Evolution has always been a genetic thing. It works through random changes that persist when they help life endure. It’s long and slow and has been doing its thing for millennia. But that machinery might’ve already been bypassed by another one. Timothy Waring and Zachary Wood have published new research arguing that culture has overthrown DNA as the primary driver of human evolution. It’s the idea that it’s not your genes that matter most anymore, it’s whether you’re born into, say, a functioning power grid that gives you a chance, or whether your institution keeps you alive long enough to pass on anything. The old evolutionary pressures have been absorbed into new ones, mainly, institutions, technologies, and infrastructures. Genes are still there and still important, but they’re more like background code at this point.

Newsweek published a very stupid article trying to make this sound reassuring, like humans have discovered a faster way to evolve by sharing eyeglasses and building hospitals. It’s an interpretation that reflects the author’s lack of a deeper critique of technological society. The reality is colder. Evolution has been privatized. As a result, survival is mediated by systems you don’t control. The algorithm that decides your mortgage rate has more influence on your offspring than your chromosomes. Your kid’s “fitness” isn’t about sturdy bones and good vision, but whether their school district gets funded or whether their environment is habitable compared to others. To put it in the simplest way possible, evolution has been hijacked by infrastructure.

Timothy and Zachary compare this shift to earlier transitions in individuality. So, single cells becoming multicellular organisms, ants becoming eusocial colonies, etc. They describe it as humanity merging into higher-order systems, a kind of group-level superorganism. It’s not a bad metaphor. A bit peachy for my tastes, but I don’t disagree with the basic premise that humans are evolving into cooperative colonies. However, I’d posit that there are darker implications once you’re part of a larger system because you’re no longer the unit of survival. In our current moment, the state or the platform becomes the real organism. You’re just one specialized cell, interchangeable and optimized for throughput until you burn out. The way I understand it, the evolutionary drift is a story of assimilation into the Machine, not collective flourishing.

Now, if cultural inheritance floated free in some egalitarian ether, I’d have a different view on this. But it doesn’t. It runs on cables, platforms, legal codes, and profit motives. Whoever owns the servers sets the conditions of evolution. If cultural systems are the new genes, then Amazon, Google, Palantir, and the state security nexus are the new genetic engineers. That means culture is administered. Adaptive practices don’t just spread miraculously; they’re monetized and patented, many gated behind subscriptions. The eyeglasses example being used in the research write-ups is evidence that you now run at the whim of a supply chain that can break down in a week if a port closes or a contract fails.

The researchers warn against thinking of this as progress, and they’re right. Evolution selects for whatever works in the moment. Sometimes that means antibiotics, sometimes it means gulags. The system doesn’t care. It rewards whatever perpetuates the apparatus, no matter how destructive it feels when it’s happening. “Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast… it’s not even close,” Zachary says. Agreed. But I’d add that techno-capital eats culture for dinner. The new evolutionary drivers are already wired into the feedback loops of markets and states, bending human survival toward whatever sustains the cybernetic core.

You see the horror here. If evolution is now driven by culture, the struggle centers on the systems that control access, which are infrastructures that decide who continues and who falls out. Some groups will adapt faster, regardless of their biology, because their institutions hoard resources more effectively. Others will collapse into chaos or dysfunction, regardless of their biology, because their water runs out or their servers go dark. It’s infrastructural selection.

So they may be right, humanity may be undergoing a “major evolutionary transition,” but I don’t think we should just assume it’s the utopian collective Newsweek implies. It’s the absorption of the human into a higher-order system of control. We’ve become part of a cybernetic body where the organism is the Machine, and in that organism, you are not the future. You are just another cell that may or may not be replaced.