introduction

Part 1: The Foundations of Culture

Chapter 1: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
Chapter 2: A Very Common Imitation
Chapter 3: Why We Imitate
Chapter 4: The Tale of the Two Fishes
Chapter 5: The Origins of Creativity

Part 2: The Evolution of the Mind

Chapter 6: The Evolution of Intelligence
Chapter 7 High Fidelity
Chapter 8: Why Do We Use Language?
Chapter 9: Gene-Culture Coevolution
Chapter 10: The Dawn of Civilization
Chapter 11: The Foundations of Cooperation
Chapter 12 Art

Conclusion: A wonder without mystery
Translator's Note
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Why is imitation so common in nature?
How did imitation shape the primate brain?
So why don't other apes have language?
Why didn't hunter-gatherer societies invent the wheel, even though they had language?

“Sometimes the success of the human species is explained by intelligence,
“In fact, it is culture that makes us smart.”

Every species is unique, but humans are especially unique.
Over the past ten thousand years, humans have built cities, written hundreds of millions of books, composed symphonies, built space stations, split the atom, and invented the Internet.
Humans have literally taken over the planet, from the hot rainforests to the frozen tundra, and have led to the massive proliferation of domestic animals like cows and dogs, commensals like rats and houseflies, and parasites like ticks and worms.
Humans' impact on this planet is so profound that the current geological epoch is often called the "Anthropocene."
What on earth is so different about humans?

The author, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, says the answer lies in our culture and cultural capabilities.
Sometimes our success is explained by our superior intelligence, but the author argues that it is culture that makes us smart, and that other traits that distinguish humans from other animals, such as language, cooperation, and hypersociality, are also the result of cultural abilities.
But understanding how culture arose is a surprisingly difficult puzzle.
Part 1, Chapter 1 of "The Foundations of Culture," examines several questions that must first be answered to answer this question: why animals imitate one another, what strategies or rules govern such imitation, what conditions are favored by natural selection for cumulative culture and what cognitive conditions it requires, and in what contexts language and cooperation emerged.

As recently as 60 years ago, researchers believed that only large-brained animals could imitate.
Refuting this age-old intuition, Chapter 2 shows that imitation is indeed widespread in nature, with rats and bumblebees imitating food acquisition, tropical fish such as guppies and mollies imitating mate choice, killer whales and archerfish imitating hunting methods, and birds learning the habit of fratricide.
So why is imitation so widespread? Chapter 3 presents a social learning strategy tournament, in which hundreds of participants and hundreds of mathematical models competed against each other, and explains the result: strategic imitation, unlike indiscriminate imitation, increases biological fitness.
Chapter 4 demonstrates how animals actually strategically imitate in nature, particularly through the three-spine and nine-spine trouts, and describes patterns of social learning strategies that appear widely among animals.
Chapter 5 introduces that, as strategic imitation is widespread, innovation, or non-social learning, which is part of it, is also widespread in nature. It discusses differences in innovative ability according to age, status, body size, gender, and species, and explains why such differences occur.

Learning, teaching, communicating with language, and following norms
Our hearts, and dance, music, architecture, fashion, and movies
Where on earth did it come from and how did it appear?

“The human mind and culture have interacted for a long time,
“They were created to fit each other’s appearance.”

The counterintuitive fact that not only monkeys and apes, but also fruit flies and tree crickets imitate, and that birds and fish innovate, raises one of the central questions of this book.
"Why do primates need large brains for imitation?" Given that social learning rates and innovation rates are closely correlated, and that brain size and innovation rates in birds are positively correlated, why did large brains evolve only in primates? According to Alan Wilson's cultural drive theory, whenever a new habit spreads through a population, natural selection favors those individuals whose ability to imitate the discoveries of others improves, resulting in the evolution of large brains.
As the brain's size increases slightly, its ability to create and spread new habits also improves, leading to a feedback loop that accelerates this process.
First, Chapter 6 of Part 2, "The Evolution of the Mind," explains the cultural drives believed to have led to the enlargement of primate brains and presents detailed evidence supporting this.

But if cultural drives were at work in all great apes and some monkeys, why didn't gorillas build particle accelerators and capuchins invent smartphones? Chapter 7 explains that cumulative culture depends, above all, on the fidelity of cultural transmission—that is, how accurately learned knowledge and behaviors are transmitted between individuals.
It also shows that teaching—a behavior that helps other individuals acquire knowledge more quickly and efficiently at a cost—improves the fidelity of transmission, and explains why teaching is rarely observed in other mammals known for their high intelligence.
Chapter 8 illuminates language as another mechanism for enhancing the fidelity of cultural transmission, demonstrating why the only plausible hypothesis is that language evolved to teach close kin and then coevolved with teaching and cumulative culture (particularly stone toolmaking).
Chapter 9 presents a wealth of evidence that genes and culture can and do coevolve, focusing particularly on the evolution of right- and left-handedness, the evolution of lactose-digestion alleles driven by dairy farming, the evolution of sickle cell genes driven by new farming practices, the evolution of culturally transmitted mate preferences and their corresponding biological traits, and the evolution of genes involved in language learning.

So why did humans remain hunter-gatherers for so long? Putting aside quantum mechanics and gene editing, why are there still so many small-scale societies that haven't developed wheels or arches? Chapter 10 explains why, from a demographic perspective and the constant movement of people, hunter-gatherer societies seriously hinder cultural evolution.
It also reveals how agriculture was able to thrive despite high labor costs, high failure rates, and uncertain economic returns, and why cultural evolution truly began to accelerate after the advent of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.
Chapter 11 shows how large-scale cooperation with non-kin emerges naturally from teaching, language, and cumulative culture, and how these capacities facilitate indirect reciprocity, reciprocity, and cultural group selection, which in turn shape our minds, including our capacity for social learning, our tendency to follow norms, and our shared purpose and intentions.
Chapter 12 uses various examples, from Benedict Cumberbatch's The Imitation Game to René Magritte's The Treachery of Images and Christian Dior's fashion, to explain how our exceptional abilities formed in this way—our imitative, perspective-taking, and innovative capacities, which are accompanied by mirror neurons, the neocortex, the cerebellum, and the cross-sensory neural network—have led to the invention and evolution of arts such as dance, music, architecture, fashion, and film as byproducts of the general laws of evolution: mutation, differential fitness, and heredity.

The third era dominated by cultural evolution,
The constant natural selection imposed on humanity

“There is extensive evidence that humans are evolving even in modern society.”

“This picture of the evolution of the human mind is fundamentally different from the picture presented by evolutionary psychologists and many popular science writers.” They argue that we have Stone Age brains, navigating a modern world ill-suited to it, but since culture is generally adaptive, this claim that humans have created an environment that does not suit their instincts is misleading.
(For this reason, evolutionary psychology, which was in the spotlight in the 1990s, is losing its supporters.) Rather, humans are the only species to have experienced a third era dominated by cultural evolution, following the era of biological evolution and the era of gene-culture coevolution, and are a unique species that has gone beyond evolving to fit into their world and shaped itself by constructing its own world.
Moreover, the changes being inflicted on humanity have not only accelerated in recent years, but are continuing to accelerate.
There is a growing body of evidence that humans are evolving even in modern society, including natural selection for women to have children later in life and to experience delayed menopause.
It is our task to deeply consider what kind of culture we are creating now and in what direction and how quickly our culture is leading us.