Human evolution is intricately linked with culture, which permeates almost all facets of human life from health and reproduction, to the environments in which we live. Nevertheless, our understanding of the ways in which stably transmitted, evolutionarily relevant human cultural traits might interact with the human genome is incomplete, and methods to detect such interactions are limited. Here, we describe some rules of cultural transmission which could pertain to both humans and cultural nonhuman animals that could lead to the formation and maintenance of stable associations between cultural and genetic traits. Next, we show that, in the presence of such associations, a process analogous to genetic hitchhiking is possible in gene-culture systems. These could leave signatures in the human genome similar to, and perhaps indistinguishable from, those left by selection on genetic traits. Finally, we model selective interference between cultural and genetic traits. We show that selective interference between a cultural trait under selection and a genetic trait under selection can reduce the efficacy of natural selection in the human genome, both in terms of the probability of fixation of beneficial alleles and the dynamics of selective sweeps. We then show that the efficiency of selection at genetic loci can, however, be increased in the presence of strong cultural transmission biases. This implies that the signatures of gene-culture interactions in genetic data may be complex and wide-ranging in gene-culture coevolutionary systems.
Keywords: gene–culture coevolution; hitchhiking; selective interference.