Books that influence me most tend to do so by giving me new glasses to see the world through: [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453215833s/1842.jpg|2138852] for seeing the impact of environments on history; [b:The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York|1111|The Power Broker Robert Moses and the Fall of New York|Robert A. Caro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403194611s/1111.jpg|428384] for seeing how power operates; [b:The Death and Life of Great American Cities|30833|The Death and Life of Great American Cities|Jane Jacobs|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1168135326s/30833.jpg|1289564] for seeing how cities work; [b:The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention|262579|The Unfolding of Language An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention|Guy Deutscher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386925063s/262579.jpg|254521] for seeing how language changes. This book promises to have a lasting influence on me by giving me new glasses for seeing how culture impacts human beings and their societies.

It synthesises insights from physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, experimental psychology and economics into an inter-disciplinary evolutionary analysis: what makes human most special among animals is that we learn and teach culture; our cultures are what allow us to dominate the globe, rather than our individual faculties; culture changes the human body over evolutionary timescales by standing in for biological functions (e.g. cooking for high-power digestion); culture can be good for human beings even though they do not know why (his main example is manioc processing that removes poisons which would only be damaging in the very long term); culture proliferates among individuals by means of evolved learning processes biased towards copying success; humans instinctively seek out, follow, and punish deviation from cultural norms; and culture proliferates among social groups by differential success in sustaining and expanding those groups. Henrich doesn't give it a name but perhaps Evolutionary Functionalism would be appropriate (Functionalism is the anthropological theory that culture tends to integrate societies and promote cooperation).

Taken individually, most of the individual insights were familiar (which was why I put the book down when I first flipped through it), but coming back to it I realised that what makes this book special is the way in which it brings them all together into a unified perspective on human culture that is a new way of looking at it. For example, take bonding practices in hunter-gatherer bands. Henrich brings up evidence that a member of a band is typically related closely only to a minority of band members. So how do bands form as cooperative units? The standard answer derived from biology and economics is that if kin-altruism does not suffice, then it must be reciprocity. But, of course, hunter-gatherers do not merely reciprocally exchange with each other; they practise naming traditions, fictive kinships, initiations, collaborative rituals, and so on, which produce social bonds that go way beyond what economics predicts. Why then do such seemingly functional, pro-social practices prevail? Henrich's answer is that such practices give an advantage in cultural-evolutionary terms to groups that practise them: they are more likely to win wars, conquer territory, maintain common identity and wider-spread inter-group cooperation when they grow and fission, and hence out-compete groups whose cultures do not promote cooperation so strongly. Nearby groups will preferentially adopt cultural forms from the dominant group, whether by force, emulation or inter-marriage (even non-adaptive culture might get included along with adaptive). The same principles go for technology or any other cultural form that drives differential group success, and the bigger the socialising group the better the technology becomes, simply by the greater frequency of invention and sharing.

Group-selection theory usually falls down (this is Richard Dawkins' critique in regard to genetic evolution) because of the free-rider problem: somebody who selfishly benefits from group cooperation without contributing to it will do even better than those who cooperate, and so the genes for cooperation will fail to spread preferentially. But, as Henrich shows, human beings are powerfully drawn to punishing the violators of cultural norms, even those which are entirely arbitrary. Cooperation according to cultural norms plus punishment of defectors mean cultural forms really can be objects of group-selection pressure. He gives empirical examples from experimental psychology and, indeed, from some history of traditional societies.

Most impressively, Henrich takes the penultimate chapter to synthesise a lot of knowledge about archaic humans so as to lay out a speculative theory of how a variety of aspects of human evolution, biological and behavioral, came together to enable and promote cultural learning.

As I say, little here is brand new when looked at piece by piece, but to put it all together like this, from human instincts through a theorised pattern of culture-enabling evolution all the way to inter-group politics, is certainly new to me: the analysis of human beings as the species in a unique cultural niche, and of their societies as under group-selective pressure for adaptive culture. It's impressive.

The book's limitations prompt further questions:

1. How does the functional or group-selective theory of cultural evolution jibe with work by Pascal Boyer ([b:Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought|786153|Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought|Pascal Boyer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1414350823s/786153.jpg|772151]) and Dan Sperber on the way in which cultural forms tend to spread not by strict imitation, but with a constructive bias in content towards certain, potentially instinctive, psychological "attractors"? Sperber in that article wants to subsume Darwinian selection pressure as just one form of cultural attractor. How does cultural evolution change when there are cultural producers determined to exploit our biases and attractors for their own financial or politcal interests?

2. If humans are as conformist as Henrich argues them to be, then what explains the common phenomenon of adolescent rebellion? Henrich discusses adolescence only as a time of cultural "apprenticeship" but this is clearly inadequate. What explains the proliferation of subcultures wherever they are free to express themselves?

3. How, if at all, does functional group selection of culture apply in agricultural societies characterised not by small-group consensus but by large-scale inequality and internal conflict: for example in the first coercive resource-extraction civilisations such as the ancient silt-based Sumer, Egypt and Indus? Is exploitation a favoured strategy in group selection? Does group-selection theory have anything to say about historical transitions in modern times from the moral economy, to capitalism, to the welfare state? Is capitalism functional in the group-selective sense despite producing deep conflicts of material interest between classes which would seem to militate against social integration? Is there a relationship between cultural norms and the cycles of boom and crisis identified by Jack Goldstone, such that societies which develop more egalitarian norms find it easier to stabilise conflict and ward off state collapse? ( )

Lots of interesting stuff here, although I couldn't follow all of it. The ideas of cultural evolution lead to a lot of great questions. ( )

In The Secret of Our Success Joseph Henrich makes a detailed argument that cultural evolution has been a key force shaping humanity. This force has been around longer than homo sapiens and has shaped our bodies, our minds, and our societies.

Cultural evolution is the idea that culture — the accumulation of knowledge across generations —has been a key influence in the biological evolution of humanity. Cultural learning, not intelligence, is the secret of our success.The book gives a number of examples how, unlike most animals, if you put people in an unfamiliar-but-livable environment, our intelligence alone is not enough to help us survive. Our culture is a critical part of our ability to survive and thrive

Because of this, there are many ways in which humans have evolved to learn. We seek out people to imitate. We form mental models of their goals, techniques, and motivations. We live in large groups where there are many people we can learn from, and we have kinship ties which help others around us tolerate our initial incompetence.

To illustrate that culture has really evolved us and is not merely a layer on top of an evolved substrate, the book spends quite a while discussing specific ways in which culture has interacted with genetic evolution, including changes in the structure of our bodies, our digestive system, and various genes that control our physiology.

Groups are key to cultural evolution. Groups can be more innovative than individuals because there are more people to learn from, leading to more effective accumulation of cultural innovations. The innovative ability of groups is the key factor leading to accelerating cultural evolution. Group innovations include things individuals can use on their own, such as learning a particular hunting technique. However, cultural evolution goes beyond the individual. It also drives the emergence of procedures, techniques, and social norms which embody knowledge that has been learned over time. This knowledge is often not explicitly visible to those who use those procedures. For example, food preparation often has many elaborate steps which reduce toxins, although it isn't always clear how. Social norms and taboos often work to increase sharing and cooperation even when they are driven by concerns about reputation or evoking negative supernatural effects.

Group norms spread through intergroup competition. This can include violence, but often does not. Effective group norms also spread through imitation, higher survival rates, higher reproduction rates, and migration patterns which favor successful groups.

It seems fairly clear that once the cycle of cultural evolution starts, it can keep building on itself, but how and when did it start? For when, Henrich looks at archeological evidence. The spread of tools indicates that imitative cultural learning existed millions of years ago. By 750,000 years ago, we see archeological evidence of technology which implies cultural evolution and we see physical change to human predecessors which imply the influence of culture evolution (e.g., food processing methods changing our jaw and digestive systems). Somewhere between the emergence of cultural learning and 750,000 years ago, cultural evolution kicked off.

How did this happen? As noted above, groups were a critical part of this. Henrich hypothesizes that human predecessors lived in larger, more stable groups than other primates. They were terrestrial which may have encouraged them to live together. They also may have had more stable social groups because of pair bonding and kin networks which arose from the need to take care of offspring with long developmental periods.

Overall, Henrich makes a compelling case for the role of cultural evolution as the key factor which drove human society to a complexity not matched by any of our fellow creatures. ( )

Love him or hate him, Jared Diamond's resource and geography-based theories of differential human social complexity in Guns, Germs & Steel have spawned an entire genre of Big History books refuting, supporting, or extending his arguments, and it seems like every few months there's an important new entry in the Big History field that presents a new angle on those research questions. Henrich's discussion of how gene-culture coevolution differentiates humans from all other species on earth thanks to our ability to pass on better ways of doing things is a fascinating bridge between E. O. Wilson's work on the logic of kin selection vs group selection in social animals in his books On Human Nature and The Social Conquest of Earth, as well as Peter Turchin's work on how cooperation and competition between and within human groups drives social complexity in his books War and Peace and War and Ultrasociety. Our dependence on culturally transmitted knowledge is a tremendous strength that allows our collective intelligence to conquer seemingly any environment on earth, even while individual humans are absolutely terrible at figuring out basic survival skills, or really just about anything, purely from scratch. The ideas in here interact well with Smithian/Hayekian theories of the importance of the division of labor, as well as more common sense ideas about the importance of public education and freedom of speech for spreading and improving general knowledge. That there's solid evolutionary theory here as well puts this in the top tier of Big History books. ( )

Excellent non-fiction on the concept of cultural learning, cultural evolution, and gene-culture interaction. Henrich argues that the success of the human species derives from the capacity to pass on complex cultural information and practices, and that this capability must be understood as a selected trait. He makes a compelling case, and one studded with wonderful pieces of detail. My favorite was the pellagra story: detoxification rituals (which pre-columbian cultures used to un-fix niacin in corn and avoid pellagra), and then how Goldberger finally traced the cause. But there were a number of others -- the co-evolution of exhaustion hunting with water containers, tracking, and target identification, the unfortunate Tasmanians who *lost fire* and the Inuit who (post an epidemic) lost fishing tridents and kayaks.

Some thoughts/criticism:
1. Chili in food as an analogy for morality. It starts as an unpleasant necessity, but becomes an acquired taste.
2. Henrich over-eggs the argument. Cultural learning is a tremendous boon. But humans are also smarter than chimps. Henrich makes much of the struggles of fish-out-of water westerners set down in hostile environments. Sure, but let's see how a chimp does when dropped on an ice floe.
3. The augury as a randomization tool argument I just don't buy. It's ingenious (randomization is hard, behavioral biases could be maladaptive) but it's just a bit too neat, and I would want more correlation between the practices where randomization helps and the practice of augury. Henrich refers to some -- but it does not mesh with my understanding of Greek and Roman augury, which seemed to be used all the time for crackpot purposes. (I should ask Tim!).
4. If you train up chimps and then test them against human infants, you have my respect. But Henrich also cites many social-psych style experiments that I just generally discount to zero. Perhaps unfair.
5.Culture/biology co-evolution is just terrifically compelling (lactose tolerance, shorter large intestines, etc., etc.). Hard to believe it does not translate to cognition, and psychology, with the evolution of color terms in language a terrifically suggestive example. It also could providea compelling explanation for the Flynn effect, and relatedly why getting people incrementally better at Raven matrices has not yielded 10x more Galoises and Ramanujans. ( )