I don't read everyone of your postings, but I am coming around to appreciating your proposal that "progress" deserves serious study as a standalone subset of the social (and maybe even "hard" brain and genetic) sciences.
Actually, as a younger man I was biased to consider physics and chemistry, etc., the hard sciences in that it was easier to control the number and kind of variables influencing experimentation. In contrast, I now appreciate that the social sciences trying to plumb the depth and breadth of the complex human animal and his diversity of social and cultural orientations and solutions is much more difficult (i.e., harder) than the usual physical sciences. We need to realize this and that financial support for social sciences may very well require substantially higher budgets to obtain large enough statistical samples for meaningful results that can withstand the current decline of repeatability in science reporting. This in turn may require that we are more selective about just which studies and topics we are going to fund, among all of the potential avenues of investigation that might tickle someone's fancy.
Great review. I suspect your set of past book reviews is a real treasure trove of time saving for those of us struggling to read the books we have bought already, let alone being incentivized to buy more, such as this one by Henrich, via good reviews.
But I am kind of struggling to get my mind wrapped around the time scale of change over human/ humanoid history. It seems incredibly slow for a VERY long time, and then (almost BOOM!) we expand our tool kit, starting painting cave walls, etc. etc. around 50K to 70K years ago. Then another longish state of stability until plant and animal domestication and the other history you have been summarizing for us, beginning 12K years ago.
Did we evolve voice boxes and language capable brains before we learned how to use fire (1.8M to 400K years* ago?) ? Having fire aided our diets substantially with cooked food being easier to digest, surviving in colder climes, etc. Does bipedalism play a role in adopting cultural practices? Longer trips, running down prey vs. lion type sprints? Is there any evidence our hands and manual dexterity are better than that of the apes and chimps in some way? Presumably picking nits/parasites off of another group member's back or head requires pretty delicate capabilities, but maybe still short of what we can do? [I don't recall ever seeing this aspect of comparative evolution discussed.]
Comparing our history and social capabilities vs. (say) chimpanzees suggests the evolutionary benefits of "some" cooperation were in action over many millions of years.
Do we end up with a series of "threshold" advances, genetic and cultural (aka, as a step function) or is it just a gradual accumulation of mental skills and corresponding successful cultural practices?
The transfer of knowledge and culture via group oral history would be very beneficial in advancing a given cultural solution, capturing to some degree the accumulated learning of many people. And probably specialized skills/learning were also transferred via kin based or ritual based allegiances? So only some of the group members had to learn a cultural specialty to have it available down the generations [in contrast to the other animal species where every member knows everything he/she needs to know to survive (with some learning among the apes and a few other species?)]. But did Henrich ever bring up the further advances of general writing/ literacy, let alone the printing press and internet as expanding communication of both "pure" knowledge and cultural practices?
*Sometimes I think we report or read such time spans all too casually. That is 1800, or 400, or 50, or 12 periods of one thousand years!! We can barely relate to a 100 or maybe 300 year time span, and even with written records in stone, clay, or paper (or digital), we often lose a lot of detailed understanding. Imagining generation after generation after generation of people/groups living and moving around among each other, fighting or cooperating and trading, etc. , as the case may be, really requires a mental effort to "let's stop and give this more serious consideration". And each of those 1000 year periods translates into (maybe?) 50 generations or so? That is a long time for such a "smart" species to exhibit such slow advances (genetic or cultural) until only several millennia ago. Maybe if we were to "count memes" or some similar metric, we would see that parameter growing in some way we (or I?) don't yet appreciate?
Thanks for the comment. I am glad that you find the reviews useful.
You ask a lot of good questions that I do not have the expertise to answer. Human anthropology is still a fairly immature science, so it is constantly being revolutionized by new discoveries. With the advent of DNA sequencing of skeletons, the data is starting to accumulate faster than theories can adjust.
I would say the best way to learn more is to read these book summaries:
I don't read everyone of your postings, but I am coming around to appreciating your proposal that "progress" deserves serious study as a standalone subset of the social (and maybe even "hard" brain and genetic) sciences.
Actually, as a younger man I was biased to consider physics and chemistry, etc., the hard sciences in that it was easier to control the number and kind of variables influencing experimentation. In contrast, I now appreciate that the social sciences trying to plumb the depth and breadth of the complex human animal and his diversity of social and cultural orientations and solutions is much more difficult (i.e., harder) than the usual physical sciences. We need to realize this and that financial support for social sciences may very well require substantially higher budgets to obtain large enough statistical samples for meaningful results that can withstand the current decline of repeatability in science reporting. This in turn may require that we are more selective about just which studies and topics we are going to fund, among all of the potential avenues of investigation that might tickle someone's fancy.
I am glad that you see the need for Progress Studies.
Great review. I suspect your set of past book reviews is a real treasure trove of time saving for those of us struggling to read the books we have bought already, let alone being incentivized to buy more, such as this one by Henrich, via good reviews.
But I am kind of struggling to get my mind wrapped around the time scale of change over human/ humanoid history. It seems incredibly slow for a VERY long time, and then (almost BOOM!) we expand our tool kit, starting painting cave walls, etc. etc. around 50K to 70K years ago. Then another longish state of stability until plant and animal domestication and the other history you have been summarizing for us, beginning 12K years ago.
Did we evolve voice boxes and language capable brains before we learned how to use fire (1.8M to 400K years* ago?) ? Having fire aided our diets substantially with cooked food being easier to digest, surviving in colder climes, etc. Does bipedalism play a role in adopting cultural practices? Longer trips, running down prey vs. lion type sprints? Is there any evidence our hands and manual dexterity are better than that of the apes and chimps in some way? Presumably picking nits/parasites off of another group member's back or head requires pretty delicate capabilities, but maybe still short of what we can do? [I don't recall ever seeing this aspect of comparative evolution discussed.]
Comparing our history and social capabilities vs. (say) chimpanzees suggests the evolutionary benefits of "some" cooperation were in action over many millions of years.
Do we end up with a series of "threshold" advances, genetic and cultural (aka, as a step function) or is it just a gradual accumulation of mental skills and corresponding successful cultural practices?
The transfer of knowledge and culture via group oral history would be very beneficial in advancing a given cultural solution, capturing to some degree the accumulated learning of many people. And probably specialized skills/learning were also transferred via kin based or ritual based allegiances? So only some of the group members had to learn a cultural specialty to have it available down the generations [in contrast to the other animal species where every member knows everything he/she needs to know to survive (with some learning among the apes and a few other species?)]. But did Henrich ever bring up the further advances of general writing/ literacy, let alone the printing press and internet as expanding communication of both "pure" knowledge and cultural practices?
*Sometimes I think we report or read such time spans all too casually. That is 1800, or 400, or 50, or 12 periods of one thousand years!! We can barely relate to a 100 or maybe 300 year time span, and even with written records in stone, clay, or paper (or digital), we often lose a lot of detailed understanding. Imagining generation after generation after generation of people/groups living and moving around among each other, fighting or cooperating and trading, etc. , as the case may be, really requires a mental effort to "let's stop and give this more serious consideration". And each of those 1000 year periods translates into (maybe?) 50 generations or so? That is a long time for such a "smart" species to exhibit such slow advances (genetic or cultural) until only several millennia ago. Maybe if we were to "count memes" or some similar metric, we would see that parameter growing in some way we (or I?) don't yet appreciate?
Thanks for the comment. I am glad that you find the reviews useful.
You ask a lot of good questions that I do not have the expertise to answer. Human anthropology is still a fairly immature science, so it is constantly being revolutionized by new discoveries. With the advent of DNA sequencing of skeletons, the data is starting to accumulate faster than theories can adjust.
I would say the best way to learn more is to read these book summaries:
https://techratchet.com/cultural-evolution-learning-path/
https://techratchet.com/biology-in-human-history-learning-path/
https://techratchet.com/geography-in-history-learning-path/