Joe Henrich and the Emergence of a (Rigorous) Culturology

notes/books/henrich-2017-secret-our-success notes/books/henrich-2020-weirdest-people-world

Bio

Ruth Moore Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. He is author of several books most recently two widely read popular books The WEIRDEST People in the world and and the Secret of Our Success. He has had a unique career trajectory in having been a professor across multiple disciplines anthropology, economics, psychology and human evolutionary biology.

Outline

• Intro
• So much to cover here!
• Three guiding themes
  • The emergence of a new discipline of "culturology" or cultural evolution - the most exciting development in social sciences in the last 50 years (!?)
    • Proper "memetics"
    • Like emergence of cognitive science
    • Study culture rigorously with models and data
  • Culture and primacy of being thesis: culture plays a major role in explaining outcomes like wealth, education, democracy etc
    • Any outcome has technological, institutional, and cultural causes
  • Culture and being: evidence of the profound link between culture and ontology/psychology i.e. christianity (and protestantism) connection to a whole bunch of psychological factors

Extras

• relationship to memeplexes e.g. "western culture"
  • what is a "unit" of culture
  • what are "big" units e.g. being french or german (cf recent paper showing sharp differences)
• cf "big picture" cultural evolution stories like spiral dynamics (which tend not to be popular in more traditional academe)

Books

• "The Secret of Our Success": Why "us" i.e. why did homo sapiens become dominant species?
• "WEIRDest People in the World": Why the "west" i.e. why did west and western approaches e.g. science become dominant over last 2,000 years and especially last 500?

Notes

Definitions:

• what is culture

Secret of Our Success

• Secret of our success: reason we became "apex predator" / dominant species on earth was because we are the cultural species. Culturality is our secret weapon. No other species evolved this capacity to anything like degree we have.
  • Other classic explanations e.g. capacity for language or tool-making are in fact really just built on culturality.
  • Deal with critiques e.g.
    • Aren't we just smarter etc => No (Chapter 2 and 3)
      • Chapter 2: more data on species comparison
      • Chapter 3: anecdotes and examples especially of lost europeans and how they did not survive
  • Culturality is powerful because it enables
    • cumulative/evolutionary intelligence i.e. try lots of stuff over time and learn what works
    • collective intelligence/storage: store what works and reproduce it reliably
• What is culturality? Predisposition to culture and specifically the individual and social capacities for highly reliable imitation
  • At genetic / behaviorable level this is distinctive feature of homo sapiens
    • Imitation
    • Strict imitation "faith"
    • Enforcing imitation
      • Chapter 11: example from MPI re children telling "max" the puppet what to do
  • why is slavish imitation important because we can't work things out for ourselves and not clear what is crucial (Chapter 7)
    • manioc and cyanide poisoning e.g. amongst Tukanoan who have an elaborate process. Example of manioc going to west africa in 17th century but lacking processing method and ongoing issues
    • breast-feeding on yasawa island
    • ash in the corn mix to stop pellagra
    • randomization with divination with Naskapi hunters
  • Building social norms to enforce immitation
• How did culturality evolve?
  • Genetic level: Imitation
  • Intergroup competition => cooperation and learning
• Sideshow: culture-genetic co-evolution e.g.
  • long distance running and water containers
  • farming in baltics and lighter skin and blue eyes etc Chapter 6
• Implications:
  • Very little hard-wired - almost everything is learnt including language
    • Some hard-wired stuff (still affected) e.g. plant aversion
  • "natural" biases in learning for "people like me" that has implications for e.g. role models, source of
  • collective intelligence aka culture is a function of size and density
    • Need capacity
    • Need reproducibility (redundancy)

WEIRD and weirdest people in the world

• Basic point for original paper
  • More cross-cultural psychological variation than assumed in textbook psychology (that implicitly assumes that what they are describing it "human" psychology not e.g. "united states undergraduate" psychology)
  • Furthermore, the populations most studied (i.e. US undergraduates) were unusual in global perspective
• => a lot of psychology is cultural (or originally cultural and then genetic)

Questions

• Scaling human cooperation

What questions did he come with

Possible questions / topics

• Emergence of "culturology" or "culture science": an empirically based ["culturology"]: "However, in the mid-1990s there was still essentially no program of empirical research no program of empirical research, no toolbox of methods, and no established ways of testing the theories generated by the [cultural] evolutionary models"
  • Crossing the streams
    • e.g. evolution, biological anthropology for cultural anthropology. Mention this in preface: "It turned out that the field of human evolution and biological anthropology was full of ideas one could use to explain important aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Moreover, I learned that Rob and his long-time collaborator, the ecologist Pete Richerson, had been working on ways to model culture using mathematical tools from population genetics. Their approach also allowed one to think systematically about how natural selection might have shaped human learning abilities and psychology"
    • "I read books on cognitive psychology, decision-making, experimental economics, biology, and evolutionary psychology." => led him to the ultimatum game
    • "Beliefs, practices, technologies, and social norms—culture—can shape our brains, biology, and psychology, including our motivations, mental abilities, and decision-making biases. You can’t separate “culture” from “psychology” or “psychology” from “biology,” because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think.28" [Weirdest people, preface]
  • Just as cognitive science evolved in relation to psychology both somehow has sub-discipline but also something more that was interdisciplinary
  • Aside: golden age of social science - new data, new methods, inter-disciplinary
• Levels point e.g. culture moved us up a whole level in terms of evolutionary pace, effectiveness etc
  • Many other animals have some degree of culture, but somehow reached a critical point in quantity and crucially reproducibility in humans
    • Much as move to self-reproducing cells/organisms was a step change from self-reproducing molecules (or at least self-catalytic reactions)
  • Culturality - i.e. ability to support culture is the secret weapon
• Other connetions:
  • Ken Wilber and integral and especially spiral dynamics. General theories of systemic "culture" evolution
    • Beware! academics and academy are generally (and rightly) wary of "grand unified theories"
• Primacy of Being thesis: his work is a massive contribution to this debate
• New appreciation of culture in mainstream development thinking e.g. "I’ve been particularly encouraged by this year’s World Development Report 2015, which is entitled Mind, Society, and Behavior."
• Importance of (rigorous/slavish) imitation changes our views on stuff e.g. nowadays in west we often think of tradition as something that is a constraint
  • Quite a breakthrough to get to a point of experimentation but in a structured way

Notes

Inbox

• Culture and the Evolutionary Process - book by his supervisors from 1985 (these guys seem to have had an amazing lab given what happened to people)

Cultural revolution in Economics

New paper of his: this is the "cultural" revolution in economics. Dreamed of this back in the day. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4200629

From https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu

Genetic => Learning => more evolution e.g. expanding brains, orienting for learning => super learner => growing group (maybe more genetic stuff for cooperation/sociability) => big groups