The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
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The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
This imaginary ancestral primate crossed a crucial evolutionary threshold as it entered a regime of cumulative cultural evolution. This threshold is the point at which culturally transmitted information begins to accumulate over generations, such that tools and know-how get increasingly better fit to the local environments—this is the “ratchet effe
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy
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Just as everything about our minds is caused by our brains, everything about our brains is ultimately caused by our evolutionary history. That means, though, that evolution can select learning strategies and cultural abilities just as it selects reflexes and instincts. For human beings, nurture is our nature. The capacity for culture is part of our
... See moreAlison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, • The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn
Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution
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