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vorgetragen in d. hochfürstl. Julierspitalkirche den 14ten Julius 1776 . von Henrich Joseph Staubach . ; Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Res/2 Hom. 569,24

"Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains--on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness."--provided by publisher

In challenging the pervasive model of individual actors as cost‐benefit analysts who adapt their behavior by learning from the environment, this article analyzes the temporal dynamics of both environmental (individual) learning and biased cultural transmission processes by comparing these dynamics with the robust "5‐shaped" curves that emerge from the diffusion of innovations literature. The analysis shows three things: (1) that environmental learning alone never produces the 5‐shaped adoption dynamics typically observed in the spread of novel practices, ideas, and technologies; (2) that biased cultural transmission always produces the S‐shaped temporal dynamics; and (3) that a combination of environmental learning and biased cultural transmission can generate 5‐dynamics but only when biased cultural transmission is the predominate force in the spread of new behaviors. These findings suggest that biased cultural transmission processes are much more important to understanding the diffusion of innovations and sociocultural evolution than is often assumed by most theorists. [diffusion of innovations, cultural transmission, learning, cultural evolution]

AbstractPayoff‐biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory construction, where agents come up with "channels" via which different cultural traits contribute to some ultimate payoff and use such "channels" as intermediate payoff currencies to make trait‐updating decisions. We show that theory‐building as a strategy is mostly favored when the noise associated with the ultimate‐level payoff is high, selective pressures are strong, and the probability of arriving at the right theory is high. This approach provides insights into both the emergence of payoff currencies and the role of cognition for causal model building. We close by discussing the implications of our model for the broader question of causal learning in social contexts.

Abstract

Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small, insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans, living in metro Detroit, whom the Henrichs use as an example to show how kinship relations, ethnicity, and culturally transmitted traditions provide the key to explaining the evolutio