Download PDF The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter By Joseph Henrich
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Ebook About How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.Book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter Review :
It is curious that we have so many books about how culture influences DNA-based evolution and so few books about the evolution of culture. Joe Henrich's book is firmly in the former category. His book is all about the origin of human nature.There are problems with studying the distant past: evidence is difficult to obtain; experiments are challenging to perform; and predictions are difficult to test. It would make sense for students of cultural evolution to look to modern cultural dynamics, which are not afflicted by these problems.In fact, Joe doesn't discuss about cultural evolution very much. He doesn't provide an introduction to the topic or attempt to explain how it works. Instead he assumes a theory of cultural evolution and goes on to use it to analyze the evolution of the DNA genes of our ancestors.Perhaps all the study of the influence of culture on DNA is a bias arising out of academic funding sources. Or maybe the researchers involved all copied each other. What risks getting lost here is the idea of culture as a largely independent system evolving along broadly Darwinian lines that operates on a different timescale to the evolution of DNA genes and proceeds largely independently from it. Ancient history is all very well, but there's also the modern world, technology, the internet and the future to think about.Anyway, it's not entirely fair to criticize a book because of its chosen subject area. In fact, the book is vastly better than most books on the topic of human genetic evolution because Joe is using a sensible theoretical framework which includes cultural evolution. If I had to describe the book in one word, I would use the term "solid".Joe argues for the importance of our collective brains, and against the significance of our individual brains. This is well-trodden territory by now, but Joe's book provides an excellent overview of this topic.Joe has spent some of his life visiting the cultures he studies, and his book has many anecdotes from them. At the start I feared that the book was too anecdote heavy. For a scientists describing evidence as 'anecdotal' is a popular way of saying it is practically worthless. Fortunately, Joe goes beyond anecdotes frequently enough for me.I was hoping to find material about the cultural brain hypothesis - which Joe publicly supported in 2012. This is the idea that was pioneered by Susan Blackmore, that culture drove the expansion of the human brain. However this idea got very little coverage in the book.I was also expecting to find some support for and advocacy of group selection. The topic is rarely mentioned in the book. Joe does start out by saying that he is going to go beyond the kin selection and reciprocity explanations for cooperation championed by Dawkins and Pinker. He then spends some time in the book attempting to establish that groups of our ancestors regularly wiped each other out - but this seems obvious and uncontroversial to me. I was expecting some kind of case to be made for group selection, but I missed it.Overall, I didn't find much to disagree with in the book. There were a few issues. For example, at one point, Joe proposes that millionaire generosity is performed so that others will copy them, and they will benefit from living in a more cooperative society. I'm pretty sure that this is mostly wrong. Virtue signaling explains such generosity. Millionaire generosity is largely performed out of reputational concerns - as proposed by Robin Dunbar in a paper titled "Showing off in humans: male generosity as a mating signal".Joe argues that cumulative cultural evolution made our species special. This seems to be a fairly common position, but it ignores the fairly substantial scientific evidence that chimpanzees also have cumulative cultural evolution. The difference between our culture and theirs is not so much that ours accumulates and theirs does not, but that their cultural accumulations run into a low complexity ceiling.I also worry about Joe over using the concept of a norm. There's more to cultural evolution than norms, and I'm concerned that constantly thinking in terms of evolving norms misses out the evolution of all the non-norms.Another suspect section was titled 'move over natural selection'. Joe writes: "since the rise of cumulative cultural evolution natural selection has lost its status as the only "dumb" process capable of creating complex adaptations". I was left wondering whether Joe though cultural adaptations formed without selection, or whether he thought that such selection was not "natural".In the end, I was left wondering about the author's position on many other points as well. Joe seems to have only covered the areas where the science was fairly settled. I would have liked to see more speculation and exploration of controversial issues. I guess then the book wouldn't have been so solid. For a long time I've disliked the flimsy, ad hoc use of culture as an explanation for social phenomena. It favors a rhetorical trick I call "cultural over-fitting" that goes a little bit like this: Take something difficult to understand, like economic growth, social conflict or the prevalence of extreme poverty, and recall how it's mostly explained by observable features -like the stock of physical capital or land lock-in- but also by unobservable ones. Proceed to suggest how some characteristic of culture, that you define, falls into the unobservable features. (At this point it'd be good to give it a familiar name: trust, entrepreneurial drive, social cohesion, etc.) Then act as if you knew how your explanan behaves to whatever end you seek: if you want to say it causes growth or poverty, go ahead and do it; if you want to say it hinders growth or reduces poverty, go ahead and do that, too. Perform this feat as often as you like: culture's vague boundaries can be made to be whatever you want them to be.Cultural over-fitting correlates well with any outcome, so it never really helps explain anything.Then I read Henrich's explanation for why blue eyes are a product of culture and genetic evolution. As humans moved to higher altitudes, the lower exposure to sunlight reduced the ability of UVB light to synthetize vitamin D, given that melanin in dark skin blocks much of this process. Some populations in the Baltic area did not have a high vitamin D in their diet because they had already switched to agriculture, heavy on cereals, which are not as high in vitamin D as other diets - like those of other populations in high altitudes who fished more (e.g. eskimos). The combination of the selective pressure to maximize vitamin D from sunlight in a cereal-fed population led to the specific mutation in HERC2 gene, which affected nearby OCA2 gene that reduced melanin in the skin -a mutation that also happens to reduce melanin in the eyes- and, therefore, causes blue and green eyes. "If cultural evolution hadn’t produced agriculture, and specifically techniques and technologies suitable for higher latitudes, then there would be no blue or green eyes" (p. 85). This is the oddly named "The Secret of Our Success" at its best: a complex web of experimental and theoretical insights from all behavioral sciences that explains culture's role in human evolution.Culture, Henrich argues, is not whatever the user of the over-fitting trick I described above wants it to be, but an even larger bag of tricks made by the interaction between information embedded in our genes and information stored, and updated, in our collective minds. "Our species’ uniqueness, and thus our ecological dominance, arises from the manner in which cultural evolution, often operating over centuries or millennia, can assemble cultural adaptations." (p. 33). The array of cultural adaptations, as described in this book, is astonishing: the digestive system, lactose tolerance, sweat, faith, tolerance to alcohol, divination rituals, spicing food, prestige, menopause, altruism and language itself are all elements that embody cultural evolution, which Henrich describes as "a consequence of genetically evolved psychological adaptations for learning from other people." (p. 35). At some point in our evolutionary past, humans crossed a threshold, where culture could serve as an information repository of knowledge and provoke adaptations in a quicker way than genes could.The carefully chosen anthropological, psychological, economical, historical and experimental evidence Henrich uses to illustrate his points are exemplary - they are unforgettable. The Naskapi ritualistic solution for hunting caribou prey that, effectively, randomizes their hunting ground to maximize the likelihood of success. Or how societies can forget to make and manipulate fire. Or how the hunting strategies imparted by grandmother killer whales on their grandchildren to catch seals near the coast can help explain human menopause. Or the similarity, and later divergence, in learning capabilities between chimpanzees and human children as both grow up. The book is full of astonishing examples that still provoke a sense of awe upon recollection.Culture is social learning. Powered by networks of brains, which are reinforced by social norms, it helps accumulate knowledge through generations, altering our biology and shaping our genes. "The Success of Our Success" is a great example of its main message, as it distills a very complex, deep, argument in a clear and rigorous way.This book is a social science jewel. Unforgettable and erudite of the likes of Diamond's "Guns, germs and steel" and Beinhocker's "The origin of wealth". I hope to re-read it soon. 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