The Secret of Our Success

I handle a lot of inherited know-how in my line of work, ways of doing things that get passed down without anyone writing them down properly, and this book put language to something I’d noticed but never articulated. Henrich’s argument is that human success isn’t really about individual brainpower, it’s about our unusual capacity to accumulate and transmit culture across generations, and that a lone genius dropped into an unfamiliar environment will reliably lose to a group with generations of locally accumulated know-how, no matter how smart that lone genius is.

The examples are where the book earns its keep. Arctic explorers with superior technology and training starving to death while nearby indigenous communities thrived on knowledge nobody had written into a manual, detoxification processes for poisonous plants that took generations of trial and fatal error to work out and get passed down as ritual rather than explained science. One reader summed the whole project up as us standing on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits, which is a strange way to put it but not an inaccurate one, the point being it’s cumulative and mostly unglamorous rather than any single flash of genius.

Where I’ll register a complaint that echoes something I’ve seen from other readers, the writing itself isn’t always doing this material justice, dry stretches where the argument gets buried under more citation than narrative, and it reads at points like it was written for a classroom rather than a general reader. His treatment of religion and faith as adaptive cultural technology also felt a bit too neat, too willing to explain away belief as pure function.

Groundbreaking premise, imperfect delivery. I’d still recommend it, just don’t expect every page to move as fast as the best ones do.