The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

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The Quarterly Review of Biology
THE APE THAT UNDERSTOOD THE UNIVERSE: HOW THE MIND AND CULTURE
EVOLVE By Steve Stewart-Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $27.99
(paper). xii + 350 p.; index. ISBN: 978-1-108-42504-9. 2018
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Full Title: THE APE THAT UNDERSTOOD THE UNIVERSE: HOW THE MIND AND CULTURE
EVOLVE By Steve Stewart-Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $27.99
(paper). xii + 350 p.; index. ISBN: 978-1-108-42504-9. 2018
Article Type: Invited Book Review
Corresponding Author: Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ph.D.
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Klosterneuburg, AUSTRIA
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Corresponding Author's Institution: Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Corresponding Author's Secondary
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First Author: Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ph.D.
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Order of Authors: Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ph.D.
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THE APE THAT UNDERSTOOD THE UNIVERSE: HOW THE MIND AND CULTURE
EVOLVE By Steve Stewart-Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $27.99 (paper).
xii + 350 p.; index. ISBN: 978-1-108-42504-9. 2018
What explains the distinctive features of human behavior? In this book, Stewart-Williams aims to
answer this ambitious question. This book is an engaging addition to the already long list of recent
attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation of human uniqueness. It is organized into six
chapters, plus two appendices. These chapters address several key topics in evolutionary theory,
sex differences and sexual behavior, altruism, and cultural evolution, albeit with varying degrees
of detail and depth. These topics include sexual selection, kin selection, Hamilton’s rule, reciprocal
altruism, costly signaling theory, group selection, gene-centered views of evolution, inclusive
fitness, proximate and ultimate evolutionary explanations, inbreeding avoidance, the Westermarck
effect, jealousy, sperm competition, mating and parenting effort, cumulative cultural evolution,
imitation and learning biases, evolutionary mismatch theories, and more.
The volume opens with a thought experiment: How would an extraterrestrial scientist
understand the peculiarities of human behavior? Answering this question is the aim of the book.
Although there is little doubt that human behavior is different in important respects from other
species, the motivation behind this question seems to be some form of human exceptionalism:
“This book is about the strangest animal in the world – the animal that’s reading these words and
the animal that wrote them: the human animal.” (p.1) Many comparative researchers will find this
starting point somewhat problematic. We can claim to be the strangest or the weirdest creatures on
earth only by projecting our own values onto nature.
Rather than aiming to offer a new evolutionary perspective on human nature, the author
relies on different insights from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory to carry
out this endeavor. The book stands out, instead, for his overarching approach. Unlike any other
book in the recent literature, The Ape that Understood the Universe relies on a robust commitment
to a gene-centered view as a foundational approach to evolutionary theory. It also strongly
advocates for a memetics approach to cultural evolution. In a nutshell, according to this view,
natural selection operating on genes gives rise to gene machines, while natural selection operating
on memes give rise to ideas and ideologies that transform human gene machines into meme
machines.
Readers sympathetic towards the ideas of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett will find
it a stimulating book targeting a broad audience. However, this is not a book for all readers. It
navigates a complicated niche of theories and ideas (‘memes’ in Stewart-Williams’ words) that is
currently dominated by authors such as Joseph Henrich (The Secret of Our Success: How Culture
Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press), Richard Boyd (A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture
Transformed Our Species. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), Cecilia Heyes
(Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2018), and Michael Tomasello (Becoming Human: A Theory of
Book review Click here to access/download;Book Review;Book review The
ape that understood the universe.docx

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Ontogeny. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). In this highly
competitive world, The Ape that Understood the Universe does its best to survive and replicate at
a time where gene-centered views of evolution and memetic accounts of culture are under fire, if
not completely dismissed.
Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI),
Klosterneuburg, Austria