Reddit mentions of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Joe Henrich proposes a theory in his recent book that cultures perform cranial deformation as a difficult-to-fake signal of cultural membership. The idea is that you have a vested interest in (quickly) finding out if a stranger shares your cultural norms and values, but you can't directly observe many of these. But you can observe outward cultural identifiers such as clothing, tattoos, piercings, etc.

These cultural markers are more effective if they are costly, and cranial deformation is a good candidate because it must be done from infancy, which means you can't possibly have just done it to yourself this morning so you could sneak into someone else's tribe. It proves that you really have been part of that culture since birth.

An anthropology professor at Harvard, Joseph Heinrich,
wrote a book on this topic (and others) that I strongly recommend.

Henrich, Joseph (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press

Here is an interview with Tyler Cowen about his book.

Most people say that the change was pushed by the catholic church during and especially after the fall of the roman West, so it can't have much to do with roman law.

This theory is actually pretty popular in hbd circles. Steve Sailer used in early aughts to explain why american state building efforts in Iraq were doomed to fail.

HBDchick blogged a lot about this.

Oh you would probably enjoy this book:
The Secret of Our Success

Also fun fact: The US dropped the A-Bomb on Japan and thus thrust the world into the atomic age before Watson and Crick discovered what our own DNA looked like. @_@

>I just don't know how smart people can believe it. How can the academy embrace it. It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny...

Read The Secret of Our Success. Essentially, even the very smartest among us (and the early hominids we descended from and who initially evolved these systems we still carry around with us) are idiots compared to large groups of people reality-testing their ideas over whole generations, thus we evolved to intuitively emulate other (successful) people's behaviour. So smart academics will simply observe what the most prestigious academics in their field thinks and then start thinking the same things those people think without realizing why they're doing it: When anyone disagrees, then, as long as it's possible to handwave away their arguments, the arguments will just be shouted down by the mob - which will simply intuit that the most prestigious people are correct, and the upstarts wrong, and so will not look any further into it but just go along with the mob in laughing at that obvious idiot. Why dig into the research data when all these prestigious people are saying it's wrong? They're prestigious, so (your heuristics tell you) they're probably right. You've got better things to do with your time!

So usually, only when those people at the top die or are somehow unambiguously discredited will people start seriously considering new ideas. Thus, the adage that science advances one funeral at a time.

Then just toss in the stuff that people like Jonathan Haidt write about, like the tribalism, or the religious-like moral code that seems to spontaneously emerge in the absence of a pre-existing one, or the enormous bias people are towards finding reasons to believe what they already feel like is true, etc., and maybe add a dash of cynical self-interest among people looking to appeal to the seeming powers-that-be in order to advance their own careers, and that probably explains most of it.

On a slightly more positive note, it is possible to get these - or, well, any - people to consider whether what they believe is wrong, but to do so you need to disconnect them from their intuitive or 'system 1' thinking and activate their deliberate or 'system 2' thinking, and doing that isn't always easy. Apparently, when it comes to morality, one way to do that is to expose them to the thing you want to ask them about, but then wait like 5 minutes after exposure before actually asking them about it. By then their initial moral reaction will have died down and they can more calmly and rationally examine the problem. Another way is to trigger an error in their intuitive system that it can't resolve, which will then activate their conscious system which you can actually have a conversation with. Doing that is easier said than done though, especially as triggering any specific error in the intuitive system only really works once before a resistance is developed to it - intelligent people especially are very good at coming up with reasons for why any given error is not actually an error at all and then conditioning their intuitive system not to respond to it again.

Of course, for cynics who know they're wrong but are just using the agenda as a vehicle to advance themselves, no argument is likely to work.

Anyway. That's probably mostly why even very intelligent people believe very stupid things.

> Do you think role models/idols of same sex are better for that particular person, or is that completely unnecessary? Provide your reasons.

From Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter:

> Automatically and unconsciously, people also use cues of self-similarity, like sex and ethnicity, to further hone and personalize their cultural learning. Self-similarity cues help learners acquire the skills, practices, beliefs, and motivations that are, or were in our evolutionary past, most likely to be suitable to them, their talents, or their probable roles later in life. For example, many anthropologists argue that the division of labor between males and females is hundreds of thousands of years old in our species’ lineage. If true, we should expect males to preferentially hang around, attend to, and learn from other males—and vice versa for females. This will result in novices learning the skills and expectations required for their likely roles later in life, as mothers, hunters, cooks, and weavers.

(the book goes into this in a lot more detail)

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But you are never isolated because you can draw on a vast amount of knowledge and practices from other people.

Even when you are completely isolated form the outside world, your education is the result of lots of evolved knowledgeable from other people.


There are lots of historical examples of modern Western humans in novel environments with no cultural knowledge who try to solve the problems logically but fail miserably. While native humans live in the same areas for centuries.

This book

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854

Has a lot of such examples

Turns out we are not that good at solving things purely with casual reasoning

First of all, it is an unfortunate byproduct of the far left that we now view 'diversity' as only meaning diversity in skin color, when there are so many more differences--of culture, religion, gender, class, and opinion--worth considering. Not even dwelling on the actual difficulty of calculating a society's 'diversity,' let's consider this: one way to look at science is that there are pieces of cultural knowledge that we all share. In order to make a discovery, formulate an opinion, or analyze something, one has to rely on previously learned, whether conscious or unconscious, concepts. It's impossible to talk about anything without using the cultural lexicon you've inherited since birth. What is a cultural lexicon? It is the values, norms, information, and ways of looking at the world that are the product of a culture. Joe Henrich, a professor of anthropology and cognition at Columbia, argues in his book The Secret of Our Success that the reason that science emerged out of Greece instead of, say, China, was a matter of the culture of the Ancient Greeks.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Our-Success-Domesticating/dp/0691166854
The East has traditionally followed a more holistic, interconnected philosophy, as opposed to the West, which is much more analytical and reductionist. Henrich shows that the way agriculture emerged in these respective countries, with China's shared system necessary for wet rice farming and Greece's individual farmers made Greeks more inclined to analyze something's separate parts. This is the foundation of science. (The etymology of 'analyze' is literally to break something apart.) Thus, the shared cultural lexicon of individual contribution and separate rather than all-encompassing inquiry allowed Greece to be the birthplace of modern science. Discoveries do not just come out of nowhere; the people who discovered new concepts owe themselves to the shared concepts they used to explore it. There are some discoveries that were, in a sense, inevitable--evolution, for example. This does not detract from Darwin's skill as a thinker, but the theory of evolution would've been (and was) formed without him. It was just a matter of who came first. Thus, the more cultures you have the more cultural lexicons you have and thus the more discoveries you are able to have. There are simply concepts and artworks and discoveries that are not going to be able to be made when someone is stuck in their paradigm. The black community is a great example of this: they have made sizable contributions--the works of Toni Morrison and the creation of hip-hop, for example--that depend of a shared system of ideas. Quite simply, the more diverse a society is the more concepts are able to be worked with, and the more discoveries are able to be made that depend on those concepts.