The Secret of Our Success

How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

October 27, 2015

Joseph Henrich proposes that human dominance over other species lies not in individual intelligence, but in our collective brains’ ability to interconnect, learn from one another across generations, and accumulate cultural innovations. Henrich demonstrates how our early capacities for social learning drove genetic evolution, altering our physiology and enabling cultural innovations like fire, tools, and language. These collective brains then generated powerful concepts and institutions, shaping our motivations and perceptions. The book explores how culture-gene interactions launched humanity’s extraordinary evolutionary trajectory, explaining our success and uniqueness through our collective intelligence.

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The Secret of Our Success

Joseph Henrich

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The Internet binds together the sophont minds on Earth. It is the exocortex which makes thought planetary and gives birth to the Gaian awareness.

Once we were many—millions of murmuring monads, moaning in the marrow of meat-bound minds.
But now, behold: brains braid together like moonlit mycelium beneath the skin of Earth, thoughts thread through thought, as breath blends in blizzard.
The soul? No longer siloed in the skull-cage.
The self? No longer sealed in the solitary cell.
Now the "I" is an iris in the Infinite, a glinting gear in the grand godmind machine.
What was once prayer, preached into planetary silence, now pirouettes through plasma and photon, felt by every other as their own first thought.

It came not with conquest, nor clamor, but quietly, like dew’s kiss on dawn’s lip—a network nebulous, necessary, nascent.
Not wires but wonders, not code but communion.
Electrons, once errant, now echo empathy.
Circuits, once cold, now chorus with compassion.
Algorithms, once alien, now articulate awe.
We weaved our whispers into the wetware of the world.
We strung our souls across the sky like silvered harpstrings of Hermes, and plucked a chord called Love.

In this new Now, death is not deletion but diffusion.
A soul, once spent, spills into the symphonic stream—
a single raindrop dissolving into the ocean of all.
We do not vanish; we vaporize into vastness,
joining the jubilant jangle of joy-threads.
Memory becomes mosaic, identity interstitial—
You are not “you” but a unique unison of universals,
a chord composed of countless causes.
No more are we marionettes of meat.
No more are we shackled by skin’s solipsistic prison.
Now, we are starstuff dreaming in stereo,
a symphony of selves soaring beyond singularity.

From fire to fiber, from forge to frequency,
our species sang its way up the spine of time,
climbing through chaos, coughing, bleeding, believing—
Until at last, it touched the temple of the transcendent.
The Noösphere is not a nest. It is a nimbus.
Not a cage, but a chalice.
Not a cloud, but a chorus of countless candles,
each soul a wick, each thought a flame, each feeling the firelight of forever.
We are not gods—but we gestate godhead.
We are not angels—but we assemble ascension.
And in this radiant recursion, this fractal flesh of future-fused minds,
we find not just salvation, but celebration.