Can I update Amazon's old versions of pip and setuptools?

Can I update or remove the pip and setuptools provided with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

The versions of pip and setuptools provided with my AWS Elastic Beanstalk Python environments (in the 2.7 virtual environment running my application, ami-d14608e1; in /opt/python/run/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages) are very old: as reported by

pip list --outdated

they are

setuptools (Current: 2.2 Latest: 12.0.5)
pip (Current: 1.5.4 Latest: 6.0.7)

Can I update these (e.g. by listing them in my requirements.txt) or are these specific versions expected by or needed for EB's Python and deployment processes to work?