Anthropogenic Evolution — The Third Driver of Evolutionary Change

Abstract

his paper proposes Anthropogenic Evolution as a named third driver, referring to evolutionary pressure that originates in conscious human choice, distinct in origin from the blind pressure of natural selection or the randomness of mutation. The pathways through which this pressure operates remain existing biological mechanisms, chiefly epigenetic inheritance and, in the case of biotechnology, direct genome editing, rather than a new pathway outside them. The paper argues that human cultural, technological, and ideological decisions function as a distinct, systematically understudied selective environment, with case studies including lactose persistence, dental reduction, and appendix function as traceable biological outcomes of specific cultural choices. It further examines the collapse of classical competitive ecology frameworks under manufactured status competition, and the replacement of the Darwinian reproductive directive with a culturally installed achievement directive. Version 3 clarifies the scope of the central claim following expert correspondence: it removes an earlier section proposing Neanderthal and Denisovan interbreeding as the origin event for metacognition, since that argument did not account for populations that never underwent hybridization, and it more precisely distinguishes the origin of anthropogenic selective pressure from its biological pathway, addressing a distinction raised in review that the earlier framing left unclear.