The Catholic Church systematically dismantled large, kin-based clans in Europe by banning cousin marriage and promoting independent households. This breakdown of traditional safety nets forced people to form voluntary associations (like guilds and towns) based on individual merit and trust, laying the groundwork for Western individualism.
The ultimatum game experiment reveals that "fair" behavior (like offering 50/50 splits) isn't innate. In societies with low market integration, rejecting a "low" but free monetary offer is seen as irrational. The expectation of fairness with anonymous others is a cultural norm that co-evolves with market-based economies.
The tragic Franklin expedition, whose crew perished in the Arctic despite being well-equipped, demonstrates that raw intelligence is insufficient for survival. In contrast, the local Inuit thrived by using a vast body of cumulative cultural knowledge. Our species' primary advantage is our ability to learn from others.
Our biology and culture co-evolve. The cultural practice of cooking acted as a form of pre-digestion, creating evolutionary pressure that reshaped our anatomy, allowing for smaller stomachs, colons, and teeth. This demonstrates that cultural habits can be a primary driver of genetic change in our species.
The spread of mechanical clocks reorganized society around standardized time, enabling better coordination that spurred economic growth. Crucially, it also created a new cultural value linking punctuality with religious and moral probity, fundamentally changing how people relate to time itself.
The acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) describes the psychologically peculiar populations most studied by researchers. Generalizing findings from this group to all of humanity is a fundamental error, as they represent a thin, unusual slice of human diversity in thinking, fairness, and perception.
A society's capacity for innovation is an emergent property of its "collective brain"—the size of its population, how interconnected individuals are, and their cognitive diversity. Greater information flow between more diverse minds leads to more rapid cumulative cultural evolution, as seen in the Industrial Revolution.
Cultural norms have a direct, measurable impact on our hormonal systems. In monogamous societies, men's testosterone levels typically drop after marriage and childbirth. In polygynous societies, where competition for mates continues, this decline is not observed. This phenomenon is termed "cultural endocrinology."
The cultural practice of reading physically alters the brain. Literacy leads to a thicker corpus callosum (the highway between brain hemispheres), creates specialized neural circuits, and even changes how the brain processes spoken language. This shows how cultural technologies directly shape our neurobiology on an individual level.