The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich CHAPTER 1 A PUZZLING PRIMATE - #giocodelsopravvissuto - #intelligenzachenonspiega @obbedienzarito #ilgrandecumulo @infanziavecchiaia
our ancestors spread across the globe, from the arid deserts of Australia to the cold steppe of Siberia, and came to inhabit most of the world’s major land-based ecosystems—more environments than any other terrestrial mammal. Yet, puzzlingly, our kind are physically weak, slow, and not particularly good at climbing trees.Read more at location 208
Compared to other mammals of our size and diet, our colons are too short, stomachs too small, and teeth too petite. Our infants are born fat and dangerously premature,Read more at location 213
Perhaps most surprising of all is that despite our oversized brains, our kind are not that bright, at least not innately smart enough to explain the immense success of our species.Read more at location 215
Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins.Read more at location 218
Let’s face it, chances are your human team would lose, and probably lose badly, to a bunch of monkeys, despite your team’s swollen crania and ample hubris.Read more at location 227
we are not so impressive when we go head-to-head in problem-solving tests against other apes,Read more at location 233
the reason why your team would lose to the monkeys is that your species—unlike all others—has evolved an addiction to culture. By “culture” I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.Read more at location 239
The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species.Read more at location 245
learning from others—so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation.Read more at location 248
This interaction between culture and genes, or what I’ll call culture-gene coevolution, drove our species down a novel evolutionary pathwayRead more at location 256
our capacities for learning from others are themselves finely honed products of natural selection. We are adaptive learners who, even as infants, carefully select when, what, and from whom to learn. Young learners all the way up to adults (even MBA students) automatically and unconsciously attend to and preferentially learn from others based on cues of prestige, success, skill, sex, and ethnicity. From other people we readily acquire tastes, motivations, beliefs, strategies, and our standards for reward and punishment.Read more at location 259
creating the extended childhoods and long postmenopausal lives that give us the time to acquire all this know-how and the chance to pass it on.Read more at location 267
Along the way, we’ll see that culture has left its marks all over our bodies, shaping the genetic evolution of our feet, legs, calves, hips, stomachs, ribs, fingers, ligaments, jaws, throats, teeth, eyes, tongues, and much more.Read more at location 268
Psychologically, we have come to rely so heavily on the elaborate and complicated products of cultural evolution for our survival that we now often put greater faith in what we learn from our communities than in our own personal experiences or innate intuitions.Read more at location 270
Once we understand prestige, it will become clear why people unconsciously mimic more successful individuals in conversations;Read more at location 278
The evolution of prestige came with new emotions, motivations, and bodily displaysRead more at location 281
Beyond status, culture transformed the environments faced by our genes by generating social norms.Read more at location 282
cultural evolution initiated a process of self-domestication, driving genetic evolution to make us prosocial, docile, rule followersRead more at location 287
How did rituals become so psychologically potent, capable of solidifying social bonds and fostering harmony in communities?Read more at location 290
why does careful reflection cause greater selfishness? Why do people who wait for the “walk signal” at traffic lights also tend to be good cooperators?Read more at location 292
How did our species become the most social of primates, capable of living in populations of millions, and at the same time, become the most nepotistic and warlike?Read more at location 294
The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brainsRead more at location 296
emerge not from singular geniuses but from the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights among interconnected minds and across generations.Read more at location 300
innovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.Read more at location 304
Like our fancy technologies and complex sets of social norms, much of the power and elegance of our languages come from cultural evolution,Read more at location 305
Why are languages from people in warmer climates more sonorous? Why do languages with larger communities of speakers have more words, more sounds (phonemes), and more grammatical tools?Read more at location 309
However, as you’ll see, we don’t have these tools, concepts, skills, and heuristics because our species is smart; we are smart because we have culturally evolved a vast repertoire of tools, concepts, skills, and heuristics. Culture makes us smart.Read more at location 319
cultural evolution has influenced the development of our brains, hormonal responses, and immune reactions, as well as calibrating our attention, perceptions, motivations, and reasoning processes to better fit the diverse culturally constructed worlds in which we grow up.Read more at location 323
culturally acquired beliefs alone can change pain into pleasure, make wine more (or less) enjoyable
