
By Joseph Henrich
ISBN-10: 0691166854
ISBN-13: 9780691166858
Humans are a difficult species. at the one hand, we fight to outlive on our personal within the wild, frequently failing to beat even simple demanding situations, like acquiring meals, construction shelters, or heading off predators. nevertheless, human teams have produced creative applied sciences, refined languages, and complicated associations that experience approved us to effectively extend right into a huge diversity of various environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, greater than the other species, whereas closing nearly helpless as lone contributors? This publication indicates that the key of our luck lies no longer in our innate intelligence, yet in our collective brains--on the facility of human teams to socially interconnect and study from each other over generations.
Drawing insights from misplaced eu explorers, shrewdpermanent chimpanzees, cellular hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, old bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and formed our biology. Our early capacities for studying from others produced many cultural strategies, comparable to fireplace, cooking, water boxes, plant wisdom, and projectile guns, which in flip drove the growth of our brains and changed our body structure, anatomy, and psychology in the most important methods. in a while, a few collective brains generated and recombined strong innovations, resembling the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, whereas additionally developing the associations that proceed to change our motivations and perceptions. Henrich exhibits how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and the way culture-gene interactions introduced our species on a unprecedented evolutionary trajectory.
Tracking clues from our old prior to the current, The mystery of Our Success explores how the evolution of either our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains either our species' sizeable luck and the origins of human uniqueness.