Harari vs. Henrich - By Joseph Heath
TL;DR
Harari and Henrich propose opposite sequences: Harari claims intelligence led to language, cooperation, then culture. Henrich reverses it completely: culture came first, then cooperation, language, and finally intelligence.
The 'intelligence first' view fails on costs: Human brains are metabolically expensive and create high mortality in childbirth, making them 'strangely over-engineered' for survival tasks like making stone tools.
Language has a startup problem: A mutation giving one person unprecedented communication ability is useless because there's no one to talk to. Cooperation had to exist before language could become informative.
Harari's cooperation explanations are circular: His accounts of gossip and 'big gods' both rely on collective action to solve collective action problems, which is question-begging.
Culture-first theory is the cutting edge: Mindless imitation lets complex behaviors accumulate without individual understanding, then conformist social learning enables group-level selection for cooperation.
Self-domestication embedded cooperation biologically: As cultural norms favored cooperation, aggressive males lost reproductive opportunities, biologically embedding prosocial tendencies through gene-culture coevolution.
The Breakdown
Yuval Harari's Sapiens gets human evolution backwards. The book's central theory-that intelligence came first, then language, cooperation, and finally culture-is the exact opposite of what leading evolutionary theorists now believe. Joseph Henrich's work shows culture came first, with mindless imitation enabling cumulative knowledge that then drove cooperation, language, and ultimately the explosion of human intelligence.
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