Culturally transmitted skills created selection pressures shaping human anatomy and physiology

Evidence

Overall, cultural evolution can, and has, powerfully shaped the human genome in a variety of important ways. As we saw in chapter 5 , this culture-gene coevolutionary interaction goes well back into our species’ history, where culturally transmitted know-how about fire, water containers, tracking, and projectiles were some of the key selection pressures favoring aspects of our anatomy and physiology. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 313

Categorization

• XREF: Links to fire, water containers, and projectile know-how as selection pressures; relevant to understanding how culture is a selective force, groundwork for the later developmental-psychology claims. — connects to: Accumulating culture continuously drives selection for bigger brains and better learners — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 206; Human digestive organs are dramatically undersized for our body compared to other primates — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 221; Cooking evolved culturally and reshaped human digestive anatomy and function — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 224 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural evolution can create selection pressures stronger than natural ones #corroborates (0.90) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 282
• Human evolution selected for learnability and behavioral malleability, not fixedness #expands (0.90)
• Cumulative cultural evolution drives selection for brains specialized to acquire cultural information. #expands (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 218
• Humans were evolutionarily selected for learnability, not behavioral fixedness #exemplifies (0.87)
• Cultural learning skills drove rapid human adaptation across all habitats #expands (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 125
• Cultural adaptation physically rewires the brain and perception #exemplifies (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2238
• Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences #exemplifies (0.82) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 365
• Natural selection shaped psychological mechanisms that determine which cultural beliefs persist. #complicates (0.75) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 3