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.’

Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People In The World (Allan Lane, 2020) *****

If you did not know, but W.E.I.R.D in the title stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic". It's the kind of bias that we find in pscyhological studies. Henrich is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He explores how Western culture developed differently than other cultures, with diverging responses and perspectives on things, but he goes a step further too: by evidence from anthropology, economics, history, religion, law and psychology, he gives a sweeping picture of why the West has become what it is today, how it has evolved, and become dominant across the globe. 

One of the more eye-catching analyses are his statistics on the Catholic church's prohibition of first cousin marriages in Europe as of the fourth Century. This resulted in a seismic shift in village growth, and horizontal mobility. Men had to move to other places in order to find a wife. This led to a more individualistic approach instead of a collective one. It meant that other values became dominant, that commercial exchanges and rational arguments became more important than kinship and generational ownership. That hierarchy of clan elders was replaced by more citizen representation. This simple fact, also led over the longer term to the diminished power of the Church itself on society. Even today, countries with the highest kinship values are often the ones with the lowest levels of democracy. This holds even true in countries like Italy, where high cousing marriages in some provinces in the 20th Century still have effects in lower election participation in the 21st Centruy. Participatory and representative forms of government are the result of societal changes that abolished first cousin marriages. It seems far-fetched at first hearing, yet the evidence and the statistics that Henrich presents are solid and compelling. 

This evolution changed society over centuries and led to the intellectual, technological and political progress we have witnessed in the West. Henrich describes and explains this change. He does not judge or pontificate that the West is best. 

Obviously all this has its effects on policy, and how to address the differences in culture for people living within the same country. Migrations and subcultures require different approaches, and in international politics one has to be aware that what works in some countries, will not necessarily work in others. This is obvious, but Henrich offers us the insights and some of the tools needed to be aware of it and to work with it. 

The book is an eye-opener, and entirely original in its broad scope and synthesis of so many disciplines.