I propose that our changing life history pattern is best explained as the fourth evolutionary exaggeration of the characteristic primate life history pattern towards later sexual maturity and longer life expectancy. This is fundamentally
being driven by the same processes as previous primate life history transitions, namely selection for individuals with
ever-greater levels of knowledge, skills, and social coordination, which require ever-longer developmental periods dedicated to learning. However, the major difference between this transition and previous transitions is that this transition’s dominant evolutionary pathway is cultural, as opposed to biological. As a result, the reduction of biological fertility is adaptive for the continued acceleration of cultural reproduction. The on-going selection for cultural reproduction comes at the direct expense of biological reproduction. If true, this could suggest that cultural evolution is in the early stages of modelling and replacing the biological evolutionary process. Such a development would mark a new evolutionary period
in the history of life as all of previous life history was driven
by variant chemical structures harvesting energy to create
more complex replicates of similar forms (as opposed to
variant cultural structures).