What Makes Us Smart?

I wrote Smart Mobs nearly a quarter century ago because I saw that computers, the Internet, and mobile telephones were merging into a medium that would dramatically accelerate the pace and reach of collective action -- for good and bad ends. That got me to thinking about cooperation and what science knows about it, which led me to understand that although cooperation and obstacles to cooperation were topics of study in different disciplines, including biology, computer science, anthropology, political science, economics, there was no interdisciplinary effort to understand how humans get things done together. I presented a TED Talk in 2005  about a new narrative that challenged the 18th century notions of competition-driven evolution. Then I worked with Institute for the Future, taught a seminar at Stanford, created an online course -- all of which is available through my posts here tagged cooperation.

In many ways, the interdisciplinary study of cooperation I called for in 2005 is emerging worldwide, and one of the thought leaders ia Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, whose book, The Secret of Our Success, is a succinct, data-based argument that the secret is cooperation -- and education. This paper, "What Makes Us Smart," by Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna, is an excellent window on contemporary cooperation theory.

Abstract:

How did humans become clever enough to live in nearly every major  ecosystem on earth, create vaccines against deadly plagues, explore the  oceans depths, and routinely traverse the globe at 30,000 feet in  aluminum tubes while nibbling on roasted almonds? Drawing on recent  developments in our understanding of human evolution, we consider what  makes us distinctively smarter than other animals. Contrary to  conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate  brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of  information in communities and networks over generations. We review how  larger, more diverse, and more optimally interconnected networks of  minds give rise to faster innovation and how the cognitive products of  this cumulative cultural evolutionary process feedback to make us  individually “smarter”—in the sense of being better at meeting the  challenges and problems posed by our societies and socioecologies. Here,  we consider not only how cultural evolution supplies us with “thinking  tools” (like counting systems and fractions) but also how it has shaped  our ontologies (e.g., do germs and witches exist?) and epistemologies,  including our notions of what constitutes a “good reason” or “good  evidence” (e.g., are dreams a source of evidence?). Building on this, we  consider how cultural evolution has organized and distributed cultural  knowledge and cognitive tasks among subpopulations, effectively shifting  both thinking and production to the level of the community, population,  or network, resulting in collective information processing and group  decisions. Cultural evolution can turn mindless mobs into wise crowds by  facilitating and constraining cognition through a wide variety of  epistemic institutions—political, legal, and scientific. These  institutions process information and aid better decision-making by  suppressing or encouraging the use of different cultural epistemologies  and ontologies.