The Secret To Success Book Summary

[Eliecer Brathwaite]

When the earliest European explorers made contact with the Tasmanians in the late eighteenth century, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers equipped with the simplest toolkit of any society ever encountered (by Europeans). To hunt and fight, men used only a one-piece spear, rocks, and throwing clubs. For watercraft, the Tasmanians relied on leaky reed rafts and lacked paddles. To ford rivers, women would swim the raft across, towing their husbands and offspring. In the cool maritime climate, Tasmanians slung wallaby skins over their shoulders and applied grease to their exposed skin. Curiously, the Tasmanians did not catch or eat any fish, despite fish being plentiful around the island. They drank from skulls and may even have lost the ability to make fire. In all, the Tasmanian toolkit consisted of only about twenty-four items.

It was also written largely to lay out the theoretical background for the argument of his second, more tendentious book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, which I plan to review some day.

Like you said, we can either choose to be rational about every action/decision, or we can simply be meta-rational by surrounding ourselves with people we want to be like. I'm glad I found your substack.

There are books that have had a greater influence on my thinking, and there are certainly books I\u2019ve devoured with greater enjoyment, but The Secret of Our Success is probably the book I think about the most relative to how much I actually liked it. Henrich\u2019s exploration of cultural evolution is good pop science: mostly not original material (and where it is, it\u2019s psych lab studies that probably don\u2019t replicate), but nevertheless well-presented and an engaging, accessible explanation of the developing field. It suggests some important questions, implies some surprisingly reactionary conclusions, and provides a grounding for other things I\u2019d like to discuss in the future.1 So let\u2019s jump right in.

We should start by clarifying exactly what we mean when we say \u201Cculture,\u201D and Henrich\u2019s definition is a pretty good one: culture is \u201Cthe large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.\u201D This obviously involves physical technologies like ceramic techniques \u2014 archeologists often refer to an unknown people as \u201Cthe [A Particular Way They Make Their Pots] culture\u201D \u2014 but it also includes what we might call social technologies, everything from norms about queuing behavior to the institution of \u201Cin-laws\u201D to the Iroquois practice of forcibly adopting enemy combatants into the group to replace fallen relatives or the medieval Icelandic transferrable right to prosecute a crime. Cultures generally come as bundles of related technologies: the Inuit kayak/leister/archery package won\u2019t do you much good without the warm-clothes and snow-house technologies that allow you to stay warm in the Arctic, and arguably Inuit social technologies about emotional expression (don\u2019t) and fictive kin-making (if you let a guest sleep with your wife he becomes your brother) go along with these because they encourage social stability in extremely close quarters.2 And it\u2019s the existence of these social technologies, rather than toolmaking either physical or cognitive, that I find the most interesting \u2014 and the least discussed by Henrich himself. But before we can get there, I want to run through the big picture of the book for necessary context.

Henrich tackles the question of \u201Cculture and evolution\u201D in two ways. He starts out with the less contentious, arguing that for at least the last million years our biological evolution has been driven more by our culture than by changes to our physical environment. Most primates, for instance, have huge guts, enormous molars, and powerful jaw muscles that allow them to chew and digest rough, fibrous plant matter. You, however, don\u2019t. Feel up the side of your head as you open and close your jaw; you\u2019ll find that the muscles you use for chewing stop around the level of your ear. Some of our australopithecine relatives\u2019 jaw muscles went all the way up the sides of their heads and beyond, anchoring to a special bony crest at the top of the skull. We don\u2019t need that, though, because we outsourced all that metabolically demanding muscle and gut (never mind the time it takes to gather and chew all that vegetable matter \u2014 gorillas spend half their day eating) to the mechanical processing and pre-digestion by heat or acid that we call \u201Ccooking.\u201D3

There are plenty of adaptations more recently, of course. Consider lactase persistence, independently evolved among at least three different populations of pastoralists for whom the ability to drink animal milk into adulthood would have opened up a valuable new source of calories \u2014 but not among other pastoralists who had developed fermentation techniques that removed most of the lactose from their dairy products. Or the AMY1 gene, which codes for a protein that helps the saliva to break down starchy foods: the Hadza, an African hunter-gatherer group who have been genetically and geographically isolated for tens of thousands of years in an environment rich in starchy tubers, have up to fifteen copies of the gene, where groups whose historical diet is not high in starch tend to have many fewer copies. And similarly for the gene-culture coevolution that leads to pale skin among agriculturalists but not foragers at high latitudes (cereal crops being much lower in vitamin D than fish or meat), and so forth.

So far, so familiar from any book about human evolution, but most of Henrich\u2019s time is spent showing that it goes the other way, too: our material circumstances drive changes in our culture. The tremendous variety of fishhooks across Oceania are just as adapted to each island\u2019s unique conditions as the beaks of Darwin\u2019s finches, but unlike the finches a fishhook \u201Cgeneration\u201D can be as rapid as a few fishing trips \u2014 and more importantly, the alterations don\u2019t have to wait for a beneficial de novo mutation. All it takes is one person fiddling with the design and someone else watching. Humans have substantial raw brainpower compared to other primates, but the real secret sauce is our ability to learn from watching others and our sophisticated mechanisms for choosing whom to watch. Even as babies, we naturally monitor the competence and relative prestige of those around us and preferentially adopt the behavior of the most successful.4 Occasionally (through chance or inspiration), we innovate on it. Thus does culture evolve.

It seems like an obvious point, but the consequences of cumulative evolutionary change can be as dramatic in culture as in genetics. Genetic evolution gave you eyes; cultural evolution has given you the ability to read this, as well as a base-10 counting system, Arabic numerals, a vocabulary an order of magnitude larger than that of most small-scale societies, eleven color terms where some people only have \u201Clight\u201D and \u201Cdark,\u201D clocks, fractions, right vs. left, and tools that many cultures have lacked like the wheel, the pulleys, screws, projectiles, elastically stored energy (as in bows or stringed instruments), levers, poisons, compressed air, and rafts. It\u2019s also given you marriage, religion, the state, and countless other social technologies that govern the ways we behave towards each other and our expectations and preferences about social interaction.

Successful social technologies (those that enable their holders to thrive; this isn't a moral judgment) generally enlarge the group with whom we can live peacefully. Take kinship norms, for instance, always a favorite of anthropologists: like all primates, humans are hardwired to show a strong preference for biological relatives. Compared to strangers, we\u2019re much more likely to help kin, and much less likely to cheat, rob, or murder them even if we can get away with it. But even the smallest-scale societies are made up of plenty of people who are not biologically related to one another, and who nevertheless manage to (mostly) live in harmony. (This isn\u2019t to say they live in utopian bliss, but given that the modal small-scale society response to encountering an outsider is murder if you can get away with it, it\u2019s not bad.) The key is social norms that redirect our innate kin-orientation toward non-kin: marriage, first of all, but also in-laws (\u201Cmy wife\u2019s brother is my brother\u201D) and extended family (\u201Cmy parallel cousin5 is my brother\u201D). These kinship norms allow their possessors to live peacefully in much larger groups: in the average hunter-gatherer band, about a quarter of the other members are your biological relatives, but three-quarters are your social kin. (The remaining quarter are probably biologically or socially related to some of your family members.) And this can be a big advantage! A larger group is better able to defend itself against outsiders, is more likely to contain particularly skilled hunters or craftsmen from whom the young people can learn, is less likely to lose technology (more on this below), and is less likely to be completely wiped out by a disaster.

Adaptive technologies spread just like adaptive genes do \u2014 by enabling their holders to outcompete or displace their neighbors \u2014 but unlike genes, they can also be intentionally adopted. In 1971, an anthropologist in the New Guinea village of Irakia observed as the elders of the village convened a series of meetings to address a serious problem: they didn\u2019t have enough pigs. This might sound silly, but for a subsistence agricultural society in the highlands of New Guinea, where pigs are the most important domesticated animal, it meant poverty and low prestige, and the solution they settled on was to copy wholesale the pig-raising practices of their more successful neighbors, the For\u00E9. This included what seems to us fairly common-sense elements, like planting more sweet potatoes to feed the pigs and not killing pigs for breaking into someone\u2019s garden, the adoption of For\u00E9 dispute-resolution practices for all disputes involving pigs, and also the seemingly bizarre measure of communal rituals in which they sang, danced, and played flutes for the pigs. Singing to pigs seems like obvious nonsense to us, because we have a culturally evolved set of heuristics about cause and effect in the physical world, but for the people of Irakia, who don\u2019t, it makes perfect sense to adopt the entire package. It\u2019s much easier to see that something is working for the For\u00E9 than it is to sort out exactly what is working. In fact, in tracking down the citation for this story, I discovered that in the subsequent thirty-or-so years, the Irakians decided that even For\u00E9-style pig husbandry had failed to bring them the prestige and prosperity they wanted and so instead they yet another bundle of technologies from a different, even more successful neighbor: they stopped raising pigs altogether, switched from subsistence farming to raising commodity crops for cash, and became Christians. It\u2019s worth noting here that the people of Irakia already had some fairly sophisticated social technologies: they had a council of elders who could make decisions for the village as a whole, which the people by and large obeyed (although whether that\u2019s adaptive in this case I\u2019ll leave as an exercise to the reader). But it\u2019s the wholesale adoption of alternative cultural packages that really grabs my attention, because despite the probably pointless pig serenades this is actually a remarkably good heuristic.

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