Book/The Educated Mind
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April 11th, 2024
- > Both show how you can’t understand psychological differences among individuals just by looking at their genes, or at their immediate environment — you have to see what’s been happening in the hundreds and thousands of years of their ancestor’s cultural history. They also both point to the importance of “cognitive tools” gained through culture, argue that we’re smart because we connect up with others, and think that mimesis is at the very base of our cognition.
Henrich makes a big point that the social sciences, thus far, have proceeded on the assumption that humans “are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee”. But cultural evolution has made us a fundamentally new kind of animal — and that the scholarly road ahead is wide open for exploring this. I sorta can’t imagine a more Egan-y thing to say. I think that one of the reasons Egan’s ideas didn’t spread is that they were ahead of their time; this was the paradigm Egan’s ideas make sense in.