"Slow down," I tell my imagination while reading this book when my mind takes off on a wild tear about the near-future genetic implications of current mind-bending cultural forces, like maybe political rule by tech-savvy children educated more by their online peers than by society. "Evolution," I tell myself, "takes a long time."
Only maybe not as long as we've thought. One of the arguments in this book is that the reinforcement of differential cultural adaptations through interactive learning in human societies can be so strong that one potential result is adaptive change at the physical level that comes faster than would be the case if the adaptation were left to the force its way up through chance mutations at the individual level.
"Survival of the fittest" for humans, then, in Henrich's formulation, becomes more a matter of social than individual adaptation, and -- significantly -- cultural responses to environmental challenges have replaced physical speciation as the basic evolutionary delineator among people. For example, ants "capture an equivalent biomass" as humans, but in doing so have split off into 14,000 species, whereas humans have only one hugely diversified and in some cases mutually unrecognizable species.
This is bad news for survivalists. Stock up on food and ammo and pimp your bunker all you want: you won't have a chance against a determined tribe of post-apocalyptic, acorn-eating sling shooters who teach their children well (whether or not they sing Neil Young).
The book will undoubtedly stimulate a fair amount of academic nit-picking -- as befits primates -- and parsing the arguments between "we were social because we evolved social skills" and "we evolved social skills because we were social" will necessarily provoke a clash of specialists. Suffice it to say for the sake of my own understanding that Henrich -- in the process of trying to determine at what point humans "crossed the Rubicon" and became a "new kind of animal" that passed down "toolkits" from generation to generation -- posits a "culture-gene co-evolutionary duet" between the discovery of tools and the ability to "reverse engineer" them through "causal models" that were then handed down. He concludes that, yes, humans are smart, but they aren't as smart alone in the wild as other species; rather, their smartness lies in the enduring, value-added smartness of their associativeness. Humans are smart "not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits."
Knowing that past scientists have produced intellectual models of human differences that have proven to be enormously deleterious, I approached the book with caution, wondering how Henrich would come out on the subject of race. Thankfully he confronts the issue explicitly early on in the book with a subsection ("Genes and Races," pp. 94 - 96) in which he says that not only do the traditional racial distinctions tell us nothing about genetic differences, they tell us less than nothing, i.e. they "distort" the genetic facts: "Our understanding of human genetic variation,"he writes, "derived from studying actual genes, completely dismantles any remaining shreds of the old racial notions." As for race prejudice, Henrich counsels awareness by making it itself a subject for study: why do we have a tendency to think stereotypically? The section concludes with a resounding, familiar-sounding declaration: "These insights will continue to fuel the spread of a new social construct: the view that all people, and perhaps some other species as well, are endowed with certain inalienable rights -- we call these human rights [emphasis Henrich's]. No new facts about genes, biology, or culture can alienate a person from these rights."
Most of the fun of this book stems from its broad presentation of human responses to environmental challenges. Technology (the bow and arrow for example ) can be won and lost and won again, depending on the ability of groups to carry it forward: sudden, large losses of population due to environmental disasters or disease have had the capacity to remove skills previously acquired from the toolkit transmitted to survivors. (I think here about the baroque recorder, the ability to play which was lost for generations and had to be re-learned. Surely this was not just so that elementary music teachers could experience truly unbearable noise? There has to be a better reason.) What people have done over the millennia to make foodstuffs more nutritious or even just edible -- adding burnt sea shells to maize; the evolved capacity to digest milk after infancy, which is still a "natural" capacity in a fraction of humans and the lack of which seems in some cases to be linked to the development of cheese, with its much lower level of lactose -- beggars the imagination.
Which, thus, easily imagines a society in which learning has been accelerated to the point that nimble-minded children engineer changes, both technical and social, that enable them to become political rulers through the weaponized use of baroque recorders ("Please! Stop! Anything! OK! OK! No more electoral college!"). Surely that's not all that implausible, given the starting point of a large pyramid of hobbits.
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