The secret of our success : how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter

The secret of our success How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter

Joseph Patrick Henrich

Book - 2016

"Humans 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 ove...r 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."--provided by publisher.

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this

2nd Floor Show me where

599.938/Henrich
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 599.938/Henrich Checked In
Subjects
Human evolution.
Social evolution.
Behavior evolution.
Cognition and culture.
Published
Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Joseph Patrick Henrich (author)
Physical Description
xv, 445 pages : illustrations, maps, charts ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-427) and index.
ISBN
9780691166858
  • Preface
  • 1. A Puzzling Primate
  • 2. It's Not Our Intelligence
  • 3. Lost European Explorers
  • 4. How to Make a Cultural Species
  • 5. What Are Big Brains For? Or, How Culture Stole Our Guts
  • 6. Why Some People Have Blue Eyes
  • 7. On the Origin of Faith
  • 8. Prestige, Dominance, and Menopause
  • 9. In-Laws, Incest Taboos, and Rituals
  • 10. Intergroup Competition Shapes Cultural Evolution
  • 11. Self-Domestication
  • 12. Our Collective Brains
  • 13. Communicative Tools with Rules
  • 14. Enculturated Brains and Honorable Hormones
  • 15. When We Crossed the Rubicon
  • 16. Why Us?
  • 17. A New Kind of Animal
  • Notes
  • References
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This book synthesizes, in a format accessible to general readers, research from a variety of disciplines that address, in varying ways, the evolutionary journey begun about 6 million years ago by our primate ancestors, forming humans, in the process, into a unique species centered, according to Harvard evolutionary biologist Henrich, around social learning, cultural transmission, and cumulative culture. Humans did not leave biology behind, he argues. Instead, we channeled genetic change to make us better at social learning and cultural transmission. Accordingly, in this view almost any aspect of human lifeways as a species has been subject to cultural evolution. The directionality of our evolution, he points out, is not determined by reproductive success, but uses instead what makes for more productive social learning and cultural transmission through imitation, thus raising a question: Whom should we imitate? The answer: Those most likely to have the knowledge and information we need for navigating our created social world; that is, he says, the successful, prestigious, or majority, which makes the basis for the directionality of our evolution sound like a mantra for the advertising world--or is something missing in his synthesis? Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate collections. --Dwight Read, University of California, Los Angeles

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Henrich (human evolutionary biology, Harvard Univ.; coauthor, Why Humans Cooperate) posits a unique approach to understanding human behavior, not in purely evolutionary terms, but as a process of cultural evolution. His book explores culture-gene coevolution-a snowball effect that occurs when a species, such as humans, intertwines cultural adaptations with evolutionary ones. Our ability to evolve as a cultural species provided such crucial artifacts as writing, and once individuals with a propensity for cultural imitation and transmission existed, natural selection began favoring these individuals over others. Henrich argues that no other species on Earth has been able to achieve culture-gene coevolution, a condition that propels humanity forward to this day. -VERDICT Recommended for readers of general social science and especially those with an interest in evolutionary aspects of cultural transmission.-Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

As Henrich (Evolutionary Biology/Harvard Univ.; co-author: Why Humans Cooperate, 2007, etc.) notes, we humans are big-brained but not big enough, for "our kind are not that bright, at least not innately smart enough to explain the immense success of our species." A glance at the TV would bear out that idea, but the author means the observation as a prelude to a larger construct: individually, we harbor all sorts of weaknesses, from shortness of step to smallness of thought, but collectively, we are capable of arriving at solutions to problems that would elude any single one of us. Just so, he observes in an often repeated formula, though by brain size alone we should be able to beat apes in most tasks, in an important study, our "hairy brethrenmostly tied [us] in a wide range of cognitive domains." Where we excel over other species is in social learning and behavior of related kinds; in another important study, "chimpanzees and capuchins revealed zero instances of teaching or altruistic giving," whereas the human preschoolers the apes were compared to showed all manner of teaching, learning, sharing, and giving. It may not be a Mister Rogers world out there, but Henrich's point, though belabored, is well-taken. While it is true that, left to their own devices, humans are prey to every fallacy there is, together we manage to think and muddle through. That's culture, and that's our advantage as humans. It's good ammunition for the crowdsourcing advocates among us, though Henrich's argument is more extensive than that. The writing is sometimes dense but always comprehensible, and it's refreshing to see someone argue from an unabashedly Darwinianor post-Darwinian, anywaypoint of view without trying to edge away from terms such as "natural selection" and "evolution." What does it mean to be human? Henrich's book, a pleasure for the biologically and scientifically inclined, doesn't provide the definitive answer, but it does offer plenty of material for a definition. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Similar Items