An honored assignment

I just wrote a newspaper article on Professor Richard Dawkins, for which I got to meet and interview him. Here's an excerpt:

Me: I was wondering, does evolution occur only in response to changes in the physical environment? The reason why I ask is, assuming humans will evolve, can actual physical change occur in response to memes or culture?

Richard Dawkins: When you say 'does it occur only in response to physical environment,' physical environment can be narrowly interpreted meaning something boring like the weather, tracking ice ages and droughts. Already in talking about arms races I've moved away from that. Evolution is progressive because predators respond to prey, and prey respond to predators, parasites, and so on.

You're talking it one stage further and asking about memes, which is another way of saying cultural evolution. I suppose I could interpret your question by saying there's co-evolution between culture and biological genetic evolution. One drives the other and the other drives the one. This point of view has been made, and I think it is an interesting one.

Genes are being naturally selected in a world which includes culture. Culture is itself evolving in a non-genetic way orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. And so there could be theoretically a co-evolutionary arms race between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

An example might be the origin of language. Cultural or genetic evolutionary change made language possible. Then language itself evolved by non-genetic cultural means. That created a new environment for genetic evolution in which those individuals who were best at exploiting the culture's language were the ones who reproduced best. That changed the conditions in which cultural evolution could take place. You could imagine a kind of software-hardware co-evolution. So yes, I think so.