Sublime

Joseph Henrich uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today.

Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations.

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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By “culture” I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.

I could have also tapped the vast literature in psychology and economics, which tests the judgment and decision-making of undergraduates against benchmarks from statistics, probability, logic, and rationality. In many contexts, but not all, we humans make systemic logical errors, see illusory correlations, misattribute causal forces to random proce

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Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together. (That was the Rubicon.) Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collabo

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