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The distinction I'm making is selection power. Culture does have selection effects, but they're noisy and very weak compared to "generate 10,000 embryos via IVF, the one with the highest genetic score for trait X is selected, rest are destroyed". And I'm not even sure that the cultural traits we're concerned with go back that full 40,000 years; Confucianism doesn't exactly predate Confucius.
Selection is a thing, yes, obviously, but honestly at this point I don't think it's currently worth worrying about. High-power eugenics techniques are coming to fruition, nuclear war's pretty likely in the near future, and we could all be killed by AI or whatever in the next couple of centuries. It's like worrying about rain acidification eroding a limestone cave when the cave also has an armed nuclear bomb in it; the current direction of the trendline is of no consequence because there is essentially no chance that it will have enough time to go anywhere before getting scrambled.
You sorely underestimate how quickly evolution happens. It only took a few very silly ideas to become memetically enshrined in our collective consciousness to radically alter the genetic trajectory of the United States. And that's only within our own lifetime.
Evolution does not take hundreds of thousands of years. Events like the Black Death, Feudal Law which likely led to a genetic pacification of European people due to persistent executions of something like 2% of the most criminal population annually, will change a population within several generations. The feudal system likewise brought higher TFR for the upper classes which functionally led to the genetic replacement of the lower classes and the emergence of a Middle Class. You cannot ignore the millennia of evolution in Europe and assume that they are selecting for the same type of personality as in Indonesia, or that these differences are not radical enough to lead to powerful selection effects. They absolutely are.
And I've already presented a very clear example of memes becoming genes in the form of the Jewish religion, although I don't mean to single Jews out because we are all products of the same forces, it's just one of the clearest cases out there of myths and symbols leading to the selection of types of people, and not over tends of thousands of years, either- much faster than that.
Embryonic selection is not high-power, it is extremely low power. High-power eugenics is filming a Movie that convinces people they should be really concerned about demographic change and organize to mass deport illegal immigrants to keep the country majority white. Or making a movie that convinces them they are an evil person if they care about racial demographics (high-power dysgenics!).
Embryonic selection cannot hold a candle to the high-power eugenic technique of planting an idea into the heads of the collective consciousness. And the rationalists most eager to pretend that something like embryonic selection is a substitute for the harder task of memetically challenging the Culture are just proving they are still slaves to it just the same.
Ah, perhaps I should specify more fully. Widely-deployed embryo selection is far higher-power than culture. This is because, if you kill/sterilise the most offensive 2% of the population every generation, you're only cutting off a bit of the tail - and a tail imperfectly correlated with the genes, because penetrance is not 100%. Embryo selection is powerful because you can cut off 90%+ of the distribution, and you can select on genes directly.
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