The Secret of Our Success
How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
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The Secret of Our Success
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Yen
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Written by:
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Joseph Henrich
About this listen
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 over 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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2015 Princeton University Press (P)2018 TantorWhat listeners say about The Secret of Our Success
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2021-08-03
Deeply Fascinating Better than Sapiens
Explains the synergistic effects of social learning and cumulative cultural evolution, and how they affect even our biological evolution. Fascinating evidence and explanations give you insight into the development of homo sapiens. The performance is excellent. In comparison to the acting performances needed for fiction, I just couldn't rate it on the same scale.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- J. Bird
- 2022-08-19
Read this instead of Sapiens...
Dr. Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success pulls together the most recent information and field studies and experiments from anthropology, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, and psychology, to explain what makes us human.
It is that rare kind of book, the kind that opens your mind, that pushes you to understand the world and your place in it in a new way.
Henrich makes the case that it is not our big brains or our ability to make tools, it is not language or bidpedalism,
that makes us uniquely human - it is cultural evolution, or more correctly, dual-path culture and gene co-evolution.
About 1.8 million years ago (not 40-70 thousand years ago as in Harari’s Sapiens) humans crossed a cognitive Rubicon, a tipping point of cumulative cultural evolution: we finally found a way to build on what past generations had learned, which meant that each generation could start from a higher floor, unlike other animals including other primates.
Human history started to move forward. This was not a sudden cognitive Big Bang. It was a gradual process of incremental, cumulative social learning, through imitation and copying and trial-and-error, keeping the more useful and successful ideas and techniques. There were occasional leaps (chance insights, stupid luck, rare discoveries), and many false turns and regressions (communicating and copying information is lossy and error-prone, especially in small isolated groups). Progress was slow and unpredictable, but it was relentless (through the ineluctable machinery of evolution).
Henrich explains the processes of social learning: how human children naturally copy and imitate observed behaviour (including unnecessary steps); the importance of prestige in identifying who to learn from and copy; how we expect and look for norms and rules; how these social norms and conventions reinforce learning and sociality and information sharing, and allow humans to cooperate in larger, inter-connected groups.
It is not only culture that evolves: genetic evolution works in concert with cultural evolution (bigger brains to hold more information, bipedalism frees up hands to make and use and carry tools, hands become more supple, shoulder joints for throwing projectiles, vocal chords and other genetic changes for language, intestines shorten because we learned how to use fire to cook food…). Feedback loops between genetic evolution and cultural evolution are what drive human development, building on each other in unexpected ways. For example, communication capabilities and tool making evolved in tandem: FOXP2 mutations involved in grammar and sequential thinking (tool building, recipes) were selected for procedural tool building then repurposed for communication (or maybe the other way around).
It is a bewilderingly complex but wonderful story, clearly told, with deep explanatory power. Henrich is intellectually humble: he knows that some of the ideas that he presents may be incomplete or incorrect, and he expects other scientists to jump in, but the overall picture makes too much sense to be wrong.
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