Brian Gallagher writes: The staunch atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that “the most overrated of the virtues is faith.” It’s a reasonable conclusion if you believe, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan did, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” To believe something without evidence — or have faith — is, in their view, something to avoid (and, when called for, to mock).

Yet it was arguably faith — rather than reason — that had been instrumental to our ancestors’ survival. That’s just one of the many intriguing and paradoxical claims that Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, defends in his new book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. His central thesis, reiterated confidently, is that natural selection — the mechanism of biological evolution — is not the “only process capable of creating complex adaptations.” Cultural evolution, he says, is quite capable of generating “complex adaptive products” essential to our survival, which no one designed or understood “before they emerged.”

Consider, for example, the art of hunting, a complex adaptive product that Henrich unpacks in a section titled “Divination and Game Theory.” To decide where to go looking for caribou, the hunters of the Naskapi tribe, in Labrador, Canada, would not do something most would consider common sense: Go to the spot where you last killed some. That tactic would be ineffective because the caribou know to avoid places where their comrades were last slayed. Of course, the Naskapi don’t realize this; the reason they don’t go to the spot of their last kill is because they rely on the result of a ritual to point the way instead. [Continue reading…]