> And our great health, wealth, and peace have greatly reduced selection pressures; cultures hardly ever die anymore. Somewhat ironic that this is on the front

> And our great health, wealth, and peace have greatly reduced selection pressures; cultures hardly ever die anymore. Somewhat ironic that this is on the front page of HN next to this article about recovering lost languages from old tapes: https://theconversation.com/how-were-recovering-priceless-audio-and-lost-languages-from-old-decaying-tapes-248116 https://theconversation.com/how-were-recovering-priceless-au... Whether cultures die depends on what you consider a culture. But languages are often regarded as an important pillar of culture, and that article mentions a language that died within the last 40 years. And that's far from the only one. More languages are dying all the time. Similarly, small "cultures" are disappearing constantly: local hobbyist groups of various kinds, craft traditions, all sort of things. You can argue that these are only cultural practices and not "whole cultures", but when enough of these things die, the culture has effectively died. It may die in a ship-of-Theseus way where it slowly morphs into something else, but still when that happens, there can come a point at which what the original culture was is lost. That process definitely continues to happen, and probably is accelerating in the present day.