“The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter” by Joseph Henrich

This is a rare work in both scope and scale. It is a mix between anthropology, ethnography, economic history, and evolutionary biology, with elements of neuroscience and psychology, written by a former aerospace engineer. The breath of this book is immense and supremely rewarding. It is a life changing book on par with Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. It will change the way you think about yourself, our species, and how humanity has evolved. Henrich's theme is the interplay between cultural and physiological evolution and how both have shaped and have been shaped by the social animals that are humans. It seeks to explain how the often subconscious inheritance of our species played into later genetic evolutions, creating an animal with an enormous brain mass and more fat than muscle who, nonetheless, came to dominate every other animal on our planet. 

This book explains how the accumulation of knowledge over the centuries, embedded in culture, has allowed today's humans to stand on the expertise of the past to push towards greater heights. Aspects of our physiology, from our relatively short intestinal tracts to the shape of our teeth, were shaped by the invention of fire and cooked food. Lactose tolerance was another evolutionary response, developed by our domestication of cows and goats and their subsequent milking. The protective sickle cell gene mutation (when passed on by only one parent) only evolved in humans populating areas of Africa where mosquitoes carrying malaria were prevalent. The mutation spread locally because it was only evolutionarily adaptive in those specific areas. The totality of codependence between culture and biology that are revealed and explained in this book is mind blowing.