Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

More praise for The Secret of Our Success

The Secret of Our Success provides a valuable new perspective on major issues in human evolution and behavior. Bringing together topics from such diverse areas as economics, psychology, neuroscience, and archaeology, this book will provoke vigorous debates and will be widely read.

Alex Mesoudi, author of Cultural Evolution

Is the ability to acquire highly evolved culture systems like languages and technologies the secret of humans success as a species? This book convinces us that the answer is emphatically yes. Moving beyond the sterile nature-nurture debates of the past, Joseph Henrich demonstrates that cultureas much a part of our biology as our legsis an evolutionary system that works by tinkering with our innate capacities over time.

Peter J. Richerson, University of California, Davis

In the last decade, in the interstices between biology, anthropology, economics, and psychology, a remarkable new approach to explaining the development of human societies has emerged. Its the most important intellectual innovation on this topic since Douglass Norths work on institutions in the 1970s and it will fundamentally shape research in social science in the next generation. This extraordinary book is the first comprehensive statement of this paradigm. Youll be overwhelmed by the breadth of evidence and the creativity of ideas. I was.

James Robinson, coauthor of Why Nations Fail

With compelling chapter and verse and a very readable style, Joseph Henrichs book makes a powerful argumentin the course of the gene-culture coevolution that has made us different from other primates, culture, far from being the junior partner, has been the driving force. A terrific book that shifts the terms of the debate.

Stephen Shennan, University College London

A delightful and engaging expedition into and all around the many different processes of genetic and cultural evolution that have made humans such a puzzling primate.

Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

THE SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS

How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

JOSEPH HENRICH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton & Oxford

Copyright 2016 by Joseph Henrich

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press

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press.princeton.edu

Jacket art courtesy of ClipArt ETC at the Florida Center for Instructional Technology and Victorian Goods and Merchandise: 2,300 Illustrations, selected and arranged by Carol Belanger Grafton, 1997 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-16685-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934779

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro and DIN Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Jessica, Joshua, and Zoey

CONTENTS

PREFACE

We humans are not like other animals. Sure, we are obviously similar to monkeys and other apes in many ways, but we also variously play chess, read books, build missiles, enjoy spicy dishes, donate blood, cook food, obey taboos, pray to gods, and make fun of people who dress or speak differently. And though all societies make fancy technologies, follow rules, cooperate on large scales, and communicate in complex languages, different societies do all this in very different ways and to significantly different degrees. How could evolution have produced such a creature, and how does answering this question help us understand human psychology and behavior? How can we explain both cultural diversity and human nature?

My journey to addressing these questions, and writing this book, began in 1993 when I quit my engineering position at Martin Marietta, near Washington DC, and drove to California, where I enrolled as a graduate student in UCLAs Department of Anthropology. I had two interests at the time, which Id developed while pursuing undergraduate degrees in both anthropology and aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame. One interest focused on understanding economic behavior and decision-making in the developing world, with the idea that new insights might help improve peoples lives around the globe. In part, I was attracted to anthropology because the research involved in-depth and long-term fieldwork, which I felt had to be crucial to understanding peoples decisions and behavior, and the challenges they faced. This was my applied focus. Intellectually, I was also keenly interested in the evolution of human societies, particularly in the basic question of how humans went from living in relatively small-scale societies to complex nation-states over the last ten millennia. The plan was to study with two well-known anthropologists, one a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographer named Allen Johnson, and the other an archaeologist named Tim Earle.

After a summer of research in Peru, traveling by dugout canoe among indigenous Matsigenka communities in Amazonia, I wrote my masters thesis on the effects of market integration on farming decisions and deforestation. Things were going fine, my advisors were happy (though Tim had departed for another university), and my thesis was accepted.

Nevertheless, I was dissatisfied with what anthropology had to offer for explaining why the Matsigenka were doing what they were doing. For starters, why were Matsigenka communities so different from the nearby indigenous Piro communities, and why did they seem to have subtly adaptive practices that they themselves couldnt explain?

I considered bailing out of anthropology at this point and heading back to my old engineering job, which I had quite liked. However, during the previous few years Id gotten excited about human evolution. I had also enjoyed studying human evolution at Notre Dame, but I hadnt seen how it could help me with explaining either economic decision-making or the evolution of complex societies, so Id thought of it more as a hobby. At the beginning of graduate school, to narrowly focus my energies on my main interests, I tried to get out of taking the required graduate course on human evolution. To do this, I had to appeal to the instructor of the graduate course in biological anthropology, Robert Boyd, and argue to him that my undergraduate work met the course requirements. Id already successfully done this for the required sociocultural course. Rob was very friendly, looked carefully over the classes I had taken, and then denied the request. If Rob hadnt denied my request, I suspect Id be back doing engineering right now.

It turned out that the field of human evolution and biological anthropology was full of ideas one could use to explain important aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Moreover, I learned that Rob and his long-time collaborator, the ecologist Pete Richerson, had been working on ways to model culture using mathematical tools from population genetics. Their approach also allowed one to think systematically about how natural selection might have shaped human learning abilities and psychology. I didnt know any population genetics, but because I knew about state variables, differential equations, and stable equilibria (I was an aerospace engineer), I could more or less read and understand their papers. By the end of my first year, working on a side project under Robs guidance, Id written a MATLAB program to study ).