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Henrich Joseph , The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2015), 445 pages. ISBN: 9780691166858. Hardcover $29.95. Paperback $14.99.
Book Review
The Secret of Our Success is an ambitious and timely endeavor to reframe the conversation around human behavior. Rather than viewing the history of our species as a linear progression--one in which culture emerged from genetic evolution and then took over--The Secret of Our Success treats culture, biology, and behavior as deeply intertwined concepts that function iteratively to make us the dominant species on the earth today.
Joseph Henrich's background in anthropology, human evolution, and psychology makes him adept at integrating current theories and research in human behavior from diverse perspectives. The Secret of Our Success offers evidence for gene-culture coevolution from a range of departments and methodologies--from the laboratories of developmental psychologists to Henrich's own ethnographic work with small hunter-gatherer societies. Such an approach both lends credibility to Henrich's thesis and provides fruitful avenues for future interdisciplinary research. By comingling theories from biology and the social sciences, Henrich highlights just how outdated the "nature versus nurture" approach to human behavior has become.
The book is structured with two main goals in mind. First, Henrich seeks to recast culture's role in human evolutionary history. To do this, Henrich problematizes popular notions about the pathways that led to the dominance of our species relative to others. It is not our intelligence or cognitive flexibility that gives humans the upper hand but our unique ability to accumulate and integrate knowledge from one another over time, thus creating a "collective brain" of innovative solutions to adaptive problems. In turn, the advantages conveyed by cultural transmission select for better and better cultural learners, creating the phenomenon that Henrich refers to as "gene-culture coevolution."
This first point is...