Buying Options
Digital List Price: | $19.95 |
Print List Price: | $19.95 |
Kindle Price: | $9.99 Save $9.96 (50%) |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

![The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by [Joseph Henrich]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/518mNbMEfUL._SY346_.jpg)
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter Kindle Edition
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
Audio CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $34.99 | — |
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper
Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.
Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.
Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateOctober 27, 2015
- File size20078 KB
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Social science is at the cusp of a revolution, incorporating a better understanding of how our capabilities and culture have evolved and how the interplay of social and political choices shape human experiences. Joseph Henrich has been at the forefront of this more holistic social science. In this wonderfully readable book, Henrich shows how our species is special and how our practices, beliefs, and instincts have emerged because of our cultural learning. This must-read book will be cherished and consulted for its ideas and insights."
―Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
"The cumulative, collaborative nature of human culture, far more than our individual intelligence, is what makes it―and us―special. How and when this collective brain emerged and evolved has until recently been only vaguely understood. Now Joseph Henrich brings a rich and deep rigor to the topic and tells the epic story in easy narrative style. This is a remarkable book."―Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything
"In this accessible, authoritative book, Joseph Henrich explains why culture is essential for understanding human evolution. It is a must-read for anybody curious about why we are the way we are."―Robert Boyd, coauthor of How Humans Evolved and Not by Genes Alone
"Joseph Henrich has written a magnificent book. With verve and clarity he sets out a compelling theory of the interactions between genes and culture, and defends the theory with a remarkable range of evidence from fields as varied as history, primatology, neuroscience, and the science of sport. This book provides an enthralling account of the secret of our success." ―Stephen Stich, Rutgers University
"Is the ability to acquire highly evolved culture systems like languages and technologies the secret of humans' success as a species? This book convinces us that the answer is emphatically ‘yes.' Moving beyond the sterile nature-nurture debates of the past, Joseph Henrich demonstrates that culture―as much a part of our biology as our legs―is an evolutionary system that works by tinkering with our innate capacities over time."―Peter J. Richerson, University of California, Davis
"In the last decade, in the interstices between biology, anthropology, economics, and psychology, a remarkable new approach to explaining the development of human societies has emerged. It's the most important intellectual innovation on this topic since Douglass North's work on institutions in the 1970s and it will fundamentally shape research in social science in the next generation. This extraordinary book is the first comprehensive statement of this paradigm. You'll be overwhelmed by the breadth of evidence and the creativity of ideas. I was."―James Robinson, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
"With compelling chapter and verse and a very readable style, Joseph Henrich's book makes a powerful argument―in the course of the gene-culture coevolution that has made us different from other primates, culture, far from being the junior partner, has been the driving force. A terrific book that shifts the terms of the debate."―
Stephen Shennan, University College London
"A delightful and engaging expedition into and all around the many different processes of genetic and cultural evolution that have made humans such ‘a puzzling primate.'"―Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
"Henrich is one of a small group of anthropologists who has revolutionized our thinking about evolution. His new book is a highly readable introduction to how our genes and cultural variants evolved together. This nuanced work offers the most comprehensive answer I know of to the question of how we became human. It tells the story of how culture, cultural learning, and cultural evolution made us so smart."―Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind
"The Secret of Our Success provides a valuable new perspective on major issues in human evolution and behavior. Bringing together topics from such diverse areas as economics, psychology, neuroscience, and archaeology, this book will provoke vigorous debates and will be widely read."―Alex Mesoudi, author of Cultural Evolution --This text refers to the paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
"Social science is at the cusp of a revolution, incorporating a better understanding of how our capabilities and culture have evolved and how the interplay of social and political choices shape human experiences. Joseph Henrich has been at the forefront of this more holistic social science. In this wonderfully readable book, Henrich shows how our species is special and how our practices, beliefs, and instincts have emerged because of our cultural learning. This must-read book will be cherished and consulted for its ideas and insights."
--Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
"The cumulative, collaborative nature of human culture, far more than our individual intelligence, is what makes it--and us--special. How and when this collective brain emerged and evolved has until recently been only vaguely understood. Now Joseph Henrich brings a rich and deep rigor to the topic and tells the epic story in easy narrative style. This is a remarkable book."--Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything
"In this accessible, authoritative book, Joseph Henrich explains why culture is essential for understanding human evolution. It is a must-read for anybody curious about why we are the way we are."--Robert Boyd, coauthor of How Humans Evolved and Not by Genes Alone
"Joseph Henrich has written a magnificent book. With verve and clarity he sets out a compelling theory of the interactions between genes and culture, and defends the theory with a remarkable range of evidence from fields as varied as history, primatology, neuroscience, and the science of sport. This book provides an enthralling account of the secret of our success." --Stephen Stich, Rutgers University
"Is the ability to acquire highly evolved culture systems like languages and technologies the secret of humans' success as a species? This book convinces us that the answer is emphatically 'yes.' Moving beyond the sterile nature-nurture debates of the past, Joseph Henrich demonstrates that culture--as much a part of our biology as our legs--is an evolutionary system that works by tinkering with our innate capacities over time."--Peter J. Richerson, University of California, Davis
"In the last decade, in the interstices between biology, anthropology, economics, and psychology, a remarkable new approach to explaining the development of human societies has emerged. It's the most important intellectual innovation on this topic since Douglass North's work on institutions in the 1970s and it will fundamentally shape research in social science in the next generation. This extraordinary book is the first comprehensive statement of this paradigm. You'll be overwhelmed by the breadth of evidence and the creativity of ideas. I was."--James Robinson, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
"With compelling chapter and verse and a very readable style, Joseph Henrich's book makes a powerful argument--in the course of the gene-culture coevolution that has made us different from other primates, culture, far from being the junior partner, has been the driving force. A terrific book that shifts the terms of the debate."--
Stephen Shennan, University College London
"A delightful and engaging expedition into and all around the many different processes of genetic and cultural evolution that have made humans such 'a puzzling primate.'"--Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
"Henrich is one of a small group of anthropologists who has revolutionized our thinking about evolution. His new book is a highly readable introduction to how our genes and cultural variants evolved together. This nuanced work offers the most comprehensive answer I know of to the question of how we became human. It tells the story of how culture, cultural learning, and cultural evolution made us so smart."--Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind
"The Secret of Our Success provides a valuable new perspective on major issues in human evolution and behavior. Bringing together topics from such diverse areas as economics, psychology, neuroscience, and archaeology, this book will provoke vigorous debates and will be widely read."--Alex Mesoudi, author of Cultural Evolution
--This text refers to the paperback edition.Review
About the Author
Jonathan Yen was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he's carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie's true adventures in the Amazon, Jonathan loves to tell a good story. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B00WY4OXAS
- Publisher : Princeton University Press (October 27, 2015)
- Publication date : October 27, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 20078 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 456 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #129,678 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #54 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)
- #59 in Evolution (Kindle Store)
- #122 in Social Psychology & Interactions
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
First, the book has a lot of interesting information, even if you do not completely buy the main thesis. It goes over some of the amazing cultural adaptations that humans have figured out through the ages (such as how the Inuit hunt in the Arctic, how South Americans learned to prepare food in a specific way to avoid food poisoning, and how Central Americans would cook corn in specific ways to avoid pellagra). It goes over how humans aren't spectacularly better than other large primates at certain intelligence tasks, how lost European explorers would often fail, and how cultural norms and practices developed and could have made us so effective. The thesis that culture has been important for how humans have evolved over the last millenia, seems to me to be well-defended.
But there are lots of caveats to the information the author provides. A couple of anecdotes about Europeans failing to live in difficult environments may mean that humans aren't smart at "just figuring things out" in a difficult envirnoment. But we would need a statistical view to actually know this. Also, the author omits tropical environments, where my impression is that many people survived shipwrecks (though I hasten that I don't have statistical backing for this either). What makes humans very special is that we build up knowledge using what others have known. This part I completely agree with the book. That by modifying our environment with our culture, we have changed our biological state (smaller guts, bigger brains, weaker jaws, etc.) also seems undisputable. But is culture being "selected" in a process like natural selection? (This is the group selection argument, though Henrich doesn't ever call it that, to my knowledge). This is controversial, and I'm not sure it makes sense to say that culture is being selected. People who create a certain culture are surviving differentially in an environment. If that is selection, then sure.
My other qualms is that the language section of the book seems pretty weak in strong evidence to me. The author argues that languages should be culturally adapted for their environment. The author offers for example that bigger population languages should have more sounds because in larger communities one needs more contrast to avoid conflicts from mishearings. To me, this argument is extremely weak, as it seems like a just-so story that can be made up for any reason. (For example, in larger communities, one might expect fewer sounds which are strongly differentiated so that people can more accurately determine the sounds made without fear of mishearing.)
Also, the author talks of the "placebo effect" as the placebo effects are mostly people's beliefs. The placebo effect is any of the effects for a person given an inert treatment. The placebo "effect" (usually actually many effects bundled together) is only helpful for things (as far as I am aware) that are subjective (directly such as people's subjective assessments of themselves like pain, or indirectly like blood pressure [from perceived stress]). For example, a recent study found a placebo made asthma sufferers believe they were better, but when they tested the actual function of their lungs, the placebo users were no better off (unlike the actual asthma medicine where function improved). I would have liked the author to make this clearer (as Henrich talks of pain going down with placebos, but doesn't discuss if there is actual healing).
This is to say, I worry that the author provides evidence for his theory without drawing attention to ways the theory could be disproven with certain types of evidence. It makes it easier to evaluate if one can say what sort of evidence would disprove a thesis, and sometimes I felt like there was no (likely) evidence that could do so. Despite these caveats, the book was well worth the read. It presents a thesis well, even if I think the evidence is sometimes a little bit overhyped. The evidence is interesting, and you will probably learn new things about a lot of different subjects (human psychology, interesting cultural innovations, lost European explorers).
There are problems with studying the distant past: evidence is difficult to obtain; experiments are challenging to perform; and predictions are difficult to test. It would make sense for students of cultural evolution to look to modern cultural dynamics, which are not afflicted by these problems.
In fact, Joe doesn't discuss about cultural evolution very much. He doesn't provide an introduction to the topic or attempt to explain how it works. Instead he assumes a theory of cultural evolution and goes on to use it to analyze the evolution of the DNA genes of our ancestors.
Perhaps all the study of the influence of culture on DNA is a bias arising out of academic funding sources. Or maybe the researchers involved all copied each other. What risks getting lost here is the idea of culture as a largely independent system evolving along broadly Darwinian lines that operates on a different timescale to the evolution of DNA genes and proceeds largely independently from it. Ancient history is all very well, but there's also the modern world, technology, the internet and the future to think about.
Anyway, it's not entirely fair to criticize a book because of its chosen subject area. In fact, the book is vastly better than most books on the topic of human genetic evolution because Joe is using a sensible theoretical framework which includes cultural evolution. If I had to describe the book in one word, I would use the term "solid".
Joe argues for the importance of our collective brains, and against the significance of our individual brains. This is well-trodden territory by now, but Joe's book provides an excellent overview of this topic.
Joe has spent some of his life visiting the cultures he studies, and his book has many anecdotes from them. At the start I feared that the book was too anecdote heavy. For a scientists describing evidence as 'anecdotal' is a popular way of saying it is practically worthless. Fortunately, Joe goes beyond anecdotes frequently enough for me.
I was hoping to find material about the cultural brain hypothesis - which Joe publicly supported in 2012. This is the idea that was pioneered by Susan Blackmore, that culture drove the expansion of the human brain. However this idea got very little coverage in the book.
I was also expecting to find some support for and advocacy of group selection. The topic is rarely mentioned in the book. Joe does start out by saying that he is going to go beyond the kin selection and reciprocity explanations for cooperation championed by Dawkins and Pinker. He then spends some time in the book attempting to establish that groups of our ancestors regularly wiped each other out - but this seems obvious and uncontroversial to me. I was expecting some kind of case to be made for group selection, but I missed it.
Overall, I didn't find much to disagree with in the book. There were a few issues. For example, at one point, Joe proposes that millionaire generosity is performed so that others will copy them, and they will benefit from living in a more cooperative society. I'm pretty sure that this is mostly wrong. Virtue signaling explains such generosity. Millionaire generosity is largely performed out of reputational concerns - as proposed by Robin Dunbar in a paper titled "Showing off in humans: male generosity as a mating signal".
Joe argues that cumulative cultural evolution made our species special. This seems to be a fairly common position, but it ignores the fairly substantial scientific evidence that chimpanzees also have cumulative cultural evolution. The difference between our culture and theirs is not so much that ours accumulates and theirs does not, but that their cultural accumulations run into a low complexity ceiling.
I also worry about Joe over using the concept of a norm. There's more to cultural evolution than norms, and I'm concerned that constantly thinking in terms of evolving norms misses out the evolution of all the non-norms.
Another suspect section was titled 'move over natural selection'. Joe writes: "since the rise of cumulative cultural evolution natural selection has lost its status as the only "dumb" process capable of creating complex adaptations". I was left wondering whether Joe though cultural adaptations formed without selection, or whether he thought that such selection was not "natural".
In the end, I was left wondering about the author's position on many other points as well. Joe seems to have only covered the areas where the science was fairly settled. I would have liked to see more speculation and exploration of controversial issues. I guess then the book wouldn't have been so solid.
Top reviews from other countries

You can't say that his concept is new: it has been clear every since Darwin that the human body itself has been altered by our culture - most accounts of human evolution have for as long as I can remember started by pointing out that humans are not very fast or very strong, and have small teeth and no claws to speak of. These characteristics must have evolved gradually as we developed teamwork and technology.
However the description of the way in which every human society has far more technology than one person could invent in a lifetime is full of interesting facts and very worthwhile. So is the emphasis of accurate transmission of human knowledge and expertise from one generation to the next. For a million years we have evolved not only to learn from our elders, but to study them to decide which ones are the most successful and the most worth learning from.


However, the writing is tediously repetitive and the text could have been shortened by a quarter without loss of understanding. Not all readers will find ‘technical’ terms like ‘dyadic reciprocity’ - a tendency to help one another - adding to the thrust and flow of the arguments.

