Joseph Henrich — The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

206 published claims from this book.

• A 7000-10000-year-old ADH1B gene variant protects against alcoholism by inducing flushing
• A culturally evolved tool can restructure an individual’s mental capacities
• A group’s social interconnectedness outweighs individual intelligence in producing innovation
• A reading brain area emerges around age eight and matures by adolescence
• Accumulating culture continuously drives selection for bigger brains and better learners
• Adaptive complexity can come from cumulative culture, not genes or intention
• Adaptive culture often arises without individual designers even noticing.
• Adopting cheese technology can halt a population’s lactase gene evolution
• Agriculture is only the best-detectable of many culture-driven genetic revolutions
• Alkali cooking practices released corn niacin preventing pellagra across the Americas
• Arctic survival depends on interlocking, non-obvious cultural techniques no individual could reinvent.
• Arctic survival turned on borrowing local cultural knowledge rather than novel invention
• Asymmetric payoffs in strategic games can be tested with chimps and humans
• Average 1815 Americans would score below IQ 70 on today’s scale.
• Baltic agriculture led to genetic selection for very light skin
• Bigger-brained species evolve longer childhoods to permit learning
• Bipedal sweating humans can run prey to fatal heat stroke
• Bird augury works as a randomization device countering cognitive and copying biases
• Birth-canal constraints halted brain expansion and forced postbirth growth tricks
• Brain expansion via longer lifespans makes species extinction-prone
• Caribou hunting rewards randomization because prey learn to avoid previously successful hunting spots.
• Caribou shoulder-blade divination worked as a randomizing device defeating hunter confirmation bias.
• Causally opaque taboos about fish reduce poisoning during pregnancy
• Causally opaque technologies make individual learning lethal and select for faith in tradition.
• Children activate causal reasoning mainly when observing people use cultural artifacts
• Children, unlike chimps, overimitate even when causality is transparent
• Chimpanzee boundary patrols systematically murder rivals and expand territory.
• Chimpanzees outperform humans at strategic randomization in competitive games
• Chronic cyanide poisoning from manioc emerges gradually with delayed symptoms.
• Collective brain size, not individual intelligence, may have driven Neanderthal replacement
• Collective numbers, not individual genius, drive human intellect’s reach.
• Combining conformist learning with age cues reliably yields adaptive answers.
• Complex tools preceded and drove the evolution of causal-model reasoning.
• Concealed ovulation forces male presence that solidifies paternal bonds
• Confident models and accurate imitation strengthen children’s normative judgments.
• Conformist transmission is triggered by difficulty, uncertainty, and stakes
• Conformist transmission lets learners aggregate dispersed wisdom rapidly
• Conformist transmission means overcopying the majority beyond its base rate
• Conformist transmission occurs across many social-learning species.
• Cook ended scurvy by exploiting prestige copying rather than force or education.
• Cooking evolved culturally and reshaped human digestive anatomy and function
• Cooking is a culturally learned skill, not an innate instinct
• Copying same-sex models activates dopamine reward circuitry like receiving money
• Cultural accumulation made individual ingenuity insufficient for survival.
• Cultural and genetic evolution began mutually reinforcing each other around 2 million years ago
• Cultural economic packages drive genetic differences even between nearby populations
• Cultural evolution can create selection pressures stronger than natural ones
• Cultural evolution drove causal understanding more than causal understanding drove cultural evolution
• Cultural evolution has been the central driver of human genetic evolution for eons.
• Cultural evolution sustains costly norms that help neither the group nor the individual.
• Cultural learning can transmit behaviors that natural selection eliminates.
• Cultural learning dominates when individual learning is costly.
• Cultural learning instincts emerge in infants and operate automatically and unconsciously
• Cultural learning machinery must activate early in development
• Cultural learning transmitted a scripted suicide epidemic through Micronesian youth
• Cultural tools replaced anatomy, so natural selection weakened human bodies
• Culturally accumulated packages can outperform the individuals who inherit them
• Culturally transmitted skills created selection pressures shaping human anatomy and physiology
• Culture has redirected human genetic evolution since Homo erectus, not only recently.
• Culture is a genetically evolved consequence of social learning adaptations.
• Culture supplied the water capacity that genes alone could not, enabling endurance running adaptations
• Culture-driven cooking let natural selection shrink gut tissue to fund bigger brains
• Culture-fueled lactose persistence spread to a third of humanity in ten millennia
• Cumulative cultural adaptations cannot be improvised by individuals in years.
• Cumulative cultural evolution can create complex, well-designed adaptations without any designer
• Cumulative cultural evolution drives selection for brains specialized to acquire cultural information.
• Cumulative culture began over a million years ago.
• Demonstrating learning does not disprove genetic natural selection.
• Dependence on fire shaped a psychological content bias for fire learning.
• Descending from the trees to eat rotting fruit drove apes to evolve alcohol tolerance
• Detoxification techniques are not rediscovered even after centuries without them
• Diffusing meat ownership reduces self-serving bias in distribution.
• Dominance psychology is older than prestige and runs on fear-based coercion
• Effective cooking techniques resist discovery through individual trial and error
• Elders gain prestige because age signals accumulated cultural knowledge and wisdom.
• Equatorial dark skin evolved to block UV light from destroying folate.
• Europeans got pellagra because they lacked alkali corn processing
• Even a language-trained bonobo cannot master Oldowan technique
• Even running form is learned culturally from prestigious elders
• Even skilled Europeans starved in environments where locals thrived without their knowledge
• Every human society processes food using generations-old accumulated techniques
• Evolutionary psychologists see the human mind as many domain-specific evolved instincts, not fewer
• Expert tracking is culturally acquired knowledge, not innate instinct
• Failure to recognize lactose persistence drove harmful universal milk-promotion policy for decades
• Faith in cultural inheritance improves survival only in cumulative-culture species
• Females pair-bond with males partly for their locally inherited knowledge
• Fire-making skill is so dependent on social transmission that groups can lose it
• Food taboos induce meat sharing without anyone understanding they do so.
• Forager water-procurement know-how is nonobvious cultural knowledge that genes could not supply
• Human arrival caused most global megafaunal extinctions.
• Human brains tripled in size mostly within the last two million years
• Human childhood and adolescence are specialized periods for cultural learning that other primates lack.
• Human cognitive plasticity extends through enduringly plastic development shaped by culture
• Human digestive organs are dramatically undersized for our body compared to other primates
• Human endurance hunting succeeds only by tracking, not sheer stamina
• Human intelligence largely derives from culturally inherited tools rather than individual brainpower.
• Human slowness in these games reflects effortful inhibition of automatic imitation
• Human success stems from culture, not individual intelligence.
• Human survival competence depends on inherited knowledge, not innate wit alone
• Human toddlers’ sole cognitive advantage over great apes is social learning
• Humans are biologically dependent on cooked food and cannot survive long without it
• Humans can be trained to match chimpanzee working-memory accuracy.
• Humans copy even fitness-destroying practices when prestige cues are present
• Humans copy spontaneously and automatically far more than chimpanzees do.
• Humans currently satisfy the criteria for a major biological transition.
• Humans dominate diverse habitats despite physical weakness and sparse innate knowledge
• Humans infer unseen traits of new species from essentialized hierarchical categories.
• Humans keep brains plastic and unmyelinated well into the third decade of life
• Hunter-gatherer bands are mostly not made up of close genetic kin.
• Impulse control loss increases punishment of unfair offers but not fair ones.
• Individual intelligence alone cannot sustain human survival without cumulative cultural knowledge
• Individual intelligence results from culturally accumulated tools rather than raw brainpower
• Infants only eat plants others have modeled as edible
• Information loss from imperfect copying is a constant drag on cultural transmission
• Innate aversions to capsaicin can be overridden by cultural learning
• Intergroup competition selects prosocial norms that can simultaneously dehumanize outsiders.
• Inuit snow houses are engineered adaptations no single builder consciously designs
• Kantus exhibit a success-biased copying bias that produces counterproductive plot clustering
• Lactase persistence varies dramatically even among neighboring African ethnic groups.
• Larger interconnected populations counteract the inherent lossiness of cultural copying
• Learners adopt causally opaque cultural practices through implicit trust in accumulated wisdom
• Learners cannot discover toxicology by trial and error because feedback is delayed.
• Learners shift from copying prestige to trusting their own skill judgments.
• Learners suppress causal reasoning when cultural transmission supplies ready-made models
• Learning from five models beats learning from one in a controlled transmission chain
• Light-colored eyes exist only because agriculture created selection for pale skin
• Lone individuals with ancestral know-how out-survive well-provisioned expert teams.
• Long postreproductive human lifespans evolved to transmit accumulated cultural knowledge.
• Marriage residence norms measurably shape Y-chromosome and mitochondrial variation
• Matching students to same-ethnicity instructors measurably reduces dropout and raises grades
• Medical professionals actively resisted Goldberger’s correct pellagra model because the intuitive one was wrong.
• Memory about animals is biased toward over-reporting danger.
• Mentalizing abilities emerge by eight months and sharpen in toddlers
• Mentalizing may have evolved for cultural learning rather than for social manipulation
• Milking created selection pressure that extended lactose processing past infancy.
• Modeled eating, not touching, licenses infant plant consumption
• Monetary fines can replace shame with a purchasable fee, worsening behavior.
• Most hunter-gatherer societies faced frequent or continuous warfare with high death tolls.
• Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences
• Natural selection independently produced five distinct lactase-persistence mutations across herding populations
• Natural selection traded costly muscle for fat to store energy for big brains
• Never violating a taboo prevents learners from disconfirming it, preserving it via negativity bias.
• Norms disciplined by communal punishment drove genetic evolution toward human docility.
• Observing another’s pain response changes observers’ own physiology
• Once cultural knowledge accumulates, individuals cannot invent better traits than they can copy
• Over 100 human genes show likely selection with cultural origins
• Passive observation of locals transfers little skill without active guided practice
• People follow adaptive taboos without any shared causal understanding of why
• People increasingly rely on copying successful others as problems grow harder or more uncertain
• People mostly fail to understand how their own institutions work.
• Placebo adherence alone doubles heart attack survival odds
• Pre-industrial humans drove megafaunal extinctions wherever they newly arrived.
• Prestige and dominance are distinct social statuses with separable reproductive effects
• Prestige evolved as a second status system distinct from dominance
• Prestige evolved to gain access to skilled cultural holders’ know-how
• Prestige grants influence far beyond the domain of skill
• Prestige leaks across unrelated domains, making celebrity endorsement powerful
• Prestige status emerges from second-order cultural learning cues, not verified skill
• Prestige status requires explanation as information-goods access.
• Prestige-based influence emerges independently across egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies
• Racial categories capture only 7% of human genetic variation
• Random loss of skilled elders can erase a group’s entire complex tool repertoire
• Randomizing divination practices spread specifically where rice cultivation made them adaptive
• Rapid social change deflates age as a prestige cue for knowledge and wisdom.
• Rejecting unfair offers is fast and automatic while accepting is deliberative.
• Reports on ape cognitive superiority are contested and hard to replicate.
• Residence norms measurably shape patterns of human genetic variation
• Rhetorical challenge preceding evidence that nixtamalization was not individually discoverable
• Rice wine production selected for genes that make drinking unpleasant
• Rising male density lowers dominance payoffs and favors pair-bonding
• Seal hunting through ice requires skills no one can improvise in years.
• Selective social learning yields group-level cultural accumulation beyond any individual’s knowledge
• Sex-based learning bias appears in children before gender identity develops
• Skill in valued domains earns prestige that grounds leadership even without formal hierarchy.
• Small-scale societies lack norms dictating generosity to anonymous strangers.
• Smaller, poorer Arctic expeditions outsurvived Franklin’s by relying on local knowledge
• Social learning is toddlers’ only cognitive edge over great apes.
• Societal success hinges on which prestige-valued domains a culture honors.
• Some researchers hold mentalizing evolved for manipulation, not cooperation
• Sometimes not understanding how a practice works is crucial to its survival
• Spice use is a cultural adaptation against food-borne pathogens
• Standard accounts wrongly frame culture as beginning only after genetic evolution finished.
• Starch-heavy diets selected for extra copies of the AMY1 gene
• Starvation can result from eating calorie-rich but unprocessed toxic plants.
• Starvation can result from failing to detoxify staple foods even with full stomachs
• Stone tool food-processing began at least three million years ago.
• Stone-tool complexity showed no improvement trend across 700,000 years
• Stranded explorers die without indigenous cultural knowledge.
• Success-biased social learning outperforms trial-and-error in complex tasks
• Successful craft choices can be nonintuitive, favoring blind copying over reasoning
• Survival in extreme environments hinges on culturally accumulated knowledge, not individual capacity.
• Survival in unfamiliar environments requires local ecological knowledge, not just provisions
• Survival rests on inherited cultural adaptations no individual could improvise alone
• Sustaining and transporting fire demands culturally transmitted skill
• Synchronous singing and movement measurably increase cooperative contributions, even in four-year-olds.
• The belief that natural foods are safe stems from supermarket living, not reality.
• The Franklin expedition collapsed into fragmentation and cannibalism once stranded.
• The last common ancestor with chimpanzees had no cumulative culture
• The leading explanation for human adaptability is individual improvisational intelligence
• The onset date of rice agriculture predicts half the ADH1B gene variation
• Toddlers are already culturally shaped but lack formal education
• Traditional racial categories convey almost no useful genetic information about adaptive variation
• Urban Western folkbiological thinking is malformed by a poverty of cultural input
• US policy promoted milk to people who could not digest it from 1946 onward
• Vocabulary sizes differ enormously between large and small-scale societies.
• Young chimpanzees outperform adult chimps on working memory tasks.