective action problems. Specifically, we use a cultural multilevel selection framework to explore the prediction that collective action and institutions of environmental management emerge when cultural selection is the strongest among social groups positioned to solve a given collective action problem. To do this, we construct an evidence typology suited for a historical evolutionary analysis. We find that the scale of cultural adaptation responded to scale of the most pressing adaptive problem. The case study provides support for the group-level selection theory of institutional evolution, and displays patterns of institutional adaptation that respond to changing conditions over time. We argue that the dominant level of selection concept in multilevel selection theory helps to clarify how matches and mismatches between resource scale and institutional scale arise. We conclude that cultural evolutionary theory provides a general causal framework for organizing evidence, and complements the study of environmental history, which provides the temporal depth needed to examine evolutionary hypotheses.