Modelling the On-going Natural Selection of Educational Attainment in Contemporary Societies

Abstract

There has been substantial increase in education attainment (EA) in both developing and developed countries over the past century. I present a simulation model to examine the potential evolutionary trajectories of EA under current selective pressure in western populations. With the assumption that EA is negatively correlated with fitness and has both a genetic component and a cultural component, I show that when prestige-biased transmission of the EA (i.e. people with more education are more likely to be copied) is present, the phenotype of EA is likely to keep increasing in the short term, yet the genetic component of EA may be undergoing a constant decline and eventually lead to an overall decrease in the phenotype.\n\nSignificance statementContemporary humans live in very different environments from our ancestors and are subject to very different selective forces. The future evolutionary trajectory of current human populations is thus of both intellectual and pragmatic importance. The present simulation model sheds light on the short-term evolutionary dynamics of educational attainment, and demonstrates the significant contribution of systematically transmitted human culture in shaping the evolutionary paths and producing non-intuitive evolutionary outcomes.