I picked this up because a coworker kept quoting the Tasmania chapter at me until I gave in, and, look, he was right to. Henrich’s whole pitch is that we got smart by accident, culture did the heavy lifting and individual brains are mostly along for the ride, borrowing know-how nobody in one lifetime could reinvent from scratch. He backs it with the Franklin expedition, with isolated groups that lost technology instead of gaining it, with the fact that a lone genius dropped in the Arctic dies faster than a mediocre person raised in a functioning tradition. That’s the argument that actually rewired something in my head, the idea that we’re smart as a network and kind of dumb as individuals.
Where it drags is the middle third, which reads like three separate papers stapled together with connective tissue that only sort of holds. A few pages on cultural learning experiments could’ve been a footnote. I don’t think that sinks the book, but it does mean you feel every one of the four hundred pages by the end, the way one reviewer put it, groundbreaking but slight on the dry side, which is about right.
He’s also more generous to religion as adaptive social technology than I expected going in, and I’m still not sure he’s earned the full case, though the tribal patriotism angle he traces back to old evolutionary biology at least shows the idea has a real pedigree. I laughed out loud at one review calling this “a very large pyramid of hobbits” holding up modern cognition, which is a garbled way of saying it, but not a wrong one. Worth the slog. I think about the Tasmania thing weekly now, which is more than I can say for most books I finish.