Book review: A Theory of Everyone – The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going Energy, culture and a better future for everyone, by Michael Muthukrishna.
I found this book disappointing. An important part of that is because Muthukrishna set my expectations too high.
I had previously blogged about a paper that he co-authored with Henrich on cultural influences on IQ. If those ideas were new in the book, I’d be eagerly writing about them. But I’ve already written enough about those ideas in that blog post.
Another source of disappointment was that the book’s title is misleading. To the limited extent that the book focuses on a theory, it’s the theory that’s more clearly described in Henrich’s The Secret of our Success. A Theory of Everyone feels more like a collection of blog posts than like a well-organized book.
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