The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on The Secret of Our Success

Abstract

Keywords Cultural evolution. Cultural learning. Multi-level selection. Cognitive science.Homo sapiens: Just another species of animal? While we have many continuities with our primate cousins, and with the other inhabitants of the living realm more broadly, it is also true that people are pretty special. We do all manner of th for example, some of us wear clothes, vote in elections, give hi-fives, or write book reviews. It is also true that we, as a species, have been very prosperous we inhabit a huge range of different habitats, our population has exploded and we are able to dominate and control most of the creatures who attempt to share our habitats with us. In The Secret of our Success (henceforth SOOS) Joseph Henrich argues that these properties are connected that those idiosyncrasies of our behaviour that we tend to term for the success our species enjoys. We think this a most reasonable ss, slowness and dullness of senses, we have been able to out-compete so many much stronger, faster and physically less vulnerable animals. A solitary, unequipped and uneducated human is generally a fairly unimpressive specimen. But allow her access to her culture and all that it can do and she might move mountains.The devil is in the detail of this appealing thesis, however. W it, and what is the nature of its connection to our success? SOOS presents as a trade book, so it is packed with colourful examples, personal observations, anecdotes, and connections with current events; the language is racy and informal. This makes it a lively, engaging read in which the author emerges in a good way as a swashbuckling anthropologist. Navigating the high seas of field work, and thrusting the sword of laboratory intervention, Henrich is trying to bring it all together into a new, coherent picture of human origins. But, perhaps inevitably, the details and the logical structure are somewhat difficult to divine. SOOS succeeds in giving an exciting glimpse of the rapidly expanding academic literature on cultural evolution and will be sure to attract new enthusiasts to the topic. A dryer text may have served better as a contribution to the literature, however. We accordingly focus, in this review, on discussing how we would like to see the field develop, and what we wish the book had spelt out. First, we offer the following summary of the main ideas on display. SummaryHenrich claims that human beings are unique different from all other animals in that they engage in a process of Cumulative Cultural Evolution (hereafter CCE). It is the technological and cognitive products of CCE, he argues, that explain our extraordinary success. Henrich allows that some nonhuman animals may be capable of some cultural evolution, but he insists that only humans have become able to sustain cultural evolution in its cumulative form.

Williams syndrome, human self-domestication, and language evolution

“…And vice versa, of course, because our mode of cognition, mostly resulting from biological changes, has a significant impact on our cultural practices. Importantly too, cultural changes can also affect our cognitive architecture via the creation of "cognitive gadgets" through subtle modifications in learning and data-acquisition mechanisms like attentional focus or memory resources (Clarke and Heyes, 2017;Lotem et al, 2017). That said, it is clear that we still need to disentangle the complex relationships that seemingly exist between genes (in particular, candidates for language-readiness and candidates for domestication), behavior, and the environment (physical and cultural), which we expect that account for the evolution of language (and languages).…”

Enquire within: cultural evolution and cognitive science

“…The most fully developed populational account of cultural evolution is known as dual-inheritance theory [5][6][7][8], or the 'California school' [9,10]. This impressive body of work is 'evolutionary' in at least three respects.…”

“…Some of these processes-known collectively as 'learning', 'intelligence', 'insight' or 'foresight'-make individuals, or, as in science, groups of humans working together, smart enough to come up with new solutions to old problems, to distinguish better from worse solutions and selectively to adopt the good ones. The crucial question is whether there is another way, a third way, in which human thought and behaviour can become adapted: a process that selects among cultural rather than genetic variants, and in which the adaptiveness of the selection does not depend on individuals or groups being smart enough to design novel solutions or to recognize what works and what does not [10,18,19]. Thus, the 'third-way' question is: Are human thought and behaviour made adaptive-made to fit their environments-not only by genetic selection and intelligence but, at least sometimes, by cultural selection?…”

“…Faced with the many requirements for third-way cultural selection, and threats against their fulfilment, cultural epidemiologists are sceptical about a third way, arguing that cultural change is rarely, if ever, a process of adaptation. By contrast, dual-inheritance theorists appear to remain optimistic about the possibility of cultural selection, but have not explained how the requirements could be met in spite of the threats [10,23]. This may have been part of what Sterelny ([9, p 43]) had in mind when he said that dual-inheritance theorists 'do not seem to think of selection and fitness in causally robust ways' (see §2 above).…”

Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

“…e.g. Milroy & Milroy 1992, Dahl 2004, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky 2009, Fagyal et al 2010, Trudgill 2011, Maddieson & Coupé 2015, Clarke & Heyes 2017, Nichols 2018.…”