For example, some people have argued that personality types—introversion/extroversion—are a product of the pathogen environment. Then they put that together and use it to enrich archaeological cases, whether from Mesoamerica—Mayan, Aztecs, Inca societies—or Mesopotamia and other places. That is a highly technical mathematical branch that then blossoms into modern gene cultural co-evolution and cultural evolution. So, if you really want to energise innovation, you should create larger collective brains — in other words, interconnect more minds and allow information to flow more freely among people with diverse areas of knowledge and expertise. Economists have recently got into this, and they now have quite a bit of evidence that, in order to explain the differences among, say, the wealth of nations or innovation or growth in GDP, culture matters a lot. On the other side, people like Richard Dawkins argued that genetic evolution played an important role in explaining behaviour and human behavioural variation. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com. So what is the explanation for the demographic transition? And some people might disagree. This is something we only see in humans. I would say the most controversial part of his work—the place where there is the strongest disagreement—is about what’s happened in Europe since 1500. 5 Tell me about that and why you’ve picked it. Read ‘Cultural Evolution may be one of the three greatest books ever written in the category 'Optimistic Accounts of Change in Public Opinion.' What we are seeing is a process that’s repeated itself many, many times over, where gradually, over a long period of time, the elites change the rules of the game so they are increasingly favoured. That got me thinking about innovation that then influenced my work on the collective brain. Then, what happens in 1500 in Europe, seems to require additional explanation: something else was afoot in Europe after 1500 that eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution and the mass of European expansion after that. The book was synthesising a bunch of ideas that had been developed by a variety of researchers, in particular William Hamilton and Robert Trivers, on how we can think about evolutionary processes to explain things like cooperation and altruism, which has been a long-running puzzle. The Selfish Gene was written in 1976. A lot of our digestion is actually done externally — so we have to put much less energy into our digestive system. 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I found that a difficult question to give an easy answer to. One of the puzzles that Boyd and Richerson take on in Not by Genes Alone is this puzzle of why it is that Westerners, and now the rest of the world, is decreasing the number of their babies, especially among the rich. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:123–135. One thing I develop in my book is the notion of the ‘collective brain.’ A lot of work on human innovation has assumed that innovation and invention are a product of singular geniuses who racked their brains and came up with ideas. The Secret of Our Success, the book I wrote, has that flavour of pulling together stuff from across the diverse social sciences. Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases. That means that the size and inter-connectedness of societies affects the rate of innovation. Harvard professor and author Joe Henrich picks some of the best books for understanding 'cultural evolution.'. There are various ways to get out of the trap. So if you have a little bit of cumulative cultural evolution: you get some fancier tools and a larger body of knowledge, then there is greater selection pressure for bigger brains that are better at acquiring, storing, and organising that information. So there was no difference in learning ability, but more people to learn from, more sociability and more tolerance allowed humans to cross the divide and begin down this road of gene cultural co-evolution. The first chapter is about a conversation he has with a guy in New Guinea, in which he gets asked, basically, the same question as I had been. It would seem to demand what researchers call an ‘autocatalytic process’ — the process had to fuel itself. So you’re working with academics from all sorts of different fields: anthropology, archaeology? The books also got me thinking about language. Another way is to partition, to think about different groups competing and the genetic composition of those different groups, and that can be useful for certain kinds of problems. You can also have the evolution of teaching, where the transmitter actively helps out the learner and helps make sure they pass on the knowledge. Independent of that memes lineage, there is this lineage of cultural evolution that starts with Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza. I lay out evidence in my book that larger and more interconnected societies produce faster cultural evolution and have fancier tools. Joseph Henrich is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. I assumed that a lot of language learning was innate, or that we had lots of pre-built, evolved machinery for it. If the collective brain idea is right, when we look back historically on this period, the early 21st century, we should see a massive increase in rates of innovation because of all the interaction the new communication technology is permitting. The demographic transition is a big puzzle for evolutionary biology because since about 1870, Western populations have been having fewer and fewer babies. The Selfish Gene There are various ways to get out of the trap. Some have been disagreed with, but in terms of the general importance of the ratchet effect, and cumulative cultural evolution, that seems quite mainstream at this point. … Life may generally be short, harsh, and exploitive, but the values transitions documented by Inglehart suggest that there are viable avenues for social improvement.’ Yes, it is a good test of the ‘collective brain’ idea. It’s a popular book, so it’s written to be digestible to readers who don’t have a biological background. In my book, The Secret of Our Success, I make the case that languages, actually have, even in historical time, gotten more complex, added new tenses, added new grammatical tools, vastly increased the repertoire of vocabularies, gotten more phonemes, and all kinds of things that go along with the rise of complexity. We say, let’s create a richly pluralistic set of methods that use the ethnographic methods of anthropologists, the behavioural, psychological experiments of psychology and behavioural economics, the systematic and rigorous statistics that are best drawn from economics and put all that together, and try and build a single coherent picture of human behaviour that’s rooted in what we know about evolution, but takes seriously the fact that we are a cultural species and that lots of our ability to adapt to our environment and how we respond depends on those things we’ve learned from prior generations. Why is it that you seem to be so rich and have so much and we have so little?’, “Oftentimes populations need an invention and they never get it, and instead they die out.”. Interestingly, in The Selfish Gene, he develops the idea of memes as a rhetorical tool. Genetic evolution is shaping us to be cultural learners, but then the interesting part is that that turns around, and cultural evolution begins to shape our genetic evolution. Diamond tried to make the case that you can go all the way back to the origins of agriculture around the world and use that to explain the poverty and wealth of nations in the year 2000. Will this understanding impact the future and, say, help solve world problems? How are people buried? Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. This is because we have all this culturally learned know-how about how to process foods. Has Mike’s work been generally accepted? How can we explain that? It had to get stronger and stronger. So if you look at how economists think about energising innovation, they often want to increase the incentive to inventors, so beef up the patent laws or create some way in which inventors can make more money on their inventions. “If you really want to energise innovation, you should create larger collective brains — in other words, interconnect more minds and allow information to flow more freely among people with diverse areas of knowledge and expertise.”. That’s a way in which we can use our understanding of genetic evolution to inform how we think about culture and cultural evolution. It seems that if humans do depend so much on sociability and interaction, I expect great things to happen from the internet — and the huge and constant interaction of people and information that it allows. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire We can think about culture as a genetically evolved cognitive adaptation for learning from other people. They don’t end up being larger and more integrated, but they also don’t end up with high degrees of social inequality. This is one of the earlier attempts to consider cultural and genetic evolution. Of course there is disagreement, there is always going to be disagreement. They never get this accumulation of more and more know-how over generations — at least as far as we know, and, if they do, it is pretty light. Why does the term ‘cultural evolution’ seem to be somewhat controversial, then? He’s a comparative developmental psychologist, so a lot of his evidence comes from comparing humans and chimpanzees or other primates and apes, and at the way children accrete knowledge when they are learning a language. It lays out a particular way of thinking where you think about as... 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