Humans have spread across the globe and in doing so have needed to modify their environment to their biological condition. Our modification of our environment is seen most visibly in the production of cultural artifacts, like roads, which allow us to travers our environment; but this is also seen in our production of culturally instituted behaviors, such as resting on Sunday, which determines the locations of humans; and the production of ideas, such as the American dream, which helps direct us towards maintaining and producing specific cultural artifacts and behaviors. This modification of our environment, via our cultural progress, is a form of evolution for it still represents a change our species is making within the larger project of being best fitted to our environment.

One of the first examples of cultural evolution that came to my mind occurred roughly seventy years ago, in the beat neck movement. The beat neck movement was a rejection of the dominant ideas surrounding what it meat to be happy and the conformity and meaninglessness of the behaviors that were set up to the means to that end. They rejected consumerism as a avenue to happiness, and instead turned to a self informed spiritualism – inspired by the eastern religious traditions that were beginning to make their way to America, and LSD which was discovered in the late 1940’s and began gaining real popularity in the 1960’s. This evolution out of consumerism and individualism was not fully realized, but most clearly was the bubbling up of some radical ideas from disparate sources which just so happened to catch on and propagate themselves through a culture. As the beat neck movement became integrated into the hippy and counter culture revolution, a most amazing evolution happened on the side of our previously established culture. To make the established culture more fit for survival against this counter culture, the establishment generated it’s own new yet not fully radical idea and behavior – the war on drugs. Quickly we saw an association between hippies with marijuana, and African Americans with crack cocaine (who were of course beginning to realize the black power movement), and with this association came the justification for the criminalization of the members of this counter culture, effectively dismantling it, and freeing the establishment of this threat.

Another example of a modern human evolution has been the amount of jobs that an single person will have throughout their life time. a while back, the average person would work the same job their entire life, and now, it is estimated that the average American will switch professions 7 times over the course of their lives. This cultural evolution is a direct response to another change in our culture, which is the rate of change that our culture is experiencing. This rate of change has reached such a speed that some jobs become obsolete within a single person’s lifetime, leading them to need to get a new job.