“Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, Joseph Henrich”, 2019-06-04 (; backlinks; similar):
Book review of an anthropologist text arguing for imitation and extensive cultural group selection as the driving force of human civilization.
Imitation of other humans is proposed as the unique human cognitive skill that gave us the edge over other primates and all animals, with any kind of raw intelligence being strictly minor.
Further, this extensive multi-level group selectionism implies that most knowledge is embodied in apparently-arbitrary cultural practices, such as traditional food preparation or divination or hunting rituals, which are effective despite lacking any observable rationale and the actual reasons for their efficacy are inaccessible to mere reason (except possibly by a far more advanced science).
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