The Impact of 'Anthropotechnology' on Human Evolution

Abstract

From the time that they diverged from their common ancestor, chimpanzees and humans have had a very different evolutionary path. It seems obvious that the appearance of culture and technology has increasingly alienated humans from the path of natural selection that has informed chimpanzee evolution. According to philosopher Peter Sloterdijk any type of technology is bound to have genetic effects. But to what extent do genomic comparisons provide evidence for such an impact of 'anthropotechnology' on our biological evolution?

Companion Animals as Technologies in Biomedical Research

“…This third attitude toward animals is influenced by behaviorism and computation logic, and philosophers of technology who hold this attitude extrapolate from input-output machines to the behaviors of animals, which they read as simplistic and unreflective (Baird 2004;Ferre 1988). Newer scholarship on animal tool-use and the relationship of humans to technology shows more nuance (Blad 2010;Shew 2017).…”