Concept map (work in progress): https://coggle.it/diagram/XNSQ6qW0VPbwb76j/t/-/75d58705d0306554136d77f31c2b54ef7dad8b8f1c166938f7e3174d5f0b7515

Book Notes / Summaries

The WEIRDest People in the World - Henrich

Key Quotes / Highlights

• Culture changes biology. Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically.
• Protestantism increased literacy. Embedded deep in Protestantism is the notion that individuals should develop a personal relationship with God and Jesus. To accomplish this, both men and women needed to read and interpret the sacred scriptures—the Bible—for themselves, and not rely primarily on the authority of supposed experts, priests, or institutional authorities like the Church.
• Shame dominates Guilt in most (kin based) societies. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame—not guilt—dominates people’s lives. People experience shame when they, their relatives, or even their friends fail to live up to the standards imposed on them by their communities. Non-WEIRD populations might, for example, “lose face” in front of the judging eyes of others when their daughter elopes with someone outside their social network. Meanwhile, WEIRD people might feel guilty for taking a nap instead of hitting the gym even though this isn’t an obligation and no one will know. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.....Throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks that knitted together distant cousins and in-laws. In these regulated-relational worlds, people’s survival, identity, security, marriages, and success depended on the health and prosperity of kin-based networks, which often formed discrete institutions known as clans, lineages, houses, or tribes.
• KEY ELEMENTS IN WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY
  • Individualism and Personal Motivation
  • Self-focus, self-esteem, and self-enhancement
  • Guilt over shame
  • Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance
  • Low conformity and deference to tradition/elders
  • Patience, self-regulation, and self-control
  • Time thrift and hard work (value of labor)
  • Desire for control and love of choice Impersonal Prosociality (and Related Worldviews)
  • Impartial principles over contextual particularism
  • Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions (e.g., government)
  • An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment
  • Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties
  • Reduced in-group favoritism
  • Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter
  • Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist
  • Linear time and notions of progress Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases
  • Analytical over holistic thinking
  • Attention to foreground and central actors
  • Endowment effect—overvaluing our own stuff
  • Field independence: isolating objects from background
  • Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities)
• We evolved genetically to be good at cultural learning because it was adaptive. Over at least two million years, our species evolved in a world in which we were becoming ever more reliant on tapping into a growing body of complex cultural know-how to acquire the skills, practices, and preferences that were crucial for finding food, making tools, and navigating the social world. To thrive in this world, natural selection favored expanding brains that were increasingly capable of acquiring, storing, organizing, and retransmitting valuable cultural information. As part of this, natural selection beefed up both our motivations and our capacities for cultural learning, including the mentalizing abilities that allow us to copy other people’s motor patterns and infer their underlying beliefs, heuristics, preferences, motivations, and emotional reactions. These abilities increasingly connected us with other minds.
• We're wired to learn from others, particularly others like us. Our evolved capacities for cultural learning have been honed to figure out who to learn from, what to learn, and when to use cultural learning over other informational sources like individual experience or innate intuitions....adults, children, and even infants integrate cues related to a potential role model’s skill, competence, reliability, success, prestige, health, age, sex, and ethnicity, among others. By preferentially attending to more successful or prestigious people, learners focus their attention and memory on those individuals most likely to possess useful information, practices, motivations, values, etc., that lead to greater success and status. By combining cues like prestige and success with self-similarity cues like sex and ethnicity (e.g., speaking the same dialect), learners can target their attention on those who possess the skills, strategies, and attitudes most likely to be useful to them in their future roles or communities.
• Intergroup competition can drive societal scale-up. Operates through processes like:
  • War and raiding: Any social norms, beliefs, or practices that generate greater cooperation, stronger in-group solidarity, or other technological, military, or economic advantages can spread via intergroup conflict, as groups with more competitive institutions drive out, eliminate, or assimilate those with less competitive institutions.
  • Differential migration: Whenever possible, people will migrate from less prosperous or secure communities to more prosperous and secure ones.
  • Prestige-biased group transmission: Individuals and communities preferentially attend to and learn from more successful or prestigious groups. This causes social norms and beliefs to diffuse from more successful groups to less successful ones and can drive the spread of more competitive institutions.
  • Differential group survival without conflict: In hostile environments, only groups with institutions that promote extensive cooperation and sharing can survive at all.
  • Differential reproduction: Norms can influence the rate at which individuals have children. Since children tend to share the norms of their community, any norms that increase birth rates or slow death rates will tend to spread.
• Strong clans can inhibit larger group solidarity. Clans provide a psychologically potent means to generate solidarity among members, in part by reducing internal conflicts. But, as happened in the Sepik, clans often can’t get along, so scaling up to larger societies requires either unifying them or dissolving them.
• Agriculture created the conditions for fierce intergroup competition which drove the scale-up of societies. the more societies relied on agriculture and herding, the more they needed to scale up (and vice versa). Larger and more unified societies were simply better able to defend their territories. farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers. With the “right” set of institutions, farmers could spread across the landscape like an epidemic, driving out or assimilating any hunter-gatherers in their path. Thus, early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.
• Agricultural societies which evolved the ability to centralize control bested societies that didn't. Such authorities allow societies not only to respond decisively to changing circumstances, such as encroaching neighbors, dwindling resources, and natural disasters, but also to strategically pursue the conquest of other societies. Any society that managed to centralize authority could potentially have an advantage in intergroup competition. By providing a means to make and enforce community-level decisions, chiefdoms often have a substantial edge in competition with more egalitarian societies. This political centralization raises the level of cooperation among the clans in warfare and facilitates the provision of public goods.
• Although in these states, kin-based institutions still dominated. Premodern states still needed clan and tribal institutions to govern effectively, and sometimes the state even buttressed or augmented the power of kin-based institutions. Typically, premodern states left it to the clans or tribes to police and adjudicate their own internal affairs, including theft, assault, and even murder.
• Once states no longer have an external threat, intragroup warfare rises to the fore. Very relevant to the US / demise of societies. Once intergroup competition wanes, which often happens when states or empires manage to eliminate their competition, things slowly fall apart. Without the looming threats posed by competing societies, the competition among ruling families within a society will intensify and gradually tear the state-level institutions apart. Cracks, gaps, and loopholes appear even in the best institutions, allowing narrow elite interests to flood in, as lineages, clans, and sometimes entire ethnic communities devise ways to exploit state institutions for their own ends.
• The religion instinct may be a result of our propensity for cultural learning. Natural selection has often favored relying on cultural learning over other sources of information, especially when uncertainty was high and getting the right answer was important. The possible existence of supernatural beings, hidden powers, and parallel worlds represents precisely the sort of high-stakes but uncertain situations in which our cultural learning abilities often overrule our mundane intuitions and common experience in favor of our learning from others. Our evolved inclinations to rely heavily on cultural learning (at least under some circumstances) create a kind of “faith instinct” that opens the door to religion, making us susceptible to ideas and beliefs that violate our worldly expectations.
• Hunter gatherer gods tended to be weak and human-like. The gods of hunter-gatherers tended to be weak, whimsical, and not particularly moral. They could be bribed, tricked, or scared off with powerful rituals. Among the Aboriginal hunter-gatherers of Japan, for example, people bribed the gods with offerings of millet beer. If things didn’t improve, they’d threaten to cut the god off from his beer supply. Sometimes such gods did punish people with their supernatural powers, but this was usually because of some divine pet peeve rather than a moral conviction....Even in rare cases when the gods did punish people for violating widely shared social norms, this usually involved an arbitrary taboo rather than something like murder, theft, adultery, or deception.13 Although hunter-gatherers often believed in some form of afterlife, there was rarely any connection between proper behavior in this life—e.g., not stealing food—and the quality of one’s afterlife.
• Intergroup competition led to stronger + more moralizing gods over time. Suppose some communities happened—by chance—to have gods or ancestor spirits that punished people for refusing to share food or for running away in the face of enemy raiders. Suppose still other communities came to share a belief in gods who punished people for breaking sacred oaths taken during key transactions, such as when trading valuable goods or affirming peace treaties. Over time, intergroup competition can gradually filter, aggregate, and recombine such diverse supernatural beliefs. If it’s sufficiently intense, intergroup competition can assemble integrated cultural packages that include gods, rituals, afterlife conceptions, and social institutions that together expand the sphere of trust, intensify people’s willingness to sacrifice in war, and sustain internal harmony by reducing assault, murder, adultery, and other crimes within groups...we should expect gods to evolve specific kinds of concerns about human actions and greater powers to both monitor adherents and punish or reward proper behavior....Supernatural beings seem to first emerge with roughly human abilities for monitoring others, but then over millennia some became omniscient, eventually even gaining the ability to see into people’s hearts and minds.....Over time, the gods evolved from peevish pranksters to divine judges capable of inflicting injuries, illness, and even death. Eventually, some gods seized control over the afterlife, acquiring the power to dispense everlasting life or eternal damnation.
• The Catholic church destroyed europe's kin-based institutions through its prohibitions on cousin marriage + arranged marriage. Marital bonds establish economic and social ties between kin-groups that foster trade, cooperation, and security. To sustain such ties, long-term marital exchanges are necessary, which usually means that new marriages must occur between blood or affinal relatives (in-laws).
• Also important, were the Church's new norms around inheritance, which made the church immensely more powerful. Intensive kin-based institutions often possess social norms that regulate inheritance and the ownership of land or other important resources. In lineage- or clan-based societies, for example, lands are often corporately owned by all members of a kin-group. Inheritance in these situations is straightforward: the new generation of clan members collectively inherits from the previous generation, so there’s no individual ownership. Often, the notion of selling clan lands is unthinkable because these territories are the home of the clan’s ancestors, and deeply tied into the clan’s rituals and identity.....the Church also provided a psychologically easier alternative: rich people could bequest some or all of their wealth to the poor at the time of their death. This allowed the wealthy to stay rich all their lives, but to still thread the proverbial needle, by giving generously to the poor at their death.....The psychological effects of such costly renunciations of wealth would have: (1) implanted or deepened the faith in impressed observers, (2) sparked copycats who would also give away their wealth (further fueling the fire), and (3) enriched the Church, as the renounced wealth flowed to the poor through Church coffers.....The Church became immensely wealthy during the medieval period through a combination of bequests, tithes, and payments for services such as annulments and dispensations for cousin marriage. Among these, bequests made up by far the biggest portion of revenue. By 900 CE, the Church owned about a third of the cultivated land in western Europe, including in Germany (35 percent) and France (44 percent). By the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the Church owned half of Germany, and between one-quarter and one-third of England.
• As kin-based institutions lost power, people were able to move more freely and voluntary institutions were started. With the weakening of kinship and dissolution of tribes, Christians seeking security could more fully dedicate themselves to the Church and other voluntary associations....This opened a door to the development and spread of voluntary associations, including new religious organizations as well as novel institutions such as charter towns, professional guilds, and universities.
• This changed how people thought of themselves. [under kin based institutions] norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also often endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g., the clan) over oneself.
• Kin-based, Agricultural societies favored polygyny for many reasons. In a world with polygynous marriage, young women and their families get a much larger selection of potential husbands to choose from than are available in a purely monogamous society; they can select either a married or an unmarried man. The best move for a particular woman in a hunter-gatherer society might be to become the second wife of a great hunter instead of being the first wife of a poor hunter;....As a result, polygynous marriage will appeal to both men and women under many conditions, including in societies in which women are free to select their own husbands. Polyandrous marriage, by contrast, won’t appeal psychologically to either men or women, except under relatively narrow social, economic, and ecological circumstances....As societies adopted farming and began to scale up in size and complexity, the emergence of large inequalities among men greatly exaggerated the intensity of polygynous marriage. The Ethnographic Atlas reveals that 85 percent of agricultural societies had polygynous marriage....In Africa, Ashante and Zulu kings each had 1,000 or more wives. However, these are just the paramount chiefs or kings; there was usually a fleet of lesser elites who maintained smaller harems for themselves. Zande kings, for example, each had more than 500 wives, but their chiefs also each maintained about 30 or 40 wives, and sometimes as many as 100. In Asia, things were often even more extreme: medieval Khmer kings in Cambodia possessed five elite wives and several thousand secondary wives who were themselves graded into various classes.
• Monogamous marriage is a christian institution that reduced violence and created stability by draining the pool of unmarried young men. Polygynous marriage tends to generate a large pool of low-status unmarried men with few prospects for marriage or even sex. Responding to this situation, men’s psychology shifts in ways that spark fiercer male-male competition and, under many conditions, foment greater violence and more crime....monogamous marriage suppresses male-male reproductive competition and drains the low-status pool of unmarried men, giving these men a stake in the future (e.g., a child, or at least a chance for one). By suppressing the intensity of this competition, monogamous marriage induces shifts that recalibrate men....Many psychological experiments suggest that men monitor the intensity of male-male competition in part by looking at the ratio of competing men to available women in the local environment and recalibrating their patience, risk-taking, and other aspects of their psychology in adaptive and predictable ways.....getting married cuts a man’s chances of committing a crime by half, both for property crimes like burglary, theft, and robbery and for violent crimes like assault and battery. Across all crimes, marriage cuts the rate by 35 percent.
• Market integration drove the uptake of impersonal institutions and the building blocks of modern states. breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities and charter towns, which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of market integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology better than many alternatives.

The Secret of Our Success - Henrich

• "Any adult chimp can readily overpower us, and any big cat can easily run us down, though we are oddly good at long-distance running and fast, accurate throwing. Our guts are particularly poor at detoxifying poisonous plants, yet most of us cannot readily distinguish the poisonous ones from the edible ones. We are dependent on eating cooked food, though we don’t innately know how to make fire or cook....The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative. That is, hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking know-how, and edible-plant knowledge began to improve and aggregate—by learning from others—so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation...innovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.
  • Evidence for this theory:
    • Explorers who died when faced with new environments w/o cultural packages of knowledge
    • Complex food processing techniques that defied rational explanation but we now realize neutralized toxins (Manioc / pregnancy taboos), inhibited pathogens (spices), or made essential nutrients bioavailable (maize) and are passed down culturally.
    • Many physical adaptations that are reliant on culturally transmitted knowledge (sweating for thermoregulation - reliant on water vessels, small/weak jaws and digestive tracts - cooked food, lactase persistence,
    • While some animals exit the womb ready to walk, we have an extremely extended physical helplessness period (can't feed/defecate/walk), but exit the womb already picking up cultural signals of competence and reliability
    • Humans are bad randomizers because we're so wired to imitate. Divination may have emerged as a way to improve our randomization abilities. (caribou hunting, bird augury for ag plot selection,
  • Other insights:
    • Cultural evolution is often much smarter than individuals and disfavors rationality. Individuals who trusted previous ways of doing things (complex food processing for example) were often less likely to get poisoned and die. This is a compelling explanation for our sometimes irrationality and cultural conservatism.
    • We self-domesticated ourselves by ostracizing norm breakers over time. Evolution has favored norm followers. Quote: "it’s our automatic norm following—not our....cool rational calculation of future consequences—that often makes us do the “right thing” and allows our societies to work."
    • Humans seem to preferentially learn from co-ethnic, same-sex models, and slightly elder models.
    • Intergroup competition / external threats bias us to more closely follow norms and sanction norm violators. In times of threat, greater in-group solidarity was advantageous. (think food selfishness during times of famine)
    • Historically, innovation is better seen as driven by a population's size and interconnectedness, not individual inventors. Relatedly, it is not possible to infer innate cognitive abilities by existing tool complexity as this is tied to inherited cultural information. This strikes me as an interesting bull-case for African countries with a high proportion of digital natives...
    • Cultural differences are biological differences (the brain gets wired differently) but are not genetic differences.
    • "Much of our species’ status psychology, including our deferential motivations, patterns of mimicry and imitation, facets of pride, cooperative tendencies, and bodily displays, appear to be genetically evolved adaptations to a world in which valuable cultural information was unevenly distributed across the minds of other members of our social groups"
    • "Once we understand the importance of collective brains, we begin to see why modern societies vary in their innovativeness. It’s not the smartness of individuals or the formal incentives. It’s the willingness and ability of large numbers of individuals at the knowledge frontier to freely interact, exchange views, disagree, learn from each other, build collaborations, trust strangers, and be wrong. Innovation does not take a genius or a village; it takes a big network of freely interacting minds."
    • "Humans are adaptive cultural learners who acquire ideas, beliefs, values, social norms, motivations, and worldviews from others in their communities. To focus our cultural learning, we use cues of prestige, success, sex, dialect, and ethnicity, among others, and especially attend to particular domains, such as those involving food, sex, danger, and norm violations. We do this especially under uncertainty, time pressure, and stress."

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

• Dawkins' central point in the selfish gene is that the fundamental evolutionary unit is not an organism but a gene - defined as a unit of heredity that is transferred from parent to offspring. All living organisms are just 'vehicles' for replicating molecules (DNA). Talking about natural selection at the level of an individual is only a convenient grammatical/colloquial simplification. Natural selection operates at the level of the gene, not the individual. [Note: There's debate about this today. Multilevel selection is back]
• Living organisms existed for 3 billion years on earth without ever knowing why!
• There are ~3B! base pairs in the human genome. Each cell's nucleus contains all of this information, split between 23 pairs of chromosomes (46 in total)
• Life evolved from replicating molecules by the ordinary forces of physics and chemistry. As these molecules replicated, mistakes were sometimes made. Copying mistakes would have had an effect on the molecules - some might replicate more quickly. Some less quickly. Others would become more/less stable. Others might copy more/less reliably. This would have changed the relative concentrations of these molecules in the primordial soup. Because resources are finite, the most prevalent molecules would be the ones with the most advantageous qualities. Repeat this process over billions of years....and you get cells, then multicellular life, and so on until us.
• While lethal genes tend to get selected out of the gene pool, selection pressure only acts at ages when humans are still reproducing. Thus, higher rates of cancer/infirmity in the elderly may just be late-acting genes that never get selected out of the gene pool. You can't pass on a beneficial mutation for no cancer in your 60s if you're no longer having children.
• Evolutionary Stable Strategies: All behaviors evolved in the context of what other organisms (vehicles) were also doing as selfish maximizers. While evolutionary stable strategies will tend to evolve, these are not the best strategies that could be achieved by group conspiracies. They're simply the best possible in our selfish, 'prisoner's dilemma' filled world
• One important variable in the evolution of altruism is the amount of genetic material animals share. Imagine two mindless robots that replicate themselves every few months. By random chance, a change in its code causes one of them to care about the success of its replications, teaching them, looking after them. Very quickly, robots that had the software bug of parental investment will outcompete robots that didn't. We love our families because genes that caused us care about relatives with shared genetic material outcompeted genes that didn't. Animals that don't have small numbers of vulnerable young don't exhibit such interest in their children. As humans, we can't analyze the true amount of genetic material we share with kin, so the appearance of shared genetic material is more important than actual genetic material shared in kin selection.
• We tend to feel so much more emotion towards parents than brothers/sisters, and much more towards brothers/sisters than cousins because shared genetic material quickly drops off. [See: Hamilton's rule]. Another wild idea relates to the origins of menopause. At a certain stage, it may have paid more (genetically) for grandmothers to invest resources in raising grandchildren vs continuing to have her own grandchildren. Thus, genes that made women reproductively infertile in middle age could have beaten out genes that prolonged fertility. Note that because males don't invest as much in offspring there does not seem to be programmed infertility.
• All evolutionary differences between males and females start at the asymmetry of egg/sperm investment. Because females carry children and invest more time and resources into a child biologically, genes that cause males to (on the margin) look for more reproductive opportunities would have prevailed. In species where the asymmetry is less (such as fish, where fertilization happens outside the body), these behaviors don't exist. Indeed, they are sometimes reversed. Female fish often have the upper hand, being able to choose when they can lay eggs and thus are able to leave the male 'stuck' with eggs when she leaves first. Also because of this asymmetry, females have the upper hand at reproductive 'choice' and thus males in all species have evolved a myriad of ways to advertise fitness.
• There were some crazy animal examples in the book:
  • Symbiosis: Ants farming fungus and aphids like cattle (which they milk)
  • Culture transmissions: Bird songs - saddleback in new zealand
  • Caddis fly larvae: Secretes ultra sticky underwater glue and constructs and shell of river pebbles around itself. Illustrates the idea that genes affect not just the vehicle at hand but the competitive environment around that vehicle.
  • Ants that secretes a chemical that causes ant workers to rebel on their queen. Monomorium santschi
  • Thisbe - caterpillar with a sound producing organ in it's head that can summon ants. Then enslaves them with a chemical.