Joe Henrich: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

The blurb reads:

The ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another has allowed us to create ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have enabled successful expansion into myriad environments. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscience, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich, author of The Secret of Our Success, will discuss how our collective intelligence has propelled our species’ evolution.

Some similar recent book talks:

• Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success - March 2016 talk @ Google
• Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success - May 2016 talk
• Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success - June 2016 talk @ London School of Economics

Also, here are some recent videos relating to evolutionary psychology, most of which feature Joe Henrich:

• Jonathan Haidt - The Rabbi's wife is wrong about evolutionary psychology
• Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success
• Leda Cosmides - Psychologists will answer the big questions for evolutionary theorists
• Joseph Henrich, Max Krasnow Debate

The Leda Cosmides video is interesting because she responds to the cultural evolution enthusiasts. Leda specialized in culture and evolution, but almost completely missed memetics - adopting a position closely related to Wilson-style sociobiology. It now seems obvious that Darwinian cultural evolution is a very important concept - but Leda missed it. In the video she says the idea makes her "uncomfortable". Rightly so. That's cognitive dissonance for you. Leda Cosmides should say: "how extremely stupid not to have thought of that".

How culture drove human evolution - A Conversation with Joseph Henrich

The Edge has this recent interview - titled "How culture drove human evolution - A Conversation with Joseph Henrich [2012-09-04]"

It offers this video of Joe - complete with a transcript:

I noted several familiar themes. One was:

Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.

That's been a theme here for a while - e.g. see: Contrasting culture and biology makes no sense.

Another was:

we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information

That's the "big brain" hypothesis of Blackmore and Dawkins that I've been talking about here for a while - in Big brains as meme nests and Tim Tyler: The big brain as a meme nest.

The title of "how culture drove human evolution" telates directly to Blackmore's "memetic drive" hypothesis - though somehow there is no mention of memes or Blackmore.

It's nice to see that researchers are finally converging on similar views - even if they don't always do a great job of giving each other credit.

Henrich says:

Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago. So, you could have a kind of late emergence at 400,000 years ago. A middle guess would be 800,000 years ago based on the climate, and then the early guess would be, say, the origin of genus, 1.8 million years ago.

Yet chimps have culture. In my book I point out that walking is a culturally-transmitted trait that is many millions of years old. Baby slings are also pretty ancient. 1.8 million years ago is a remarkably recent guess.

Does monogamy support cultural group selection?

The latest paper from Henrich, Boyd and Richerson is called "The puzzle of monogamous marriage". It ponders the puzzle of monogamous marriage - how monogamy has spread while wealth inequality has increased.

Much of the paper is devoted to showing that monogamy is good for society-level fitness. They invoke cultural group selection to explain monogamy's spread.

Slavery seems like a suitable point of comparison. This is also widely banned - despite the fact that the richest might be expected to benefit most from it.

Wife inequality is seen as more of a moral issue than wealth inequality - and technological growth independently fuels wealth inequality.

Is the spread of spread of monogamy down to cultural group selection? I'm sceptical. It is true that in the democractic, religious and political revolutions and invasions that have spread monogamy a whole buch of memes gets supressed at once. However, describing this as being a form of group selection seems a bit controversial. A whole bunch of birds went extinct at once when mammals reached New Zealand. However, few would describe that as being a form of group selection. The invading animals wiped out the natives bacause they were fitter than them - not because of group-level effects.

Looking at large groups of memes going extinct during a major mass extinction event isn't terribly good evidence for cultural group selection, IMHO. In general, one group of organisms systematically wiping out their neighbours is just evolution as usual. Group selection - at least of the type that is controversial among biologists - is a more demanding concept than this.

The outcome shows that the monogamy meme bacame fitter as civilization progressed. If it could additional be shown that monogamy lost out to polygamy within groups, that would then qualify as evidence for group-level selection. However, the paper doesn't do that, and the idea that the polygamy meme wins within groups is probably simply false. In which case, group selection is not clearly needed as a hypothesis to explain the results.

A simple explanation for monogamy is democracy. Monogamy is deleterious for 90% of males and probably most females too. The few males it benefits may be powerful, but they are simply out-flanked by the rest of society. This explanation is simple, obvious - and it doesn't invoke group selection.

Memetic altruism is the most obvious thing to look for if looking for evidence favouring cultural group selection. At the moment, people see things that aren't explained by existing theories of altruism, and then invoke forms of group selection. However, it seems to be that this happens largely because they don't have a decent list of the known causes of human altruism. That seems to be largely because of a widespread incomplete understanding of memetics. Account properly for the existing known causes of altruism and group selection theories have a lot less work to do.

Update 2012-01-31: Razib Khan is sceptical about the group selection too.

Joseph Henrich - resources

Joseph Henrich is a researcher in cultural evolution.

Videos

The W.E.I.R.D.-est People in the World.

Polygamy & Democracy, Incompatible?

Are Taboos Adaptive? Evidence from the Island of Fiji

Joe Henrich - Thematic Series: The Emerging Science of Culture The Weirdest People in the World

BHTV: Jonathan Phillips and Joe Henrich

Podcasts

• On the nature of cultural transmission networks.

Links

• Joseph Henrich - Home page.
• Joseph Henrich - Home page.
• Joseph Henrich - Lab.
• Joseph Henrich - Lab publications.
• Publications - from Joseph Henrich.
• Part 1 [broken link].
• Part 2 [broken link].