Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind

by Kevin N. Laland

How culture transformed human evolution

Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind--and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture--evolve from its roots in animal behavior? Darwin's Unfinished Symphony presents a captivating new theory of human cognitive evolution. This compelling and accessible book reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others--it is also the key driving force behind that process.

Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species--such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation--are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research, and bringing it to life with vivid natural history, Laland explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. He traces our rise from scavenger apes in prehistory to modern humans able to design iPhones, dance the tango, and send astronauts into space.

This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Evolution, Biology, Psychology, Cultural, Anthropology

464 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 2017

Reviews

[Peter McCluskey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a mostly good complement to Henrich's The Secret of our Success. The two books provide different, but strongly overlapping, perspectives on how cultural transmission of information played a key role in the evolution of human intelligence.

The first half of the book describes the importance of copying behavior in many animals.

I was a bit surprised that animals as simple as fruit flies are able to copy some behaviors of other fruit flies. Laland provides good evidence that a wide variety of species have evolved some ability to copy behavior, and that ability is strongly connected to the benefits of acquiring knowledge from others and the costs of alternative ways of acquiring that knowledge.

Yet I was also surprised that the value of copying is strongly limited by the low reliability with which behavior is copied, except with humans. Laland makes plausible claims that the need for high-fidelity copying of behavior was an important driving force behind the evolution of bigger and more sophisticated brains.

Laland claims that humans have a unique ability to teach, and that teaching is an important adaptation. He means teaching in a much broader sense than we see in schooling - he includes basic stuff that could have preceded language, such as a parent directing a child's attention to things that the child ought to learn. This seems like a good extension to Henrich's ideas.


The most interesting chapter theorizes about the origin of human language. Laland's theory that language evolved for teaching provides maybe a bit stronger selection pressure than other theories, but he doesn't provide much reason to reject competing theories.

Laland presents seven criteria for a good explanation of the evolution of language. But these criteria look somewhat biased toward his theory.

Laland's first two criteria are that language should have been initially honest and cooperative. He implies that it must have been more honest and cooperative than modern language use is, but he isn't as clear about that as I would like. Those two criteria seem designed as arguments against the theory that language evolved to impress potential mates. The mate-selection theory involves plenty of competition, and presumably a fair amount of deception. But better communicators do convey important evidence about the quality of their genes, even if they're engaging in some deception. That seems sufficient to drive the evolution of language via mate-selection pressures.

[I recently read another theory about the evolution of language which directly contradicts Laland's claim that early language needed to be honest and cooperative. Wild Voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language claims that an important role of initial human vocal flexibility was to deceive other species.]

Laland's theory seems to provide a somewhat better explanation of when language evolved than most other theories do, so I'm inclined to treat it as one of the top theories. But I don't expect any consensus on this topic anytime soon.

The book's final four chapters seemed much less interesting. I recommend skipping them.

Henrich's book emphasized evidence that humans are pretty similar to other apes. Laland emphasizes ways in which humans are unique (language and teaching ability). I didn't notice any cases where they directly contradicted each other, but it's a bit disturbing that they left quite different impressions while saying mostly appropriate things.

Henrich claimed that increasing climate variability created increased rewards for the fast adaptation that culture enabled. Laland disagrees, saying that cultural change itself is a more plausible explanation for the kind of environmental change that incentivized faster adaptation. My intuition says that Laland's conclusion is correct, but he seems a bit overconfident about it.

Overall, Laland's book is less comprehensive and less impressive than Henrich's book, but is still good enough to be in my top ten list of books on the evolution of intelligence.

[Wilte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The breadth of the Laland lab is incredible. This book is crammed with research, experiments and models by Laland and co-workers. They work on things like social learning (animals are social learning specialists, evolved for specific function; humans are learning generalists, can generalize across domains), evolution of intelligence, gene-culture coevolution, and cooperation.

Laland is also well know because of niche construction; "Through our culture we have built our own world, but that is only possible because our minds are fashioned for culture" (p282).

The chapters I enjoyed most were Chapter 3 on the social learnings strategies tournament with Luke Rendell. See 2010 Science paper Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament. "Copying beat asocial learning hands down over virtually all plausible conditions" (p69). "The selective performance of behavior by the copied individual [not randomly chosen, but rather a select, tried-and-tested, high-payoff behavior] is what makes social learning so profitable to the copier." (p71).

And chapter 4 on the threespine and the ninespine sticklebacks (=fish). "Ninespines are capable of exploiting public information, while their close relatives, the threespines, were not" (p81). Public info in this case is the feeding rate of other fish (3 or 9 spine, doesn't matter) to determine richness of a feeding patch. Threespines are less vulnerable out in the open (their spines do protect them), so they can learn asocially (ie on their own); that is often too dangerous for ninespines, hence the evolution to use public information. And ninespines prefer public information over social cues, because it is more reliable. What looks like a interesting paper; "Nine-spined sticklebacks exploit the most reliable source when public and private information conflict" (2004).

p118, based on work by Louis Lefevbre; "Natural selection may have favored innovativeness as a part of a survival strategy based on flexibility - that is, the flexibility to cope with unpredictable or changing environments and to alter their behavior to outcompete others. Perhaps selection for innovativeness could be driving brain enlargement over evolutionary time."

The longest recorded utterance of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee taught sign language by Herbert Terrace was 'Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.' Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas seem to make rather poor conversationalists (p178)

p193 Mark Pagel quote: "language evolved as a trait for promoting cooperation"

p240 "Hunter-gatherers are effectively trapped in a vicious cycle that severely constrains their rate of cultural evolution". Because they have to move a lot, they don't develop/use heavy tools. And they have to space their offspring, because a mother can only carry one child at a time when moving around.

Couple of interesting papers:
p100: Herring gulls drop rabbits from cliffs to kill/drown them and eat them (Young, 1987, Herring gull preying on rabbits)
p106: Crows use passing cars to open nuts (Nihei, 1995. Variations of behaviour of carrion crows Corvus corone using automobiles as nutcrackers
p106 thieving birds stealing quarters from a car wash
p280: Humans are more likely to copy an action that is performed by three individuals one time each, than an action performed by one individual three times. Haun et al (2012) Majority-Biased Transmission in Chimpanzees and Human Children, but Not Orangutans

[Richard Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those frustrating books that is very good in parts, but let down by others. If you are interested in the evolution of learning and culture I think this is a good place to find out more, but with the warning that there are flaws.

The first few chapters are the best. I learnt a lot both which was useful and interesting about the evolution of learning and the importance, the primary importance of imitation, to learning. The author, a life long academic, explains both the science and the experiments that support his findings. There are lots of interesting snippets and facts. In these first few chapters it is not the lightest of reads - it is at the heavier end of what I think of as popular science, but I think the author steers a good balance between getting too heavy on the science and being too light to make it easy to read. I really enjoyed this.

There are though a few flaws which I found disappointing. Occasionally, there were scientific terms I did not understand - not many, but a few. The author felt it necessary to explain who Machiavelli was - but not to explain a couple of unusual scientific terms, reinforcing the view that the author was writing for scientists, but not social scientists (who would all know who Machiavelli was). This is, to be fair, a trivial point. Additionally, he uses the word "culture" all the time, in a valid way, but it is a very broad definition of culture not the more narrow meaning many of us use in everyday life.

There were a couple of more significant annoyances. The first is the author seems to be a person falling into the "give a man a hammer and he'll see everything as a nail". He is so interested in his topic of learning and cultural development that he sees it as the root of everything. Secondly the later chapters, especially the last two, drift from science he has personally overseen, to more speculative thoughts about culture and the arts.

I really dislike it when a scientist moves from hard science to speculation without at least signaling - you know this is not science, this is my speculation. I have no problem with speculation, but when a recognised authority does it that authority does have a responsibility to make clear they are not talking with the same evidence base as in their core area of expertise - else it can give an artificial level of credibility to what is written when I was not sure it deserved it.

I found this particularly annoying in the last chapter. This is titled "arts" but is really about one specific art - dance. Actually its quite an interesting read on the history and development of dance, but it is mostly so tenuously connected with the rest of the book that it is little more than an opinion piece. And an opinion piece from someone who did not really show any appreciation about what the arts are about. We may be able to create art because we have learnt to imitate, but the idea that art is simply imitation shows a really poor understanding of the topic. Additionally, an evolutionary scientist should know how carefully to apply the word "evolution" - when we talk of the "evolution of dance" this is at best a metaphor for evolution in the biological sense. Yet he uses the word freely in both cases as if they meant the same thing - the old fallacy of equivocation.

So, I am in the odd place of recommending a book which I have not rated that highly overall. If you are interested in learning I'd say read this. Personally, this was a gift from a friend, and I read it because of its focus on culture and I thought I might learn about the evolution of ethics - I did not. I did however find lots of interest to my professional field of organisational change, which I did not expect. However, the price for this is at times listening to a man going on a bit too much and going a bit too wide.

[Simon Lavoie · Rating 4 out of 5]

La symphonie inachevée de Darwin est de situer les capacités intellectuelles ou cognitives humaines par rapport à celles des autres espèces. Il y consacre deux ouvrages après l'Origine des espèces . La filiation de l'homme et la sélection liée au sexe (The Descent of Man and the selection in relation to sex, 1871), L'Expression des émotions chez l'homme et les animaux (1872), qui, semant différentes pistes stimulantes, laissent en plan autant de questions faute d'évidences empiriques et de concepts pour nous devenus centraux (dont l'héritabilité génotypique).
La quête de prolongements et de réponses suscite des travaux nombreux et stimulants depuis les trois dernières décennies. Kevin Laland présente dans cet ouvrage sa contribution tenant en la synthèse des recherches menées par son équipe sur 25 ans, avec différents compléments esquissant des axes de recherches en cours.

Laland reconstitue à grands traits la tendance qui fut d'abord considérée inséparable ou naturellement liée à Darwin, qui attribue de manière charitable aux autres espèces les mêmes classes ou catégories de capacités cognitives qui font notre orgueil (capacité morale, logique, sociale, coopérative, esthétique), capacités dont la seule différence avec les nôtres en serait de degré, capacités que les recherches scientifiques auraient encore échoué à saisir en raison de leur nombre encore modeste ou de leur manque à gagner au plan des conditions expérimentales.

Cette tendance, dont certains films se rapprochent qui mettent en vedette des animaux résolvant des dilemmes de justice, s'ancre à des travaux qui carburent à base d'anecdotes non réplicables et d'émotions proches du mysticisme (cf. Franz de Waal). En rupture avec ce point de vue, la reconnaissance d'une unicité de l'intelligence humaine résidant principalement dans sa dimension sociale, écrit Laland, fait l'objet d'un consensus actuellement. "The gap is social" (dixit Michael Tomasello figure de premier plan de ce paradigme et penseur très largement repris par Laland, citation extraite de sa contribution à P.Kappeler & J. B. Silk, 2009, Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals).

Les travaux originaux exposés dans les chapitres 2 à 5 détaillent les capacités d'apprentissage sociale, par imitation, d'espèces éloignées phylogénétiquement de l'homme telles des variétés de poisson (threespine et ninespine sticklebacks) et d'oiseaux. Ces travaux servent d'illustration au postulat central de Laland selon lequel l'apprentissage social n'est jamais inconditionnel ou automatique, mais suit différentes conditions qui le rendent efficace et adaptatif : conditions ayant trait au quand imiter (imite si 1. le coût de l'apprentissage asocial - par essai et erreur - est trop élevé en termes de prédation, imite 2. en cas d'insatisfaction envers le résultat obtenu; ou 3. en cas d'incertitude pour cause 3.1 d'environnement changeant ou 3.2 d'informations périmées); et ayant trait au qui imiter (1. la majorité, cinq individus performant une fois le même comportement, davantage qu'un individu performant cinq fois le même comportement, 2. l'individu le plus prestigieux, autour duquel gravitent 3 femelles davantage que celui autour duquel 1 femelle gravite, 3. l'individu ayant le plus de succès dans son approvisionnement - déduction via l'information publique ou comportement, de la qualité et quantité des ressources). Cette base expérimentale est, largement, à la source des apports originaux de Laland à la symphonie inachevée. L'autre portion tient en la description détaillée de la nature précise du "gap" ou écart.

Cet écart, selon Laland, tient en la rétention des comportements à imiter au fil des générations, en la précision avec laquelle ces comportements sont transmis, en l'émergence de l'éducation (teaching) pour augmenter cette précision - cumulativité, et en l'émergence du langage pour étendre la portée de l'éducation au-delà des relations entre parents ("kin") et au-delà d'un domaine d'activités spécifiques, affaiblissant le coût de l'éducation, et redoublant la précision de la transmission.

Précision de la transmission - éducation - langage forment les trois piliers sur lesquels l'unicité de l'apprentissage social-imitatif humain repose au sens de Laland et son équipe. Il consacre une portion de l'ouvrage à démontrer que cette hypothèse satisfait les 7 conditions à l'évolution du langage posées par Szamado et Szathmary dans un article clef (2006) : unicité, honnêteté, caractère coopératif et adaptatif, motivation à l'apprentissage, et ancrage symbolique. Une portion plus considérable de l'ouvrage tient en la reprise d'un postulat initialement formulé par Allan Wilson selon lequel, à partir d'un certain seuil, les innovations et comportements imités sont à l'origine de pressions sélectives favorisant la rétention de mutations génétiques clefs pour l'accroissement de la taille du cerveau (anatomie, connections entre aires), la consolidation du contrôle d'un organisme sur son environnement et sa modification morphologique (stabilisation des mutations responsables des modifications d'organes compatibles avec les innovations comportementales apprises et transmises).

Laland insère cette hypothèse dans le cadre plus global de la construction de niche, auquel il a puissamment contribué à donner une formulation achevée (voir. Odling-Smee, Laland et Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution). Ce cadre donne à la théorie défendue ici sa véritable ampleur : non seulement l'imitation transmise avec précision du fait de l'éducation et du langage forme-t-elle l'unicité de l'apprentissage social humain, mais par sa production de nouvelles pressions sélectives affectant la taille du cerveau, l'anatomie et la physiologie de l'espèce, cet apprentissage forme un processus autocatalytique au sein duquel nous distinguons deux phases. Après le règne des pressions environnementales auxquelles des réponses biologiques-adaptatives étaient apportées, Laland distingue une période caractérisée par des pressions sélectives occasionnées par des comportements-innovations auxquels des réponses biologiques-adaptatives étaient apportées (telle la tolérance au lactose, ou la rétention de gènes favorisant l'immunité aux virus proliférant en contexte de sédentarité et de proximité avec les espèces domestiquées, notamment) laquelle période fut suivie d'une autre, dans laquelle les pressions sélectives créées par des innovations suscitent, non plus seulement des adaptations biologiques, mais surtout et dans un tout premier temps, des réponses culturelles (techniques notamment).

Les contraintes à l'innovation culturelle posées par le nomadisme et l'exigence de mobilité sont détaillées afin de mieux mettre en lumière l'ampleur du processus autocatalytique amorcée ultérieurement à partir de la conjonction de la domestication des plantes et animaux avec la sédentarisation et l'agriculture. D'une part, une mobilité réduisant le patrimoine matériel au minimum, faisant appel à tous également dans les tâches de collecte et de chasse, ne laissant place à aucune augmentation de prestige à base de ressources accumulées, et contraignant à des naissances espacées (moyenne de 4 ans d'écart entre les naissances); d'autre part, bien qu'à travers plusieurs difficultés et écueils, accumulation de ressources, division du travail, encouragement à l'innovation technique (irrigation, charrue, laboure...), augmentation démographique, naissance d'administration (décompte des récoltes), de villes, d'armée et d'états.

Les forces de l'ouvrage :
• un enrichissement des recherches sur l'unicité des capacités d'apprentissage sociale humaine dans un dialogue stimulant avec certaines figures clefs du domaine, sur fond d'études expérimentales nouvelles et solides (au sein d'espèces peu étudiées);
• une cohabitation réussie du postulat de l'unicité sociale-cognitive humaine avec une extension subtile - sélective et attentive aux détails - de la capacité imitative à des espèces peu réputées pour leur intelligence;
• un étagement successif des arguments clair et stimulant, en général;
• une réfutation des hypothèses simplistes de la psychologie évolutionniste grand public (pour laquelle les membres de notre espèce auraient construit un environnement en décalage et inadéquation avec leurs capacité cognitives ancrées dans un environnement de Pléistocène - petits groupes liés par l'apparentement, le gossip et autres);
• un plaidoyer convaincant sur la nécessité d'intégrer histoire culturelle et biologique, innovations culturelles et adaptations biologiques.

Les faiblesses de l'ouvrage:
• aucun rapprochement avec la littérature philosophique portant sur la théorie cognitive et évolutionnaire (contrairement à Michael Tomasello);
• absence de prise en compte de certains travaux clefs postérieurs à 2013 (notamment Thom Scott-Philipps, Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special et toutes les recherches de Tomasello ultérieurs à Why We Cooperate);
• une certaine hétérogénéité entre les portions de l'ouvrage résumées dans ce commentaire et les autres portant sur l'agriculture, les fondements de la coopération et l'évolution culturelle de la danse;
• beaucoup de redites, en particulier lorsqu'il convient de démontrer la pertinence d'une mise en perspective bio-culturelle d'une pratique comme la danse. L'importance et la complexité de la coordination inter-modale (coordination des perceptions - de ce qui est observé - et des actions qu'il convient d'imiter) sont réitérées à plusieurs reprises et l'apport de la mise en perspective proposée ne semble pas aller beaucoup au-delà.

Point en suspens
Si, comme Laland le soutient, les innovations culturelles posent des problèmes adaptatifs auxquels des réponses culturelles sont dorénavant apportées (suivant une temporalité beaucoup plus courte que celle des adaptations biologiques qui se poursuivent à la traîne), les partisans actuels des sciences sociales y verront suffisamment matière à persister dans leur voie de négligence et de désintérêt envers les développements des recherches esquissées et synthétisées ici. Il reste une différence dans l'ordre du type de questions que se posent les praticiens des sciences sociales - critiques et constructivistes pour la plupart - et les chercheurs d'ascendance néodarwinienne (Niche construction comprise) : les premiers cherchent à problématiser des rapports de force, de domination et des inégalités, et passent les idées et événements sous le bain acide de cette problématisation incessante, tandis que les rapports de pouvoir ne sont abordés qu'indirectement (lorsqu'ils le sont) par les seconds; abordés, qui plus est, sans un accompagnement revendicateur ou d'indignation, mais avec une tonalité descriptive parfois proche d'une certaine quiétude. L'écart (gap) dans l'intelligence sociale entre espèces peut être admis avec beaucoup moins de réticence que d'autres thèmes développés par l'ancienne sociobiologie notamment, et il est possible d'en tirer des éclairages nouveaux sur certains thèmes de la socio-anthropologie, notamment d'ascendance fonctionnaliste, mais il n'en demeure pas moins que cet autre écart dans la prise en compte des rapports de pouvoir reste béant entre ces domaines d'étude, que l'on doive déplorer ou se réjouir de cet état de fait.

[Pi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like a walk in the park. A walk in which the author held my hand and guided me, step by step, through the fairly intricate science of cultural evolution: from social learning in the animal kingdom, through the evolution of big brains, to cumulative cultures, language and art. Not only that, it was also a journey through the process of scientific discovery and refinement. My favorite chapter was the one on the evolution of language, in which Laland covers ground in elucidating some of the long-standing conundrums surrounding why and how such a complex and potent communication system has evolved. The writing was brilliant throughout and managed to keep me onboard even during detailed descriptions of scientific experiments in animal behavior.

[Jukka Aakula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on how culture evolution impacted on the biological evolution of people and vice versa. Not a tutorial type of book however. Start rather with Boyd and Richerson "Not by Genes Alone".

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a few kinds of popular science books: those written by journalists, those written by scientists on topics outside their own research area, and those written by scientists about their own research. The last category is not nearly as common as you might expect it to be – probably because scientists are both too busy doing research to write about it, and because many scientists don't necessarily have the writing chops to do their work justice. Fortunately, this is one of those rare gems. Darwin's unfinished Symphony reads like a series of great seminar talks. The traces years of careful and productive scientific inquiry, steadily advancing hypotheses, accumulating information, eliminating competing explanations, and narrowing in on probable patterns and explanations for natural phenomena. Laland's phenomena of interest are pretty huge. Cultural evolution is an enormous part of human history, to the extent that understanding it provides as much insight as the discovery of biological evolution itself.

From the time I started reading this book, I happen to come across an article about what's called the "interface theory of consciousness." The author (Michael Shermer, incidentally) was critical of the concept, and asked, rhetorically, “how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?” I don't want to be to mean here, because it's easier to make fun of mistakes like this when you are you know why they're wrong, and plenty of people less persistently obtuse than Shermer might reasonably make the same mistake. But for someone who studies evolution, the answer seems fairly obvious: acquiring accurate information is costly.
Much of this book is dedicated to explaining not so much how culture could possibly have occurred, but rather why it is so rare. The runaway benefits humans have accrued through cultural evolution make its selective advantages seem so appealing that we find ourselves asking, "why are other animals so dumb that they haven't figured out how to do this too?" Which is kind of a crude way to state it, but it's ultimately the main question of Laland's research. He builds up from the bottom, starting with the most basic building block of culture: imitation. Imitation is obviously valuable, because other organisms are surviving and reproducing, and it's less risky to just do what they do than to experiment with things that might be dangerous. It allows information about the environment to be passed from generation to generation without hard coding all that in the genome.

But there are problems with imitation. First, if everyone imitates, then whole populations might follow a bad behavior off a cliff like the putative lemmings. On the other hand, if everyone else's imitating the group, innovations might be more rewarding – a new food source all to yourself, for instance. The solution here is a bit obvious when you can think through the whole situation, but the confusing part is that even cognitively limited species demonstrate the same solution: contextual imitation. When it's risky to learn, imitate. Thus stickleback fish vulnerable to predation carefully observe other fish before deciding where to feed, while sticklebacks with physiological predator deterrents do not. The surprising thing is that apparently, this kind of context dependent decision-making doesn't require actually understanding the situation. Sticklebacks are not able to apply the same logic to finding good places to shelter, for instance. Evolution is apparently able to create context dependent behavioral learning through very specific and limited sets of cues. As Laland puts it, "most species are social learning specialists." Learning is thus one specific solution species can adopt when facing a challenge, and it seems to be costly or risky enough that many adopt others instead.

This specialization limits the value of innovation for most species that engage in imitation. For the few species that are social learning generalists, innovation seems to increase, but even then it's kind of the easy part. More difficult issue is maintaining transmission of novel behaviors with sufficient accuracy and frequency that they are not lost. For this purpose, once again we already know that the obvious solution is teaching. The same question arises: among species that are social learning generalists – ravens, raccoons, dolphins, etc. – why hasn't teaching become universal and created a cumulative culture?

The answer is once again intuitive in retrospect but difficult to predict. Teaching is moderately costly, depending on the behavior, and therefore it only emerges when it's beneficial. The counterintuitive part is that intelligent species may be less likely in intelligent animals, because they are capable of learning complex behaviors through imitation alone. I've never heard of the spectrum, extremely difficult behaviors are unlikely to foster teaching because so few individuals acquire them in the first place, so there are few teachers and the behavior dies out. So the sweet spot for teaching is a behavior that substantially increases fitness but that is neither too difficult nor too easy for an intelligent social generalist to pick up on their own. Put in those terms, it doesn't seem all that surprising that teaching emerged and persisted in comparatively few species. Manufacturing stone tools seems to be a good candidate for this unique catalyzing behavior. Laland even explicitly speculates that the lack of such a potential behavior is the only limitation that prevented the most intelligent marine mammals from embarking on the same evolutionary trajectory towards continuous culture.

The next step on a trajectory is the evolution of language, a controversial question for which Laland's answer is probably too premature to assign too much weight to. However, he makes a compelling case that teaching fits the necessary criteria better than any other existing hypotheses. Language is a useful aid to teaching even in its most simple precursors, and is inherently generalizable to teaching any behaviors that emerge, from cooperative hunting too cool making to social interactions. Once language had evolved, teaching became so efficient that practically all useful behaviors that emerged could be retained perfectly and indefinitely within the population. From there, innovations emerge not simply through interactions between individuals and the environment, but primarily through iterations and combinations of existing behaviors. This process of incremental refinement is, as in biological evolution, by far the most important process in cultural evolution, far more so than the innovation of the genius inventor.

The last inflection point Laland covers is the one I'm most interested in: agriculture. Before the book, I was familiar with his work not on cultural evolution per se, but specifically in niche construction theory. As in the other cases, a strong selective filter prevents the majority of innovations from being adopted and perpetuated in most environments. Hunter gatherer toolkits and behavioral repertoires are relatively conservative because innovations must be highly portable to be practical in a trans-humant lifestyle. This is a less novel insight than some of the other findings of the book – importance of sedentism has been recognized by anthropologists for a long time – but it bears repeating here because the parallels with other evolutionary filters emphasizes the continuity and universality of natural selection operating across all life, including human history.

A slightly more interesting point is the discussion of why agriculture itself was beneficial when it has so many clear negative impacts on health and welfare. This is the perspective I have learned through the anti-civ lens on human history, that agriculture exhausts soils and destroys forests, ultimately creating deserts and reducing overall carrying capacity. The problem with that line of thinking is that the data seem to show the opposite, at least in many biomes, at some timescales. Human population density in Europe, for instance, seems to have increased after each secular cycle, rather than leveling out or decreasing. The apparent conclusion is that niche construction and cultural evolution are, at least under some circumstances, capable of outpacing environmental degradation. That's a bit of a tangent – Laland only goes so far as to point out that while mortality may increase in agriculture and especially urban societies, birthrates increase so much more that agricultural societies are able to outcompete healthier and together in the sorrel societies in group selection over the long term.

But doesn't do too much farther than that, though it touches on the common misconception in evolutionary psychology that contemporary human brains are mismatched to the current cultural environment. He briefly emphasizes that genetic evolution speeds up in larger populations (as selection overpowers drift) and thus that while proven cases of gene-culture coevolution are still few, the enormous quantity of new cultural material and persistence of human genetic evolution practically necessitate the conclusion that modern society is involved in many of its particulars to adapts to our brains and that our brains are adapted in a plethora of ways to navigate it. He speculates that humans may in fact be "domesticated" – more docile, cooperative, and moralistic than our ancestors.

Jumping back to the "interface theory of consciousness," one of the things that I found satisfying about this book is that it provides specific mechanistic support for the continuity between evolution and cultural relativism. Until I read about the interface theory, this was something that I had sort of figured out on my own, without seeing a lot of relevant discussion in the literature. It's easy to see how imitation of behaviors and locations for feeding and hiding begin to bridge the individual perceptual models of organisms to a "socially constructed reality." It even provides a new perspective on the old, annoying disciplinary debate: should it be "reality is socially constructed" or "reality is culturally constructed?" The answer seems to depend on what kind of society are species has. In humans, social construction is cultural construction because society is cultural. In sticklebacks, social imitation doesn't meet the threshold of culture and thus social construction is just that. This is sometimes felt like kind of a pedantic thought to me, as I always worry all of my thoughts are, but this research emphasizes its relevance. Postmodernism really does stand to benefit from engagement with evolutionary biology, one that isn't limited by the conservative tendencies of pop evolutionary psychology and instead embraces the phenomenology of individual perception, shaped by continuous evolution, as an important part of relativism.

Consistent with the typology I set out at the beginning, the last few chapters of the book are by far the least interesting and valuable. They leave Laland's research area to draw sweeping conclusions and implications about cultural evolution across human history, and they're just not very specific or satisfying. The chapter about dance in particular feels more like a proof of concept than a real evolutionary history of dance, but it's a concept that doesn't need to be proved at such length. I feel like something with a more direct tie to the evolutionary logic of the book might've made a better example here – storytelling is the one that I really want to read about, but writing or language or tools or domesticated animals and plants/agricultural techniques would've been cool too. But to be fair, those all really deserve their own books. I was pretty satisfied with what had already been achieved in this one, just got kind of impatient after it lost focus.

[Darrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is somewhat uneven but I am giving this book 5 stars because its' premise and hypotheses are so important. Since I was 18 years old I have wondered about the origins of language, music, dance. These are so prevalent in all human societies, I felt they must play some kind of central evolutionary role for our species. I am 71 now and am delighted to have a book that proposes a reasonable answer to this question among others. We, as a species, have created a culture drive that in turn is creating and recreating us. At once pressuring our brains to reorganize, grow and make amazing connections. What hit me the most was the importance of teaching. We are a teaching species. Teaching may be the root of language and provides a cheap way to create a deep fund of knowledge vastly superior to any of our close relatives. After reading, and upon reflection, it became apparent that we routinely share an amazing amount of information among each other every day. What seems just everyday conversation is actually a fund of information and knowledge that we, as a culture, hold among us. I found this book to be revolutionary in many directions. I can't begin to do it justice in this short review. Suffice it to say, this book answers some of the deepest questions about who we are and how we got to this position as a species.

[Cassie1801 · Rating 1 out of 5]

The grammar is unnecessarily difficult and the number of ideas per page is low. That makes this book unnecessarily difficult to read. If the content is good -- if it goes beyond already well-known ideas in the evolution of ideas -- that's a tragedy.

To choose a random sentence: "Milk-bottle opening is an example of an animal innovation, defined as the devising of a novel solution to a problem, or a new way of exploiting the environment.

Milk-bottle-opening --> opening a milk bottle

I think animal innovation is defined as an animal innovating. This whole sentence is wasted.
The comma before or is very difficult to justify. I don't know what the "or" means. That one can use either definition even though they are different?

You have now thought more about this sentence than the author. This was a random sentence! They are all like this. (less)

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carefully, meticulously written - Laland slowly builds his case for the centrality of culture as a shaper of human evolution, both as a supplement to ongoing biological change, and as a driver in its own right.

We are left with a sense of, in his terms, cascading, runaway, autocatalytic transformation that is, in terms of scope, scale and speed, quite out of kilter with anything that has gone before. He doesn’t much comment on this, but it haunts his theorising. Can we keep up with our technologising?

[Seha Ozgur · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mind blowing account of the latest theories on the evolution of the traits that have allowed our complex culture and civilization. The book is somewhat dense on occasion but is absolutely fascinating. Author argues that high fidelity (i.e accurate) transmission of knowledge through teaching is a uniquely human adaptation which has led to our language and other cognitive capabilities.

[Kirk Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first two thirds, while at times coming across as a little contrived, does contain a novel, credible and probably significant interpretation. The book is worth reading for this reason. The final third rambles, and while overall the book is well written it is at times a harder read than it could be, hence the overall rating.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dry, systematic case for cultural feedback loop in human evolution. While not as entertaining as Joe Henrich, Laland is more compelling. He starts by showing how social learning is adaptive in most species. But then we land into the famous “Rogers Paradox” - in Nash Equilibrium of social and asocial learners how does culture confer fitness?

Laland argues that the paradox is resolved with smart strategic copying which outperforms slavish indiscriminate copying, assumed by Alan Rogers. Once selection for strategic social learning is in place, Laland can make a legitimate argument for cultural drive theory that results in selection for a correlated set of trans-modal abilities in the brain. Obviously this smells a lot like selection for GCA (General Cognitive Ability), which is exactly what it is. Laland even describes the findings that estimate G across primates.

Like everybody else he has difficulties explaining why humans alone passed the threshold where this selection yields an autocatalytic niche construction process. Once the threshold is passed the niche construction effects (i.e. culture) become strong enough to become a bigger factor in driving our evolution relative to physical environment, setting up a positive feedback loop between genes and culture.

His argument for human’s uniqueness relies on “high-fidelity” copying idea, where simulations indicate that returns to smart copying are exponential rather than linear, if copying is of high quality. Humans get that high-fidelity by relying on a combination of teaching and longer life-history. And then we crawl through the evolutionary threshold onto the springboard of Fisher’s runaway selection. I didn’t love the argument, but am hesitant to dump it into the garbage either.

With that in place Laland gives us various goodies such as language, cooperation, and norm psychology. Conditioned on selection for teaching, language is a cheap and high-fidelity way of doing it. Teaching of kin is adaptive, and with language we can extend it out along diminishing degree of relatedness till we get to cooperation. The “cultural equilibrium selection” will further cement cooperation as groups that are better at solving collective action problems will outcompete the ones that aren’t.

An unfortunate side effect of all this wonderful cumulative cultural baggage and cooperation is a so called “norm psychology” that we observe in humans - docility, exaggerated sense of in-group identity, and wiring for punishing norm violators and rewarding compliance.

Finally, note that I avoided the fashionable and misleading “gene-culture coevolution” term. Gene-culture coevolution simply means that as humans change the culture, that culture in turn imposes selection on those very humans. Given that culture is more malleable and faster-changing than physical environment this selection will be stronger and faster, which is exactly what geneticists have been observing. In fact, differential selection in recent human evolutionary history was the main subject of the ASHG conference that ended a week ago.

In the book Laland enumerates studies showing that the rate of human genetic evolution has increased hundredfold in the last 40,000 years. He gives dozens of examples including post-agriculture genetic changes due to diet and zoonotic deseases, and much more recent diabetes risk among Polynesians and HbS frequency drop (sickle-cell) in Curacao. Predictably, Laland is uncomfortable with this, so he succumbs to Zizekian “split screen syndrome” and simultaneously argues that while genetic evolution in humans is intensifying, the purely cultural adaptations are becoming increasingly important. I suppose you can look at it that way.

[Bevan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Laland’s book is remarkable. I read the book over a year, only finishing it as I was reading other books, a terrible habit of mine. This book addresses the complex ideas revolving around what many scientists call “gene-culture coevolution.” According to Dr. Laland, we have entered a third age of adaptive evolution, “where cultural evolution dominates.” This is not to say that natural selection has stopped working on humans; it hasn’t. The evolution of the mind has set us apart among millions of species of animals on Earth; this book forms the basis of a theory of the mind and its eventual development.

The book begins by discussing the concepts of “copying” among animals of many different species, and noting the biological benefits of doing so. This in turn leads to a focus on cooperation. If one thinks of it, cooperation exists everywhere among humans, from the musicians in a symphony orchestra to the workmen constructing a building. So, why don’t apes design iPhones and build rocket ships? One obvious answer is language. With language comes complex group cooperation and learning. The story of how culture, broadly defined, made the human mind is the theme of this book.

The first half of the book is a detailed discussion of various animal studies, demonstrating cooperation and social learning among many different species of animal. Chapter 10 starts a discussion of “The Dawn of Civilization.”

The central explanation for our success is the accumulated benefits from cultural acquisitions.

This book is brilliant in many ways. I would recommend it.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about evolution of human culture from the beginning. Wonderful ideas about how copying behavior exists in many other species including insects, but “teaching” is almost uniquely human. Intriguing hypothesis about the origin of human language as primarily a teaching tool. Not a breezy read but not too difficult either.

[Hamilton Carvalho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, packed with findings from strong and diverse research. Laland’s view is compelling, not only because it has a solid base on evidence but also because it accounts for multiple feedback processes that are a staple of complex phenomena.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, broad, and ambitious. Kevin Laland is a brilliant scientist and master theoretician. In this book, he deftly weaves all the topics that he and his collaborators have investigated over 30 years (evolution of culture, evolution of intelligence, evolution of teaching, evolution of language, evolution of cooperation, niche construction, and gene-culture coevolution) into a grand theory of nearly everything in evolutionary and comparative psychology, to explain our species’ “uniquely unique” level of success and cognitive sophistication. I’m not sure if I agree with everything in this book but I agree with most of it, and it’s firmly grounded in experimental evidence and/or ingenious theoretical/mathematical models, and therefore highly plausible. Well worth reading.

[Andres Gomez-Lievano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book on Cultural Evolution. The prose is not as fluid as that of J. Henrich's The Secret of our Success, but it covers many more topics, and in much more depth. The author makes the effort to explain everything with care and detail (which is why the book is so long), without taking out of sight the big questions. A single minor objection I have is with the fact that the book is a lot about Laland's own research. While very impressive and wide-ranging, it does give a biases view of the field. Still, the book deserves my full five stars.

[Paul Sand · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

Another book from a scientist reflecting back on a lifetime chasing answers to intriguing questions. It's pretty good.

The scientist in this case is Kevin Laland. He begins nicely, with the quoted poetic final paragraph from Darwin's The Origin of Species, where an "entangled bank" is contemplated, rife with plants, bugs, worms, singing birdies, etc. All this produced via the "war of nature", natural selection. Darwin, it's evident, took a bit of (justifiable) pride in describing how all that wonderousness could have come to be.

When Laland looks out his window, he sees the biological stuff too, but in addition sees all the artifacts of humanity that signify how different we are from the birdies and bugs: massive buildings, electric poles, hospitals, cars, the Internet, and Major League Baseball. Well, he doesn't see that last bit, he's British. But still… you have to ask the Darwinesque question: how did all that come about? He's spent a lifetime working on the answers. Which aren't all in yet, but there's been a lot of progress made toward them, and Laland and his research teams have done their part.

Laland major theme is the examination of how cultures evolve, often in concert with corresponding biological evolution. (Called, naturally enough, "coevolution".) Humans aren't the only species where that happens. There's a fascinating diversion into the social learning talents of the threespine stickleback, a fish that was shown to learn by observing the feeding behavior of its peers. (A closely related species, the ninespine stickleback, is relatively stupid at this task.)

Via a combination of good storytelling and rigorous science, Laland shows how humans took a number of traits present in the animal kingdom and more or less turned them up to eleven. In addition, humans were able to take advantage of teaching, which is relatively rare in other animals. And teaching is made much more efficacious when combined with our talent for language (completely absent in other animals).

My only quibble is that Laland seems to avoid what I think of as Deirdre McCloskey territory: he doesn't attempt to explain the hockey-stick increase in economic prosperity in a mere eyeblink of evolutionary time.

[He does, however, go into an area where I haven't seen others go: the evolution of artistic expression, concentrating on dance. Didn't see that coming.]

I seem to be reading in this area a lot. If you're interested, I can also recommend The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley and The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich.

[Sannu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why don’t apes build spaceships and put themselves on moon? Out of all the species, why we are the only ones able to develop complex thinking, communication through language and intricate social structure? The answer to this question according to Laland lies just not in our incredible brain, but our culture. If you want to develop a self-driving car or a new gene-editing technology, you don’t start from scratch. You build on the shoulders of what people have done previously. This is what Laland means when he is saying culture is the major drive behind our brain development. Complex cultural norms needed brains able to do complex inference, this improved our brains, which again forced us improve our culture by natural selection. This cycle is the major cause for our development.

This is an incredible book, Laland’s decades of research into behaviour of various primates gave him enough hints about how we could have developed such a complex brain along with culture. They co-evolved together. We think we are strong species because we are intelligent, but it maybe is the culture that makes us intelligent. Laland also stresses on the importance of teaching, how such a global mechanism could have developed in only one species not the others?

The book tackles very interesting problems, and tries to explain them in a scientific manner. It made me appreciate Darwin, and his scientific rigor at that time, he deduced that only natural selection isn’t enough to enough to explain mankind. Darwin knew that there is always something more to it, the language, the habit of teaching young kids rigorously, and social structure that we developed aren’t just a random mutation from natural selection. With Laland’s coherent work of genius, the unfinished symphony of Darwin about how we evolved is quite close to completion. I haven’t read such a nice scientific book in a long time, definitely recommended!

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

High culture will resemble a daring dance, thus requiring much strength and flexibility.

Note to self : investigate the rising consumption of Joylent and the like in light of gene-culture coevolution and find out which copies of a gene this change in diet favours.

[YHC · Rating 4 out of 5]

.....................
后记 疑惑得解，敬畏长存

我写作本书的念头发轫于某日向窗外出神凝望之时，当时我在思考纷繁复杂的人类文化问题。跟之前的很多人一样，我心中也不免疑窦暗生：作为阐释自然世界发展规律的进化论这一强大理论是否也可以解释人类社会中诸如汽车、房屋、医院、工厂、道路交通网、电网、戏剧作品以及管弦乐交响曲这些事物的存在？对技术、工程、艺术以及科学本身的起源有没有科学的解释并可以在动物行为领域追溯其根源呢？

将近30年前，我在伦敦大学学院读研究生时就提出过这些问题，可我意外地发现自己找不到答案。简单来说就好像建筑承包商搭建了建筑框架结构，但是这一结构却无法用力学原理进行充分合理的解释。我想要弄明白的是，我们人类这种建设、计划、协调能力以及建设如此庞大建筑所必需的团队合作等深层能力是如何一步步进化而来的，而不仅仅将人类取得的成功简单地归因于我们的文化、语言、智力或者合作等因素，因为这些因素本身就具有神秘属性，这些特质在自然界中是前所未有的。

随着我对这一问题思考的深入，我发现人类文化正因其丰富多彩和复杂多样而越来越难以进行科学分析。虽然进化论可以解释我们人类存在的大多数方面的因素，但是我并没有感到心满意足，越来越多具有挑战性的问题就像剥洋葱一样在我脑海里一一浮现。我本来信心满满地寄希望于能够在生物科学领域找到问题的答案，但是最终铩羽而归，留下的只是深深的敬畏感和赞叹声。我们究竟该怎样诠释人类文化呢？这是一种人类独有的特质，正是这种特质使我们与众不同，使我们与自然界其他物种区分开来，使我们作为一种物种取得生态领域的主宰优势和数量的巨大增长。不仅文化的起源难以解释，而且人类与其他动物在认知能力上有着巨大差距和鸿沟。根据过去几十年的新研究表明，这种认知能力的差距并没有缩小，而是一步步固化下来。科学如何得以缩小这一差距呢？

现在，为应对这一挑战，在研究团队的众多成员以及其他专业同事的支持帮助下，经过长时间的研究之后，我觉得找到了答案的些许线索。当然并不是完全找到了答案。我很可能在这一过程中出现了纰漏而对他人的努力和贡献没有充分认知。然而，对我来说重要的是，科学方法可以使我们深入了解文化起源的秘密。研究人员可能永远不会知道文化能力背后深层的心理能力是如何进化演变的。这种不断进化的心理是如何与丰富的社会环境相结合，进而产生各种各样的思想、行为和手工技艺的，对这方面的完美重构可能仍然���法完成。尽管如此，也有很多令人满意的地方，现代科学可以对人类思想、智力和文化的核心方面的起源提供可靠的解释。世界上还有相当一部分人否认人是进化而来的，这确实值得我们去研究和用科学方法解释。

通过行为科学家大量的实验研究，我们已经认识到，模仿和创新是在动物世界里普遍存在的现象，但是动物在利用自身所学信息的方式上显示出高度的策略性。社会学习策略竞争学说正好可以对这种信息学习模式做出合理解释，该理论认为准确和效率是模仿能力的具体体现，而模仿能力又决定着动物在自然选择中的优势大小。策略性强、保真度高的模仿行为有利于身体健康，使其在自然选择中处于有利位置。根据这一理论观点，自然选择偏好效率更高、保真度更高的社会学习模式以及灵长类动物大脑中那些能够产生这种学习模式的神经结构和功能。在此过程中，自然选择就可以促进灵长类动物大脑和智力的进化。

灵长类动物间对比研究的数据也印证了这一观点，并且数据表明灵长类动物的社会学习能力、创新能力和脑容量之间有很强的联系，社会学习能力与智力程度也具有共变性，这在自然参数如工具的使用以及学习和认知能力实验测试中都有具体体现。这些发现表明文化驱动过程可能已经在几种不同灵长类动物之间运作起来，其中自然选择钟情于模仿能力强的物种。几乎可以肯定的是，高智商灵长类动物的自然选择源于多个方面的因素。然而，对比分析表明，发生在猴和猿身上的大规模社会性智力选择，随即演变为在类人猿、卷尾猴和猕猴之间更为严格的文化智力选择，并且还受到寿命和饮食质量提高的影响。这一选择被认为加强了几个认知方面的能力，包括学习、观点采纳、计算、工具使用，特别是社会协作式互动。

比较分析反过来又提出了这样一个问题：为什么只有人类的文化才表现出高度的复杂性呢？理论研究后的答案是，复杂的文化需要高保真度的信息传播。研究表明，社会传播准确性的小幅增加就会导致文化在寿命和数量方面的大幅增加；对累积性文化而言，知识传播的高保真度是其存在的必要条件。另外，这种自然选择竞争告诉我们对社会性学习的高度依赖会自动使得文化知识获得极长的存续期。人类似乎超越了对社会性学习依赖的限定水平，文化知识变得极度稳定，几乎可以无限期地存在下去。随着社会性学习（而不是自主性学习）的不断增加，我们祖先一方面变得更加墨守成规，一方面也开始展示潮流和时尚，这在我们现代人类中也是常见的现象。总而言之，这些理论研究成果表明，一旦我们的祖先进化出十分具有策略性和准确性的模仿形式，现代人身上具有文化能力的很多方面就会逐步显现。

我们祖先是怎样实现信息传播的高保真度的呢？很明显，一旦信息传播的各种具体形式确定下来，答案就是通过教授的方式来实现的，这在自然界中很少见，却是人类社会普遍的现象。数学分析表明，知识教授的进化需要苛刻的条件才能实现，但是累积性文化则会放宽这些条件。这意味着，我们祖先在知识教授和累积性文化方面实现了共同进化，这样一来，在地球生命历史上就首次产生了能够向亲属们教授广泛领域知识的物种——人类。人类之所以在知识教授的广度和深度上独一无二，主要是因为累积的文化可以使学生获得原来很难获得的知识。

知识教授逐步进化的条件有三个：一是知识传授的成本要低或者可以抵消物质供应成本；二是知识传授高度准确，知识传播高度有效；三是教师和学生具有高度的关联性。任何降低知识传授成本的改进措施都可以增加其在自然选择过程中的自身优势，前提是这种改变不会真正削弱知识传授的效果。正是在我们古人类祖先这种空前的大规模知识传授背景下，语言作为知识传授的辅助工具开始进化出来。语言是一种适应性的改变，发端于自然竞争之中，目的是降低成本，提高准确性以及扩大知识传授的领域范围。这种解释的优势在于它可以阐释语言的忠实性、合作性和独特性，并且还可以阐释语言的归纳概括能力、语言是如何产生以及语言为什么会被学习。人类语言是独一无二的，至少在现存的物种中是这样的，这是因为只有人类才能构建起一个丰富多样、富于变化、生产能力强、需要交流的文化世界。一旦我们的祖先发展出一套社会化的符号交流传播系统，语言的其他方面特质，如组合性就自然而然地出现了。

实验研究成果印证了这一假说：基因—文化协同进化发展体现在包括工具使用在内的社会传导技能以及人类体格和认知方面的协同进化、动态发展上。人类进化过程中这种互动式发展从至少250万年前就一直延续至今。理论研究、人类学研究和遗传学研究都证明了基因—文化协同进化作用在近期人类进化过程中的重要性，因为这种进化模式不仅塑造了我们的体格和认知方式，而且加快了变化的速度。正如所预料的那样，在近期的古人类进化过程中，大脑中与模仿、创新和工具使用相关的区域得到了爆发式的发展。正如生物进化论让位于基因—文化协同进化论一样，文化进化论也取代了人类适应论，同时，我们人类进化的变化速度也进一步加快了。文化向我们的祖先提供了食物获取和生存技能，随着每一项新发明的出现，人类能够更有效地开发和利用周围的环境。这不仅促进了大脑的进化发展，而且人口也不断增长。

随着植物的培育、动物的驯养以及农业的兴起，人口和社会复杂性都得到巨大增长，这使得整个社会不再受到狩猎采集型生活方式的不断迁徙而带来的种种限制。农业社会的蓬勃发展，一方面是因为农业社会使得人类所处环境的承载力增加，进而超越了狩猎采集型社会的发展；另一方面是因为农业的发展促进了一系列发明创新的产生，极大地改变了人类社会。对那些依靠农业生产生活的广大人群来说，那些有益的创新发明能够更好地传播和保存。农业带来的革命性发展指的不仅仅是众多科技发明的出现，而且还包括那些完全出乎意料的思想迸发，比如轮子的发明、城邦制度的发展以及宗教的兴起。历史记录通过口头传说、舞蹈和仪式得以保存，并且通过文字、书籍以及现代计算机存储这样的外部文化记忆存储方式得以巩固加强，这样一来，文化知识越来越难以丢失。

人类合作的规模和复杂程度达到了前所未有的水平。理论和实验数据表明，正是因为我们人类具备独特且有效的社会学习、模仿和教授能力，人类社会中大规模合作才会成为可能。文化使人们走上了崭新的进化道路，为促进现有的合作机制（比如间接的互惠共生机制）创造条件，创造在其他动物群体中未曾发现的新合作机制，比如文化群体选择机制。在此过程中，基因—文化协同进化就促进了新的进化心理的形成，这种心理完全不同于我们所观察到的其他动物心理，而且还使得人类的学习和计算能力获得巨大增强。理论和试验研究表明，人类认知和文化与其他猿类的有着巨大差异，因为在人类文化深层结构中，我们人类具备一系列独一无二的社会认知能力，包括教授、语言、高等模仿和丰富的社会性。这些能力是与累积性文化协同进化的，这是因为这些能力可以提高信息传播的保真度。

进化生物学理论可以阐释当代文化现象随时间推移而变化的方式，也可以揭示文化产生所必需的心理、神经和生理特性的起源。这一点可以用舞蹈进化发展的例子来解释，例如舞蹈的进化揭示了为什么人类能够跟上音乐的节拍，我们如何能够跟其他人保持同步以及我们如何能够学习一长串的舞蹈动作。尽管舞蹈可以有让人眼花缭乱的各种形式，但是要理解为什么有舞蹈多样性的存在，可以通过追溯血统，认识舞蹈创新背后的各种影响以及了解舞蹈发展所处的社会环境来分析。我们也可以看到，随着时间的推移，各种想法是如何相互作用并组合在一起产生非常复杂的舞蹈形式的，这与综合性的生物适应性进化类似。舞蹈是这个道理，文化的其他方面也是这个道理，不论是否与艺术、科学还是技术相关，在所有文化因素中，对现有文化形式的改进和组合就会促进新文化形式的出现。文化的极端多样性和复杂性并不妨碍科学研究。我们对基础科学的理解非但不会毁掉文化，相反经过反馈后能够使得历史分析更丰富，更少些神秘感。人类文化确实经得起进化分析。

事后看来，我们如今才明白为什么弄清楚人类认知和智力的起源是如此艰巨的任务了，甚至包括达尔文在内的历史上最伟大的人物为此孜孜以求而不得。特别需要指出的是，有三个因素使得这一挑战显得尤其艰难。第一，人类认知中关键因素（文化学习、智力、语言、合作以及计算能力）的起源单独拿出来并不能够让人完全透彻理解，因为这些因素在复杂的协同进化进程中相互联系、相互影响。第二，人类心智、思想和思维的进化并不是简单的直线式发展，而是随着外部环境的变化进行优胜劣汰的自然选择，而这种自然选择以认知适应性为标准进行。同样，我们心智能力的进化也要经过一个错综复杂、相互作用的过程，在此过程中，我们的祖先不断构建他们的物质和社会环境，而环境反过来又对他们的体格和头脑进行优胜劣汰的自然选择，如此循环往复。第三，要理解人类头脑的进化这一复杂的动态发展过程需要多学科协同努力，运用现代基因组学、考古学、人类学和心理学工具。这一套工具在达尔文以及达尔文之前的人所处的时代并不具备，而是近来才出现的。我们所具备的思考、学习、理解和交流能力使人类与其他动物真正区分开来。科学家现在认为这种差异正是反映了古人类一系列反馈机制所起的作用。通过这些机制的作用，人类认知和文化的关键因素便自发地大规模加速发展起来。

现在回想起来，我才明白，我的研究小组致力于阐释文化进化的努力面临很多困难，要在科学界层面理解人类思维起源同样也面临很大挑战，两者的原因都是一样的。人类的文化能力并不是孤立地进化，而是与认知和行为的核心要素经历复杂的协同进化，这些核心要素包括我们的语言、知识教授、智力、观点采纳、计算能力、合作能力、工具使用、记忆力以及对自然的控制。我们研究的意外收获是，在我们努力理解文化起源的过程中，我们对人类思维、语言和智力的起源有了进一步的认识。

我相信，我与很多从事这项研究的天才科学家的努力已经逐渐拨开了人类文化极度复杂性的迷雾。人类思维的创造能力和分析能力以及不懈追求、永不满足的潜能令人惊叹不已：在文化进化过程中，正是这些能力和潜能才使得我们的文化生活更加丰富多彩。深入理解文化起源的进化分析之后再去审视莫扎特、莎士比亚或者达·芬奇的奇思妙想，不由得让人叹为观止，令人印象深刻。艾伦·图灵、居里夫人和伊莎多拉·邓肯的才华横溢仍然给人极大的启发，令人欢欣鼓舞。尽管惊叹之情稍退，但敬畏之心长存。

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the origins of the entangled bank of human culture, and the animal roots of the human mind. The central argument is that no single prime mover is responsible for the evolution of the human mind. Instead, cycles of evolutionary feedback, which are interwoven complexes of cultural processes, reinforce each other in an irresistible runaway dynamic that engineered the mind’s breathtaking computational power.

Comparing the distinguishing features of humanity through comparison with other humans is another central theme in this book, and will help to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways to humanity’s spectacular achievements. Our species extraordinary accomplishments can be attributed to our uniquely potent capability for culture. (Culture = extensive accumulation of shared, learned knowledge, and iterative improvements in technology over time.) We can build on the innovations of others (even others from the past) in a way that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Culture is an evolved capability; we need to understand i) why animals copy each other at all, ii) the critical conditions that favoured cumulative culture, and the cognitive prerequisites for its expression, iii) how and why humans invented language, and how that led to complex cooperation, and iv) how all these processes fed back on each other to shape our bodies and minds. There is a real gap between human minds and animal minds that really needs explaining. What is special about our mental capabilities? Cooperation (we are predisposed to cooperate, and expect the same of others), theory of mind (we can understand that others have false beliefs, intentions, and goals), communication (language allows us to exchange ideas about matters distant in space and time).

- The story begins with the observation that countless animals learn life skills and acquire valuable knowledge by copying other individuals. Copying works because other individuals prefilter behaviour, thereby making adaptive solutions available for other to copy. Selection for more efficient and accurate copying had seemingly led some primates to rely on more socially transmitted information. Social learning coevolved with enhanced innovateness and complex tools use to promote survival. The result was a runaway process in which different components of cognition fed back to reinforce and promote each other, leading to extraordinary growth in brain size in some primates, and high intelligence. this process favoured teaching, which is costly behaviour designed to enhance learning in others. Selection for more efficient teaching may have been critical in acountgin for why our ancestors evolved language. Teaching + language was key to the appearance of extensive large-scale human cooperation. Human minds are not only built for culture; they are also built by culture.

- In Darwin’s day, people thought that monkeys imitated but behaviours of most animals were controlled by instincts. Copying is ubiquitous in nature; learning from others in a prevalent trick that animals rely on to acquire skills and knowledge in a tough world. Animals don’t require big brains to copy behaviours; female fruit flies select male flies that other males have chosen as mates. Animal behaviour is not completely controlled by ‘instincts’ and ‘innate tendencies’, but is also influenced by learned and socially transmitted wisdom. What is so good about copying?

- Imitation is an important form of social learning. Asocial learners acquire costlier, but more accurate information by trial and error. Social learners acquire cheaper, but less accurate information by copying others. It used to be thought that in any population, there will be a mix of these two types of learners in a state of equilibrium, known as a mixed evolutionary stable strategy; but is this the case? (Short answer: no.) Laland sought to figure which social strategies led to the greatest increase in fitness. After all, how could we have confidence that we had found the optimal fitness-enhancing mechanisms when there are so many possibilities? Could we devise a tournament to work out the best way to learn, that would yield general insights into why it paid to copy, and how best to do so? They used a multi-armed bandit framework: imagine a fruit machine with a hundred separate levers, each with a different probability of giving a payout. The challenge is to work out which levers to pull. The scenario was a hypothetical population of organisms that had to survive in a novel, challenging, and changing world. The simulated environment changed regularly which meant that the payoffs associated with each behaviour changed frequently. The tournament was structured into a number of rounds, and in each round each agent must perform one of three possible moves: INNOVATE represented asocial learning; OBSERVE represented any form of social learning; and EXPLOIT represented the performance of a behaviour from the agent’s repertoire, equivalent to pulling a lever and getting the cash. What strategies would most likely survive? It is possible to learn too much; when strategies deployed a learning move, the best means to do so was through copying. Copying was not universally beneficial. Copying only paid if it was done efficiently. Poorly performing strategies learned too much, and at the wrong times. Asocial learning is only more effective than learning from others in extreme environments that change at extraordinarily high rates - rates so high that they are rare in nature. So why is copying so robust? Copying pays because other individuals filter behaviour, making adaptive information available to copy. An animal doesn’t need to be smart to benefit from copying, because a lot of the smart decision making has already been done for it by the copied individuals who have prefiltered their behaviour. Simple, poorly implemented and inflexible social learning does not increment biological fitness, but smart, sophisticated, and flexible social learning does. When alternative social learning strategies compete, the strategy that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning. High levels of reliance on social learning automatically generate extreme durability of cultural knowledge. There are genuine fitness benefits to copying if its done strategically and with high fidelity. Copying, even blind copying, offers advantages over trial and error learning because copiers benefit from the adaptive prefiltering of behaviour by the indivduals that are copied.

- Fish behaviour is far from rigidly controlled by a genetic program, but is flexibly adjusted to exploit information and resources in the environment. Fishes have proven a terrific model system for investigating social learning processes; animal traditions and the diffusion of new innovations are group-level phenomena; and if scientists want to replicate populations of experimental animals, fish are practical in that respect. Public-information use is defined as the capability of an animal to assess the quality of a resource, such as the richness of a food patch, through vicariously monitoring the success and failure of others. There are subtle morphological differences between threespine sticklebacks and ninespine sticklebacks; threespine haveless but larger spines, and are therefore less vulnerable to predators, than ninespine sticklebacks. The ninespine stickleback possesses a highly specific form of social learning - the capability for public information use - that the other lacks. How can this be explained? Ninespine have weak morphological defences and are the only stickleback to use public information. Public information use is of benefit where it allows animals to acquire information relevant to survival safely, cheaply, and reliably. The use of public information has evolved to be highly strategic and allows the fish to exploit resources with near optimal efficiency. Conversely threespine sticklebacks, which are more physically robust, can gain information directly without relying on the information provided by other fish. To wait under cover while other fish feed would mean that threespine would miss out on feeding opportunities. Animals exploit information provided by others in a strategic manner. A social learning strategy is a pattern of copying exhibited that fits with hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory, such as copy when asocial leaning is costly, copy when uncertain, and conform to the majority behaviour. Animals don’t use one strategy implemented by a species; animals typically use many social learning strategies, switching between them according to the circumstances, in order to exploit the available internal external cues in a flexible and adaptive manner. However, while animals typically possess specific social learning competences to address particular challenges in their natural ecological niches, humans are social learning generalists; our copying is applied strategically, but is seldom greatly constrained by our competences.

- Humans don’t have a monopoly on creativity; learned behaviour spreads through innovation and social learning. It was found that a bird’s brain size correlated positively with how innovative it would be. Allan Wilson proposed a ‘cultural drive hypothesis’ whereby the spread of behavioural innovations through cultural transmission led animals to exploit the environment in new ways, further increasing the rate of genetic evolution. Natural selection may have favoured innovativeness as part of a survival strategy based on the flexibility to cope with changing environments in order to outcompete others. Could this hypothesis explain the emergence of human capacities? Two problems: if fruit flies can learn socially with tiny brains, why should primates need huge brains? Second, many factors covary with brain size, so how could we be confident that any one relationship was causal?

- Wilson proposed a three step hypothesis for how culture formed the human mind. First, a new advantageous habit arose in an individual; second, this habit spreads by social leaning; third, selection favours those bearing brain mutations that endow an enhanced innovation or social learning capability. (Baldwin effect.) Biology gives rise to culture, which in turn modifies the biology to be receptive to more culture. Is cultural drive correct? First, if honeybees can copy behaviour, why should evolution favour bigger brains? The social learning strategies tournament explains this: copying pays only if it’s done well. If you copy everything, or copy at the wrong time, copying is a hindrance rather than an aid to survival. This means that brains need to be more complicated in order to be more accurate and strategic in their copying in order copy efficiently. Which functional capabilities of the brain would enhance innovation? Enhanced perceptual systems, a theory of mind and perspective-taking, social and asocial learning capabilities, capacity for innovation, increased sociality (sensitivity to social cues, tolerance). Natural selection operating on social learning capabilities has driven the evolution of intelligence in primates; and rates of social learning covary with brain size and a whole host of measures of cognitive performance. Second, how do we know that social learning drove brain evolution? Alongside measures of social complexity, how long a species lived predicted how big its brain would be and how smart it would be. Extended periods of juvenile dependence would potentially create extra opportunities for transgenerational knowledge transfer; selection for efficient social learning and innovativeness allowed for energy gains in dire, which in turn fuelled brain growth and generated selection for extended longevity. So cultural drive looked like a viable explanation for how humanity’s explosive cultural potential was started.

- Why have only humans been to the moon if cultural drive has operated on all primates? Knowledge that is copied faithfully will remain in a population for longer, and more culture will be preserved. Humans have more culture because of human-specific transmission mechanisms that significantly enhance the fidelity of social learning. The difference between human and animal culture comes down to transmission fidelity. Cumulative knowledge can only begin to accrue when cultural traits are transmitted through a population with a high enough fidelity rate. What are these mechanisms? Language and teaching. Many animals can teach (definition: tutor teaches if modifies behaviour only in the presence of pupil at some cost) but teaching isn’t found among large-brained mammals celebrated for their intelligence. Why? Smart animals don’t need to teach, because most of their skills can be learned asocially or through copying. Why are humans different then? Teaching evolved in humans primarily because cumulative culture renders otherwise difficult-to-acquire valuable information available to teach. The complexity of human culture hangs critically on our capacities for teaching, language, and imitation. Humans alone possess cumulative culture because humans alone possess sufficiently high-fidelity information transmission mechanisms, including an unusually accurate capacity for imitation, teaching and language.

- What, then, are the origins of language? There are too many explanations of the evolution of language; what is the right one? Any evolutionary account for the origins of language must pass seven benchmarks. First, the theory must account for the honesty of early language. Cost-free signaling that is accurate and honest can evolve, but only where there are no conflicts of interest. Second, the theory must explain why an individual would go out of his way to help another by passing on accurate information. Third, the theory should explain how early languages could have been adaptive from the outset. Fourth, any account must explain how the words that were devised acquired meanings tied to the real world. Fifth, the theory should explain the generality of language. Sixth, the theory should account for why only humans have language. Seventh, the theory should explain why communication needed to be learned. What was language needed for that required it to be both socially learned and rapidly changing? There is only one theory that accounts for all these factors. Teaching and cumulative culture coevolved in our ancestors. Should something appear that simultaneously increases the effectiveness and reduces the costs of teaching, then we would predict it would be subject to strong positive selection only in a population of teachers. Language was selected for its efficiency in reducing the costs, and increasing the effectiveness, of teaching. If language evolved to teach relatives, we would expect it to be honest (first), and it would have emerged in an already cooperative context (second). Simple attention grabbing commands would do little to get most messages across, but they have been proven to help facilitate social learning (third), and at the same time, pointing and movement can ground teaching utterance to provide meaning to unfamiliar terms (fourth). Teaching through language could be applied to all kinds of proficiencies that are difficult to learn (fifth) and only humans evolved this ability because only humans were involved in extensive social learning (sixth). Lastly, language had to be learned because only our species uniquely constructed a sufficiently diverse, generative, and changeable cultural world that had to be talked about (seventh). Language probably began as a means to teach complex foraging skills, but got cooped to teach linguistic symbols too; humans might have been predisposed to be highly competent manipulators of strings of elements because tool-manufacturing requires precise sequences of actions.

- Genes and culture coevolve; genetic propensities, expressed throughout development, influence the cultural traits that are learned, while cultural knowledge, expressed in behaviour and artefacts, spreads through populations and modifies how natural selection affects human populations. Our ancestors didn’t just evolve to be suited to their world; they shaped their world. The landscape of human evolution did not pre-exist us; we built it ourselves. Cultural niche construction transformed the human mind, leaving our cognition specifically adapted for cultural life. Desmond Morris is wrong; while mismatch between human brains and modern environments do occur do some degree (sugar and fat), the extent of this incongruity is limited. Humans built structures that broadly enhance their evolutionary fitness. Modern, or cultural, technologies that have negative consequences typically have benefits that outweigh the costs, in the long term.

- Why did we spend so long as hunter-gatherers? Hunter-gatherer life imposes constraints on the growth of cultural knowledge. Constant movement means that technology cannot be bulky, and the lack of individual wealth means that there is little persistent social structure. After a certain threshold is reached, cultural evolution can occur at a much more rapid pace. What are these threshold conditions? The climate being suitable is a necessary precondition, rather than a direct cause. There is no magic bullet that enables the rapid acceleration of evolving culture and technology. The right species, with the requisite knowledge, had to be in the right place, at the right time, and behave in the right way. The development of large scale socially structured societies with extensive division of labour couldn’t have evolved without intensive agriculture. Rich environments favoured agriculture, because populations were more sedentary, populations could grow, and combine existing cultural elements to generate increasingly complex technologies. Agricultural societies then outbred hunter-gatherer societies, and unleashed the explosive potential of further innovations that changed human society. Agriculture then generated many further inventions.

- How is large-scale cooperation to be explained? Human cooperation may be unusually extensive as a result of cumulative culture and may be uniquely reliant on teaching and language. By reducing the costs of teaching, language may have allowed instruction to spread to more distantly related individuals. Tutors began correcting the behaviour on their pupils, and eventually each society was characterised by a particular set of norms that dictated how pupils should behave. We then identified with the group, abode by its rules and privileged in-group members. Cooperation hugely increased in scope thanks to the advent of language; models have demonstrated that indirect reciprocity can lead to cooperation. Interpopulation cultural diversity sets a premium on recognising and preferentially learning from the members of one’s own group who have useful local knowledge, rather than from outsiders who come from other groups. Languages or dialects can function as ethnic markers, which allows a form of group selection to arise, known as cultural group selection. Those groups that possessed more effective or efficient traditions, norms and institutions fared better in competition with other groups. The net result is the spread of military technology, division of labour, religious doctrines, and many other cooperative endeavours. By these means, societies are able to resolve many collective action problems. The human tendency to coordinate group action has also fed back to shape human psychology in ways that leave us uniquely able to understand and share the goals and intentions of others. What separates humans is not our genes, but the products of a few thousand years of cultural evolution. Biology is not irrelevant; through our culture we have built our world, but that is only possible because our minds are fashioned for culture.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes us human? is a question of interest to me for a long time and can be approached thru different ways of knowing. This scientist reaches the surprising conclusion that teaching and teachers are the essential difference between humans and other animals. Specifically, teaching allows humans to accurately and cheaply copy information from one individual to another and allows cultural information to accumulate across generations. Simulations and thought exercises show that teaching would only be selected under a narrow range of circumstances and only a few examples of teaching are known to exist in the animal kingdom (e.g., meerkats). So today's "red for ed" demonstrations strike at something much larger than dissatisfaction over pay. Its really about the future of humanity.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the end I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The author has conducted a wide variety of fascinating research into the evolution of culture (and the coevolution of genes and culture). I only give it 4 rather than 5 stars for my own selfish preferences for more examples from nature and evolution (in addition to the fascinating modelling experiments), and for my preference for more of a focus on detailed explanations of human genetics (and animal behaviour) research. That is of course not the focus of his book. Overall I learned a lot and enjoyed it!

[Tom Roth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very extensive review of all the scientific work that Kevin Laland and his students have done over the years. The main thesis is that human evolution (and in some sense uniqueness) has probably been driven by the need for teaching, and the argumentation for this is quite good. Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in human evolution & animal behavior.

[Mike Sanders · Rating 3 out of 5]

By no means a bad book, I would call it a decent book. But neither here (simple and introductory) nor there (deep and detailed). Suffers from being an academic writing a popular book. A shorter book with more vividity might have worked better, or cutting out the generality for more specificity and depth.

[Paul Wason · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested not just, as in the title, how culture made the human mind but also how scientists came to that conclusion, this is the book. The number of studies clearly explained without loosing the theoretical thread is amazing.

[Saqlain Mighiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kevin Laland exhibited an extensive range of experimental studies to explain his narrative about intricate topic of human evolutionary history. He specifically demonstrated, how scientists drive conclusions through experiments and field work.

[Derek Henderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Laland makes portentous claims and then fails to deliver. He really can't see the forest for the trees. Too much focus on non-illuminating details and then sketchy when we want meat and potatoes. Avoid.