Cumulative cultural evolution drives selection for brains specialized to acquire cultural information.
Evidence
Our unusually big brains, with their slow neurological and behavioral development but rapid evolutionary expansion, is precisely what you’d expect if cumulative cultural evolution had become the driving selection pressure in the evolution of our species. Once cumulative cultural evolution began to produce cultural adaptations, like cooking and spears, individuals whose genes have endowed them with the brains and developmental processes that permit them to most effectively acquire, store, and organize cultural information will be the most likely to survive, find mates, and leave progeny. As each generation gets brains that are a little bigger and a little better at cultural learning, the body of adaptive know-how will rapidly expand to fill any available brain space. This process will shape the development of our brains, by keeping them maximally plastic and “programmed to receive,” and our bodies, by keeping them small (and calorically inexpensive) until we’ve learned enough to survive. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 218
Categorization
- XREF: Ties directly to the stated purpose: brains kept ‘maximally plastic and programmed to receive’ across development implies the timing of when biases like conformist copying harden or relax is under the same selection pressure — relevant to predicting coercion-vulnerable windows. — connects to: Accumulating culture continuously drives selection for bigger brains and better learners — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 206; Human cumulative culture emerges from evolved domain-specific cognitive adaptations for social learning — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 16; Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 365 (+16 more)
Broader Connections
- Human cumulative culture emerges from evolved domain-specific cognitive adaptations for social learning
#expands(0.88) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 16 - Culture is a genetically evolved consequence of social learning adaptations.
#expands(0.87) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 139 - Natural selection shaped psychological mechanisms that determine which cultural beliefs persist.
#expands(0.85) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 3 - Human evolution selected for learnability and behavioral malleability, not fixedness
#corroborates(0.83) - Observational learning enables cumulative cultural evolution of behaviors no individual could invent alone
#expands(0.82) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 19 - Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences
#exemplifies(0.80) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 365 - Cultural learning skills drove rapid human adaptation across all habitats
#corroborates(0.80) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 125 - Cultural evolution can create selection pressures stronger than natural ones
#qualifies(0.78) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 282 - Cultural evolution drove causal understanding more than causal understanding drove cultural evolution
#complicates(0.75) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 377 - Evolutionary and neurological accounts cannot fully explain cultural patterns
#complicates(0.74) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 807 - Cultural variation between groups requires an adaptive explanation consistent with evolved psychology.
#qualifies(0.72) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 8