p. 37 evolutionary reasoning suggests that learners should use a wide range of cues to figure out whom to selectively pay attention to and learn from. Such cues allow them to target those people most likely to possess information that will increase the learner’s survival and reproduction. . .individuals should combine cues related to the models’ health, happiness, skill, reliability, competence, success, age, and prestige, as well as correlated cues like displays of confidence or pride. These cues should be integrated with others related to self-similarity, such as sex, temperament, or ethnicity (cued by, e.g., language, dialect, or dress). Self-similarity cues help learners focus on those likely to possess cultural traits (e.g., practices or preferences) that will be useful to the learner in their future roles.

p. 43 We are prestige biased, as well as being skill and success biased.

p.99 cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are. Operating over generations as individuals unconsciously attend to and learn from more successful, prestigious, and healthier members of their communities, this evolutionary process generates cultural adaptations. Though these complex repertoires appear well designed to meet local challenges, they are not primarily the products of individuals applying causal models, rational thinking, or cost-benefit analysis. Often, most or all of the people skilled in deploying such adaptive practices do not understand how or why they work, or even that they “do” anything at all. Such complex adaptations can emerge precisely because natural selection has favored individuals who often place their faith in cultural inheritance–in the accumulated wisdom implicit in the practices and beliefs derived from their forebearers–over their own intuitions and personal experiences.

p. 104 other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat.

p. 139 Across human societies, we see that seeking prestige, often more than wealth itself, drives much human behavior. However, prestige derives from success, skill, or knowledge in locally valued domains. While not infinitely malleable, what constitutes a valued domain is amazingly flexible. The differential success of societies and institutions will hinge, in part, on what domains are valued.

p. 154 human communities–whom we ally with, help, marry, and love–are forged by social norms, which variously harness, extend, and suppress our social instincts. Our species cooperation and sociality is deeply influenced by and highly dependent on culturally evolved social norms, which makes us rather unlike other animals. We acquire social rules by observing and learning from others, and we–at least to some degree–internalize them as goals in themselves. Because cultural learning influences how we judge others, it can create self-reinforcing stable patterns of social behavior–social norms.

p. 170 Over time, history suggests that all prosocial institutions age and eventually collapse at the hands of self-interest, unless they are renewed by the dynamics of intergroup competition. That is, although it may take a long time, individuals and coalitions eventually figure out how to beat or manipulate the system to their own ends, and these techniques spread a slowly corrode any prosocial effects.

p. 204-205 our minds are prepared to carve the social world into ethnic groups, but not into classes or ideologies. . .Ethnic-group membership is assigned based on culturally transmitted markets, like language or dialect. By contrast, racial groups are marked and assigned according to …traits, like skin color or hair form, which are genetically transmitted. . .racial cues can automatically and unconsciously “trick” our psychology into thinking that different ethnic [racial?] groups exist.

p. 316-317 Our social psychology appears designed for navigating a world with social rules and reputations, where learning and complying with these rules is paramount and where different groups possess quite different norms. We internalize costly norms as goals in themselves, usually via cultural learning, and are particularly good at spotting norm violators, even when those violations have nothing to do with cooperation. To make sure we learn the best norms for our own groups and avoid the dangers of miscoordinating with others, we preferentially use marker traits like dialect and language to distinguish potential models and then preferentially target our cultural learning and social interactins toward those who share our marker traits.

p. 321 in 1815, the average American would have an IQ below 70.

p. 324 some ancient societies even began to develop a package of social norms that fostered and enforced rules that limited the number of wives a man, even a rich one, could have to just one (at a time). This is odd, given that 85% of human societies permit men to marry multiple wives. By exploiting various aspects of human psychology, normative monogamous marriage may have spread because it suppressed male-male competition within societies, which reduces crime, violence, rape, and murder while increasing infant health and survival, in part by increasing male investment in children.

p. 331 Humans are bad at intentionally designing effective institutions and organizations, though I’m hoping that as we get deeper insights into human nature and cultural evolution this can improve. Until then, we should take a page from cultural evolution’s playbook and design “variation and selection systems” that will allow alternative institutions or organizational forms to compete. We can dump the losers, keep the winners, and hopefully gain some general insights during the process.