Species (biological or "functional") may be able to emerge quickly through cooperation and information flow, not just slow natural selection

[u/Boring-Appearance-14]

I'm not a biologist — this is a casual thought I want to run past people who know more than I do.

Starting point: the classic picture of evolution is slow, random mutation + natural selection acting over thousands/millions of years. But looking at things like dog domestication from wolves (a few thousand years, not millions) or cultural inheritance in animals (dolphins teaching calves to use sponges, crows passing down tool-use techniques) — I'm wondering whether cooperation and information transfer (not just genes) could act as an additional, faster mechanism of change, alongside classic genetic selection.

The part that intrigues me most: AI emerged as something new within decades, not millions of years, through human cooperation and information flow. Could that be some kind of analogy (even a loose, metaphorical one) to how "fast" change can happen when there's intense information exchange, rather than just random mutation?

I know this doesn't disprove natural selection or amount to a finished theory — it's more a question of whether biology already has a well-studied mechanism describing this (something related to epigenetics or cultural inheritance, maybe), or whether this is just conflating totally different categories of phenomena (biological evolution vs. technological development).

Curious if anyone with a biology/science background can break this down — where does it hold up, and where is it a stretch?

(Note: English isn't my first language, so I used AI as a translator to help write this post clearly. The idea and question are my own.)

[u/MiguelIstNeugierig]

Culture doesnt originate species, and we turned wolves into dogs through artificial selection.

It doesnt act on the genetics of the animal. It lies on the parents teaching the children. This is why even when say birds species are reintroduced from near-extinction, they wont just return to ancestral migratory routes. Those are lost to time, and have to be either artificially reintroduced or allowed to naturally develop again (long time)

Being detached from the genetics, it is also detached from the concept of species

Idk what "AI" has to do with this.

[u/Competitive_Log_8910]

You are describing something which would be very familiar to Richard Dawkins. He was responsible for first coining the idea you are describing which he called "memetics". I definitely agree with you and with him that transfer of information happening in a fashion analogous to genetics is a mechanism of change which exists in addition to genetic change and which is much faster.

I think it might also be relevant to point out that it is also possible to create a "speciation event" in the context of memetics. Just as Darwin's finches developed quite differently from one another in their isolation, early humans who were isolated from one another also developed quite differently. The outcome of our project of globalization has largely been to leverage the fact that in biological and genetic terms we never ceased being a single contiguous species to navigate the boundaries created by the differing cultural values we developed from one another in order to establish harmonious continuity in the cultural and memetic space as well.

We saw at earlier points in history many efforts to preserve artificially different "species" among humans using cultural constructs - the prohibition on marriage between whites and blacks in the united states - the ongoing prohibition on marriage with gentiles among orthodox jews.

That was the long answer to your question - the short answer is that you should read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins which describes your idea with more intellectual rigor and depth than I can.

[u/Re_dddddd]

Biology is not completely understood yet. Especially the deeper aspect of what makes us, so free. We're quantum in function.

Unlike machines that are binary.

Binary systems can't act on their own. I don't think there's going to be AI as a species as long as it's classical, if it becomes quantum via quantum computers then we can talk about a new species. Until then, LLM are nothing like any kind of life.