Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success

Per the publisher, drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology.

Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.

He was once introduced in an interview as follows:

He's the only person on the planet who has been granted tenure in the following four disciplines-- anthropology, psychology, economics, and human evolutionary biology.

He's probably the foremost scholar in the world who studies the evolution of cooperation and the capacity for culture in humans.
He does this using several major approaches. First, he conducts really ingenious, and creative, and innovative cognitive and behavioral experiments in many different cultures across the globe. Second, he's a very sophisticated theoretician who has developed a lot of important new mathematical techniques for analyzing cultural evolution. And finally, he goes out into the field and collects empirical data from small scale societies in many places ... using a variety of ingenious techniques from psychology, and cultural anthropology, and economics.