Harari vs. Henrich

An interesting piece from Joseph Heath that compares the opposed theories on the origins of human intelligence posited by Yuval Noah Harari and Joseph Henrich: What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model… and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any the items on the…