Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2016) *****

I was more than impressed by Henrich's other, more recent work - The Weirdest People In The World - that I went back to his successful earlier book "The Secret Of Our Success". Henrich is an anthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. 

In this book, Henrich explains how nature and nurture are in fact meaningless concepts, since humans have evolved, also genetically as the result of cultural evolution, and we have changed nature around us as well. We depend on our cumulative culture for survival, we need to live in cooperative groups, using allo-parenting, the division of labour and information, and on our communicative abilities to be what we are today: a biological anomaly, a new kind of animal. The chronological concept that we are developed in nature, and then later developed our culture is an erroneous one: our culture affects our genes and our genes affect our culture: both co-evolve, and are still co-evolving. Henrich provides numerous examples from biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics, economics, history and anthropology to build his convincing case. 

We are a cultural species, whether we want to or not, and understanding this, will help us understand the perspectives of others even better. We are not determined once and for all. Henrich ends his book with eight insights that will help this understanding and paving the way for future research and human progress.  Especially his examples related to language, communication, cooperation and collective brains show how collaborative and communal efforts have led to benefits for us all. Henrich gives examples of how highly intelligent and resourceful explorers did not manage to survive in difficult situations (from the arctic to the Australian desert), despite their brains and technology, while local indigenous people did. They lacked the collective intelligence of the local tribes. 

Henrich's sweeping picture of humanity is well-substantiated and easy to read. For instance, his example that humans can outrun quadrupeds in terms of endurance, and have done so daily as hunters, for the simple reason of using gourds of water they took with them to compensate for sweating and dehydration. The cultural invention compensates for the natural deficit, turning it into an advantage, and thus better chance of survival. 

It's a humbling and insightful book, well-written and compelling. Henrich concludes:

‘To move forward in our quest to better understand human life, we need to embrace a new kind of evolutionary science, one that focuses on the rich interaction and co-evolution of psychology, culture, biology, history, and genes. The scientific road is largely untravelled, and no doubt many obstacles and pitfalls lie ahead, but it promises an exciting journey into unexplored intellectual territories, as we seek to understand a new kind of animal.’