Hatchet was a lie!
In
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Joseph Henrich demonstrates that people are mostly not very bright and that our culture's collective knowledge—rather than intelligence, grit, or pluck—allows us to thrive.
In "Lost European Explorers," Henrich points out at length that European explorers consistently die in novel wildernesses unless they, like Roald Amundsen, work to learn from the people who live there. I wondered when reading these passages if the English explorers' deaths might also be attributable to cultural arrogance. There is one scene in which the Inuit find the Franklin expedition, who would view the Inuit as savages in need of cultural elevation, eating their shipmates. One imagines the Inuit slowly backing away.
The work made me think a lot about how we should approach education. One takeaway is that individuals are actually not very smart (even relative to chimps in some measures) and we should be careful about what we discard when interacting when picking up cultural know-how. We should maybe also strive to do more exploring of cultural understandings and of disciplinary knowledge. Henrich's success seems to come from his backgrounds in engineering, anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. The depth of his ideas comes in part from the breadth of his study.
I found
The Secret of Our Success often fascinating, and I also appreciate reading about nongenetic evolution. And yet, I often found this a take it or leave it work, chapter by chapter. The failing may be mine, however, as evolution is not my first subject.
Notes.
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Entering my third year, with a master’s under my belt, I decided to go back to the drawing board—to start over, in a sense. I consciously took a “reading year,” though I knew it would extend my time to the PhD by one year. […] I started by going to the library to take out a stack of books. I read books on cognitive psychology, decision-making, experimental economics, biology, and evolutionary psychology. Then I moved to journal articles. I read every article ever written on an economics experiment called the Ultimatum Game, which I’d used during my second and third summers with the Matsigenka. I also read a lot by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as well as by a political scientists named Elinor Ostrom. […] Of course, along the way I never stopped reading anthropological ethnographies. xi
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. […] 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. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative. That is, hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking know-how, and edible-plant knowledge began to improve and aggregate—by learning from others—so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation. […] This interaction between culture and genes, or what I’ll call culture-gene coevolution, drove our species down a novel evolutionary pathway not observed elsewhere in nature, making us very different from other species—a new kind of animal. 3
Since working memory uses the neocortex, and humans have much larger neocortices than chimpanzees, we might expect adult humans to significantly outperform any chimpanzees in head-to-head competition. Two Japanese researchers, San Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, set up just such a chimp-virus-human showdown. […] These chimps faced off against university students. For working memory, our species did well. In the easiest task, when six digits remained on the screen for a full 0.65 seconds, 7 of the 12 humans beat all the chimpanzees. […] However, when the numeral flashes got quicker and the task got tougher, Ayumu beat all the humans. Interestingly, as the flash of numbers sped up, Ayumu’s performance remained consistent whereas the humans’ performance, as well as that of the other chimps, rapidly degraded.
For informational processing speeds, which is the time from the end of the flash until the participant hits his first white square, the chimpanzees ruled. Every chimpanzee was faster than every human, and their speed did not vary with their performance. By contrast, faster human responses tended to be less accurate.
Typically, at this point, humans start making excuses for their uneven performance, arguing that the playing field was not level. 16-7
Why couldn’t these me survive, given that some humans do just fine in this environment? King William Island lies at the heart of the Netsilik territory, an Inuit population that spent its winters out on the pack ice and their summers on the island, just like Franklin’s men. In the winter, they lived in snow houses and hunted seals using harpoons. In the summer, they lived in tents, hunted caribou, musk ox, and birds using complex compound bows and kayaks, and speared salmon using listers (three-printed fishing spears). The Netsilik name fo the main harbour on King William Island is Uqsuqtuuq, which means “lots of fat” (seal fat). For the Netsilik, this island is rich in resources for food, clothing, shelter, and tool-making. […] The reason Franklin’s men could not survive is that humans don’t adapt to novel environments the way other animals do or by using our individual intelligence. None of the 105 big brains figured out how to use driftwood, which was available on King William Island’s west coast where they camped, to make the reserve composite bows, which the Inuit used when stalking caribou. They further lacked the vast body of cultural know-how about building snow houses, creating fresh water, hunting seals, making kayaks, spearing salmon and tailoring cold-weather clothing. 23 -4.
Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptions. Culture, and cultural evolution, are then a consequence of genetically evolved psychological adaptations for learning from other people. That is, natural selection favoured genes for building brains with abilities to learn from others. These learning abilities, when operating in populations and over time, can give rise to subtly adaptive behavioural repertoires, including those related to fancy tools and large bodies of knowledge about plants and animals. 34-5
Domains of cultural learning include: food preferences and quantity eaten, mate choices, economic strategies, artifact (tool) functions and use, suicide, technological adoptions, word meanings and dialect, categories (“dangerous animals”), beliefs, social norms, standards of reward and punishment, social motivations (altruism and fairness), self-regulation, judgement heuristics. 36
Surrounded by a sea of ice above the seventy-fifth parallel, the Polar Inuit live in an isolated region of northwestern Greenland, at the farthest reaches of the Inuit’s massive expansion across the Arctic. They are the northernmost human population that has ever existed. Sometime in the 1820s an epidemic hit this population of hunters and selectively killed off many of its oldest and most knowledgeable members. With the sudden disappearance of the know-how carried by these individuals, the group collectively lost its ability to take some of tis most crucial and complex tools, including listens, bows and arrows, the heat-trapping long entry ways for snow houses, and most important, kayaks. With the loss of kayaks, the Polar Inuit became effectively marooned, unable to maintain contact with other Inuit populations from which they could relearn this lost know-how. […] The population declined until 1862, when another group of Inuit from around Baffin Island ran across them while traveling along the Greenland coast. The subsequent cultural reconnection led the Polar Inuit to rapidly reacquire what they had lost, copying everything, including the style of Baffin Island kayaks. 211
Larger and more interconnected populations generate more sophisticated tools, techniques, weapons, and know-how because they have larger collective brains. 218
Interconnectedness is important because ti means more individuals have a chance to access the most skilled or successful models, and thereby have a chance to exceed them, and so can recombine elements learned from different highly skilled or successful models to create novel recombinations. 220.
The African immigrants (our ancestors) who were contemporary with Neanderthals were a touch innately dumber. However, they had larger collective brains capable of generating greater cumulative cultural evolution. These larger collective brains resulted from bigger and more tightly interconnected social groups as well as from individuals who experienced longer adult lives (on average). Longer adult lives means more time for learning, both from diverse other people (to create novel recombinations) and from individual experiences, as well. As for retransmitting this wisdom to others. More specifically, Neanderthals, who had to adapt to the scattered resources of ice-age Europe and deal with drastically changing ecological conditions, lived in small, widely scattered groups and periodically suffered shocks that reduced their population size. 226
Empirically, however, what surely doesn’t work in case after case is providing people with “the facts” or “education,” in part because we are selective cultural learners who evolved to acquire practices and respond to social norms. The framing of the message and the messenger are crucial, but the mini causal models (the “facts”) are merely secondary—only necessary to support any acquired practices or social norms. 328
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