be more dominant than others until they begin to form an individual species themselves.
However, one living species do not evolve biologically and that is humans. Humans are very
much cognitive in nature than other living species. They rely on their complex thinking and
creativeness to survive. Humans also have a much higher capacity of learning especially
through mistakes. Through their complex thinking, they come up with ways, methods and
ideas to solve their problems and through creativeness and trial and error, they invent
effective tools to help implement these ideas and methods. It is in all these that lie the
differences between biological and cultural evolution. All other species evolve biologically
over time to survive nature or a change in environment. However, for human beings, a change
in environment will produce a change in ideas, methods, belief systems etc. to survive. They
do not change bodily in the sense but the way they think and act will change over time.
Initially, both types of evolution are dependent on factors of survival and the environment as
catalyst for change. However, when things get beyond survival and the environment factor,
the biological change will slow down to a seeming halt while the cultural will continue to
evolve especially in the human species. When surviving their environment is no longer an
issue, humans turn to improving their lives, to make living easier and more convenient, to
better organize themselves and their individual societies to achieve that end. As humans
discover and learn new things, their technologies change and improve. Their knowledge and
perception of the world around them change through time. Thus cultural evolution will always
continue to exist in humankind as humans continue to discover and rediscover about
themselves and the world they live in. Meanwhile other living things around them have slow
down or stop evolving physically.
The level of cultural evolution, however, varies among the human species. Human societies
have different levels of progress especially in technology, some are fast and some are very
slow. Those societies that progress fast become much more advanced, more dominant than
the others. Over time, the gap between the cultural societies widen until when at some point
these societies meet, there is a great conflict of ideas and ways resulting in the more superior
or advance cultures and societies overtaking the backwards, older and weaker ones. This leads
to the problem of cultural domination and oppression. It gives rise to those backwards and
slow developing societies being labeled as “barbarians” or “uncivilized” and making for
excuses of the political agenda of more powerful ethnic or cultural societies to conquer or
enslave and even drive to extinction the weaker cultures and societies.
Despite the problem of cultural evolution and the seeming slow down or even maybe
disappearance of biological evolution, these two are key and essential aspects in
anthropology. In the study of the humankind, it encompasses the physical, mental and cultural
aspects of the human species, from its past history to modern times. The origins of human
societies, the how and why of them coming to what and where they are now, their looks, their
behavior, their way of living, their technologies and inventions and the tremendous variations
within humankind itself. All these can be traced through the biological and cultural evolution
of humans and the world around them. Thus, both concepts of evolution are very important
and two of the keys to learning and understanding humankind as remarkably unique and
diverse, apart from all other species which co-exist in our world.
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