James Heartfield No, they don't shape their environment, because they don't create a mental picture of how they want to change it before they do. Once people introduced
reason into their relationship with nature, they introduced a principle of change that was much more rapid than the leisurely pace of natural selection. So, for example, over around a hundred years, people put something like twenty years onto their life expectancy. That could not have happened through natural selection. It could only happen through the impact of human industry onto human development.
Similarly, if you look at the take-off in population, you will see that the biological existence of the majority of the species is a consequence of that
unnatural intervention of industry and agriculture. We have left evolution behind.
^^^^^ CB: Or we might say that human culture and cultural development are unique human forms of evolutionary adaptation. Culture can't be unnatural, or its practictioners won't survive. Industry and agriculture are not unnatural interventions, or else they 'd be maladaptive. (Or at least they haven't been so far. Modern industry is starting to look a bit maladaptive.) Anyway, so, human cultural adaptation (stone tools, bow and arrow, kin systems, wheel, right on up through industrial factories) is within the process of natural selection. (See cultural evolutionary materialist school in anthropology; Leslie A. White; Julian Steward; Elman Service; Conrad Kottak)
Note that human culture is an extrasomatic, and a LaMarckian-like adaptive mechanisms in that it allows a sort of inheritance of acquired characteristics that cannot be had through genetic adaptation ,which must follow Mendelian rules.