3733. Anwar Shaikh’s Contributions to the Development of Radical Political Economy

By Kamran Nayeri, November 5, 2026

Photo credit: Jacobin

 After the publication of “Tribute to My Teacher, Anwar Shaikh” (Nayeri, October 7, 2026), I was asked to write a piece about his major contributions to radical political economy.

In this article, I will discuss some of Shaikh’s contributions I consider important. While the label Marxist economics (or political economy) has been in use for some time, it has been identified with Marx’s labor theory of value, surplus value, capital accumulation, and economic crisis, and Shaikh considered himself a Marxist economist; I have never quite liked the terminology. Marx himself never claimed to be an economist. While Engels pointed to the theory of surplus value as one of Marx's two intellectual contributions, along with historical materialism, he added that, above all, Marx was a revolutionary socialist. Engels also criticized young followers of Marx for overemphasizing economics in Marx’s theory and accepted his own, as well as Marx’s occasional overemphasis, as a possible reason.

I must also point out that Shaikh never claimed to be a socialist activist; he devoted his life to developing a coherent, consistent theory of capitalism aligned with Marx’s labor theory of value as outlined in his magnum opus, Capital, while incorporating the main contributions of heterodox economists and empirically validating it.  He did so brilliantly in Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis (2016, hereafter “Capitalism”).  

Intellectual context of Shaikh’s development as an economist

To understand Shaikh’s development as a radical economist, we must begin with his graduate studies in economics at Columbia University after earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Princeton University. Shaikh wanted to study economic development because he was born in Pakistan and spent his youth in a mix of developed and still-undeveloped capitalist countries. He believed economics, as a science, could help overcome economic backwardness. However, Shaikh rebelled against mainstream neoclassical theory taught at Columbia University even though he had very influential professors. Among them were William Vickrey and Gary Becker, who taught microeconomics; both won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences; Arthur Frank Burns, a macroeconomist who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1956 and served as the first Counselor to the President under Richard Nixon from January to November 1969; and Ronald Findlay, who specialized in international trade and economic development.  Thus, instead of focusing on economic development, Shaikh began searching for an alternative to neoclassical theory. His doctoral dissertation was on “Theories of value and theories of distribution,” supervised by Findlay.

In “Introduction” to Capitalism (2016), Shaikh explains this and why his research focused on developed capitalism and his methodology. He argues that developed capitalism is characterized by “what appears to be one of almost constant progress: inexorable growth, rising standards of living, rising productivity, and ever-improving health, well-being, and welfare. Viewed from afar, it is the system’s order, its internal coherence, which stands out. However, the closer one looks, the more haphazard it all seems.

“Individuals wander along entangled paths, propelled by obscure motivations toward some dimly imagined ends, crisscrossing and colliding as they act out their economic roles as buyers and sellers, bosses and workers, producers and speculators, employed and unemployed; information, misinformation, and disinformation hold equal sway. Ignorance is as purposeful as knowledge. Private and public spheres are entwined throughout, as are wealth and poverty, development and underdevelopment, conquest and cooperation. And everywhere there appears a characteristic unevenness: across localities, regions, and nations; and across time, in the form of booms and busts, and breakdowns. Seen up close it is the system’s disorder that is striking.” (Shaikh 2016, p. 3)

He then asks: “How does one address these two, equally real, aspects?”

Neoclassical theory

Dominant neoclassical economics seizes on the first aspect and sets aside the second by casting the market's supreme optimality as the ever-perfect invisible hand. This optimality is then projected back into microscopic units, so-called representative agents, from whose superlatively rational choices it is said to derive. In its perfectly ordered form, then we arrive at the system which equalizes all prices for all comparable goods, all wage rates for comparable labor, all profit rates for comparable degrees of risk. Moreover, it fully utilizes all available resources, including available plants, equipment, and labor. All these without error, instability, or crisis. But after claiming this, neoclassical theory gradually allowed imperfect reality into the story.

Thus, the young Shaikh at Columbia University gravitated toward the Imperfect-Competition critics of neoclassical theory, like Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin. However, Imperfect Competition theorists still operated within the neoclassical theoretical framework.

Thus, Shaikh began to study classical political economists, especially Adam Smith and David Ricardo.  

He also studied Karl Marx, as reading Capital became the focus of a layer of radicalized young economists in the 1960s who discovered Marx’s theory of real competition, then called “free competition” (in Capitalism he uses the term “real competition” to depict the turbulent system), and began to rebuild what became known as Marxist economics, the view of capitalism as a chaotic system where competition is the result of accumulation of capital. Marx criticized classical political economy for failing to understand capitalism as a passing stage of economic development in human history. In particular, he saw the failure to understand the significance of the working class's emergence and its struggle against capital as underscoring the grave methodological and philosophical weakness in Ricardo's work (Pilling 1980, Chapter 2).

Critique of theories of monopoly capital

Shaikh and others of his generation identified real competition as a manifestation of the process of capital accumulation, which became the foundation for Shaikh’s reconstruction of radical political economy. Thus, Shaikh wrote in Capitalism (2016):

“The theory of real competition … is the theoretical foundation for the analysis in this book. The profit motive is inherently expansionary: investors try to recoup more money than they put in, and if successful, can do it again and again on a larger scale, colliding with others doing the same. Some succeed, some just survive, and some fail altogether. This is real competition, antagonistic by nature and turbulent in operation. It is the central regulating mechanism of capitalism and is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet. Competition within an industry compels individual producers to set prices that keep them in the game, just as it forces them to lower costs so that they can cut prices to compete effectively. Costs can be lowered by cutting wages and increasing the length or intensity of the working day, or at least by reducing wage growth relative to that of productivity. But these must contend with the reaction of labor, which is why technical change becomes the central means over the long run. In this context, individual capitals make their decisions based on judgments about an intrinsically indeterminate future. Competition pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, buyer against buyer, capital against capital, capital against labor, and labor against labor. Bellum omnium contra omnes' (Shaikh, 2016, p. 14).

In turn, this paradigmatic shift has a radical implication for understanding capitalism and its history.

The replacement of Marx’s real competition with monopoly in Marxist writings began with Engels's editorial note in Volume 3 of Capital (Engels, in Marx, 1894, pp. 568-69) and was popularized by Lenin’s highly influential Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). But Rudolf Hilferding was the intellectual fountainhead of this staging of the history of capitalism.  In his Finance Capital (1910), Hilferding offers a systematic analysis of the changing character of nineteenth-century capitalist development, particularly in Germany. The analysis of competition is the chief aim of Part Three of his book titled “Finance Capital and Restrictions to Free Competition.”

For Hilferding, capitalist development undermined competition for two reasons. First, capital concentration created larger firms. The small number of large firms seemed to make collusion and cooperation possible.  Second, the centralization of capital through mergers tended to produce cartels and trusts. Capitalist competition also seemed unstable because barriers to entry and exit hampered capital mobility across industries. Concentration and centralization of capital created barriers to equalizing profit rates. Thus, Hilferding argued differential profit rates implied a two-sector economy: one competitive and the other monopolistic. He expected the monopolistic sector to eventually take over the entire economy: “The ultimate outcome of this process would be the formation of a general cartel.” (Hilferding, 1910, p. 234).  Taking his criticism to its logical conclusion, Hilferding concluded that Marx’s labor theory of value had ceased to operate: 

“Classical economics conceives price as the expression of the anarchic character of social production, and the price level as depending upon the social productivity of labor. But the objective law of price can operate only through competition. If monopolistic combinations abolish competition, they eliminate at the same time the only means through which an objective law of price can actually prevail. Price ceases to be an objectively determined magnitude and becomes an accounting exercise for those who decide what it shall be by fiat, a presupposition instead of a result, subjective rather than objective, something arbitrary and accidental rather than a necessity which is independent of the will and consciousness of the parties concerned. It seems that the monopolistic combine, while it confirms Marx's theory of concentration, at the same time tends to undermine his theory of value. (ibid., p. 228; my emphasis)”

Thus, the monopoly capital theorists from Hilferding to Bukharin, Lenin, and finally to Baran and Sweezy (1966) argued that capitalism had a progressive competitive period by the last decade of the nineteenth century and a regressive monopoly capitalist period since then, during which capitalism entered into crisis and decay as signaled by World War I.

Contributions by Shaikh and his generation of radical political economists (Marxist economists) helped to theoretically return to Marx’s labor theory of value based on the foundation of capital accumulation and real competition, as well as empirically showing that it, and not the monopoly capital theory, explains the history of capitalism (Nayeri, 2023, pp. 18-28).   They also provide empirical evidence to refute monopoly capital theory (Nayeri, 2023, Appendix 1, 358-364). In Capitalism, Shaikh provides a theory of advanced capitalism consistent with Marx’s labor theory of value, together with empirical evidence to support it

Implications for Dependency Theories 

Once the monopoly capital theory is refuted, the theoretical path to refute Dependency Theories and it political implication, Third Worldism, opens.

I begin with Shaikh’s contribution to international trade theory, which attempts to explain why nations trade with one another, what determines the goods and services they exchange, who benefits from trade, and how international trade affects economic development and wealth distribution. A key question throughout the history of debate on international trade has been whether it benefits all participating countries or reproduces and deepens inequalities between them. David Ricardo developed what remains one of international trade theory's foundational propositions. In On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), he introduced comparative advantage. The central argument is that countries can benefit from trade even when one country is more productive in every industry. What matters is not absolute productivity but relative opportunity cost. For example, if Portugal has a cost advantage in making wine and England has a cost advantage in producing textiles, it would be mutually beneficial for them to produce and trade these two commodities accordingly. This led to the theory of free international trade.

In "Foreign Trade and the Law of Value," Shaikh (1979) critically examines the relationship between international trade and value theory, particularly through a Marxian lens. In the first part, Shaikh (1979a) criticizes the Ricardian theory of value and argues for a Marxian perspective that extends the law of value to foreign trade (theory of absolute advantage in international trade). In the second part of the essay, Shaikh (197 9b) derives Marxian laws of foreign trade and addresses phenomena often misattributed to international monopoly power. This analysis is significant for understanding the complexities of global trade dynamics and the underlying value structures that govern them. I used Shaikh’s theory of absolute advantage in international trade to critique dependency theories by Raúl Prebisch, Arghiri Emannuel, and Paul Baran (Nayer, 1991, Chapters 3, 4, and 5, 2023, Chapters 3, 4, and 5).

Capitalist crises

The 1973-75 world economic recession signaled the end of post-World War II capitalist prosperity.  Much of the Western world- the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand- sank into recession. The proximate trigger was the October 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which nearly quadrupled the price of oil by January 1974. But the underlying conditions had been building for years. The collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange-rate system in August 1971 had removed a key external discipline on US monetary policy. Nixon-era wage and price controls had suppressed measured inflation while distorting relative prices and creating a backlog of pent-up price pressure. Accommodative monetary policy through the late 1960s and early 1970s embedded inflation expectations, which the supply shock then amplified into the first stagflation.

Radical political economists provided a deeper understanding of the crisis's root causes, including empirical studies. Shaikh provided theoretical explanations of capitalist crises. In “Introduction to the History of Crisis Theory” (Shaikh, 1978), he framed the capitalist economy as a turbulent system driven by real competition, with ongoing capital accumulation prone to crisis. He identified three approaches to capitalist crises.  The most popular explanation of capitalist crisis is laissez-faire capitalism rooted in Adam Smith theory of the invisible hand of the market. There are right-Keynesian (Joan Robinson’s term) varieties of this explanation. Others claim capitalism cannot expand itself. These include Keynes's demand-gap theory, disproportionality, and underconsumption theories of non-Marxist and Marxist economists who rely on Volume 2 of Capital, and the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall in Volume 3 of Capital, which argues capitalist accumulation creates the conditions for its crisis.

Shaikh also wrote the entry on “economic crisis” in the Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983), in which he discusses possibility theories of crisis, including underconsumptionist/stagnationist theories, wage squeeze theories, and necessary theories of crisis focusing on Marx's tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.

Shaikh contributed to Marxist crisis theory by systematically transforming national income accounts into Marxian categories to improve empirical studies (see below) and by developing his theory of advanced capitalism, as presented in Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. In this book, he integrates long wave theory with the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.

Systematic transformation of National Income Accounts to Marxian categories

An admirable aspect of Anwar Shaikh’s contribution to radical political economy is his work to tie labor theory of value to empirical evidence, showing that it is superior not only to neoclassical theory but also to monopoly capital theories of capitalism. To that end, Shaikh developed a methodology for transforming National Income Accounts categories, which are in prices, into Marxian categories that are in value terms.

E. Ahmed Tonak, a student of Shaikh who enrolled in the doctoral program in economics at the New School for Social Research in 1975, wrote about this aspect of Shaikh’s contribution as a tribute to him (Tonak, 2026). Coming from a similar academic background, Tonak quickly became Shaikh’s research assistant.  Shaikh had just written a manuscript titled "IO [Input/Output] Accounts and Marxian Categories." In 1978, he also completed the well-known manuscript "National Income Accounts and Marxian Categories." Tonak considers this paper an early draft of Measuring the Wealth of Nations, the book Shaikh and Tonak published in 1994. He writes that Shaikh’s 1978 paper showed how net tax, through the capitalist state's distributional policies, affected productive workers and altered the rate of surplus value. In his dissertation, Tonak extended this empirical work for 1952-1980. “Later, in two papers on the subject, Anwar and I replaced net tax with the category of net social wage (expenditures on labor income minus taxes on labor income) and questioned whether a welfare state could really be said to exist in the United States.”

Shaikh also developed the concept of profit on alienation (POA) in the context of the transformation problem, which later appeared in Measuring the Wealth of Nations, and in his 2016 magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises.

Tonak adds:

“Marxists have generally been reluctant to embrace this concept. After all, under capitalism, the fundamental source of profit is surplus value generated in the sphere of production, while profit on alienation is discussed in the Marxist literature mainly in connection with precapitalist merchant profit.

“Yet as my former student Alper Duman and I tried to show in a paper we wrote together, POA also provides a useful starting point for analyzing phenomena within capitalism itself: both privatizations, which have been central to neoliberal policies, and the gains banks extract from workers' incomes. In that paper, we also sought to operationalize the concept in the Turkish context and estimate it empirically. In a sense, following in Anwar's footsteps, we gave concrete empirical form to a concept whose importance he had emphasized primarily at the theoretical level (Tonak, 2026).”

Concluding remarks

Anwar Shaikh’s journey to develop a coherent, consistent radical political theory culminated in the publication of Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises in 2016.  In it, Shaikh reaffirms, theoretically and empirically, Marx’s labor theory of value while integrating theories of finance and interest rates, exchange rates, money, inflation, long waves, and crises.

It is important to remember that Marx’s three volumes of Capital are, by Marx’s own initial plan, incomplete (for a discussion of Marx’s developing plan for his critique of political economy see Musto, 20100). In his introduction to the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in his letters of 1858–1862, and in the 1861–1863 manuscript itself, this plan titled “Plan for the Critique of Political Economy” can be presented in the following schematic form as projected by Marx in 1858–1862:

·       Capital:

·       Introduction: Commodity and Money

·       Capital in general:

·       The production process of capital:

·       Transformation of money into capital

·       Absolute surplus value

·       Relative surplus value

·       The combination of both

·       Theories of surplus value

·       The circulation process of capital

·       The unity of the two, or capital and profit

·       The competition of capitals

·       Credit

·       Share capital

·       Landed property

·       Wage-labor

·       The state

·       Foreign trade

·       The world-market

However, Marx published only the first volume of Capital, which deals with the process of production, in 1867. Using Marx’s notebooks as a draft for Capital, Engels edited and published volume two of Capital, which deals with the process of circulation of capital, published in 1885, and volume three of Capital, which deals with the process of capitalist production as a whole, published in 1894. Karl Kautsky edited and published Theories of Surplus Value between 1905 and 1910.

Moreover, Engels and Kautsky, who edited Marx’s notebooks, did not necessarily share the same understanding of Marx’s labor theory of value.  As I noted above, while Marx considered the law of value operating within the sphere of the capitalist mode of production, Engels believed it operated as far back as 5,000 to 7,000 years ago (Weeks, 1981, p. 8).

After the publication of Marx-Engels Werke (MEW) starting in Germany from 1956 onwards, and subsequently the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the first volume of which appeared in 1975 but remains incomplete, we now have Marx’s own notebooks from which Engels edited Volumes Two and Three of Capital. Sven-Eric Liedman, a biographer of Marx, writes in A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (2018, p. 18), “Now Marx’s own text exists in a critical edition, and it thereby becomes possible to make comparisons [with Engels’ edited volumes two and three of Capital]. The differences, as we will see, are significant. He continues, “Capital is the subject of an enormous amount of literature. Interpretations often stand against interpretations.”

Shaikh's contributions must be judged on this basis. 

References:

Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital. 1910. 

Liedman, Sven-Eric. Karl Marx: A World to Win. 2018.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 3.  1894/Vintage Books/1981.

Musto, Marcello. “The Formation of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: From the Studies o 1843 to the Grundrisse.” Socialism and Democracy. 2010.

Nayeri, Kamran. The Role of Competition in Theories of Late Capitalist Development. Ph.D. dissertation, 1991.

______________. Toward A Theory of Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023.

_____________. “Tribute to My Teacher Anwar Shaikh.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 7, 2026.

Pilling, Geoff. Marx’s Capital: Philosophy and Political Economy. 1980.

Shaikh, Anwar. “An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theory.” In U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, Union for Radical Political Economics. 1978.  

____________.  “National Income Accounts and Marxian Categories. “Unpublished manuscript, 1978.

Shaikh, Anwar. “Foreign Trade and the Law of Value. Part 1.” Science and Society, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 233- 251, 1979.

____________. “Foreign Trade and the Law of Value. Part 2.” Science and Society. Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 27-57. 1979.

____________. “Economic Crises.” In Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Tom Bottomore, Laurance Harris, V.G. Kierman, and Ralph Miliband, editors. 1983.

Tonak, E. Ahmed. “Anwar Shaikh Changed My Life.” Jacobins. October 18, 2026.

Weeks, John. Capital and Exploitation. 1981.

3732. Hegel's Philosophy of History

 

3731. Philosophy: Baruch Spinoza

3730. Philosophy: Immanuel Kant

3729. What Came First in Human Evolution: Intelligence or Culture?

By Peter Turchin, ClioDynamica, October 15, 2026

                   Yuval Noah Harari: 

Photo credit: londonspeakerbureau.com.tr 

I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens soon after it was published. Despite the hype, I found it quite boring. I didn’t learn anything new from the book (and what I did see as new was mostly wrong, as others have commented). Sapiens's intellectual infrastructure was very much 20th-century, failing to profit from the insights brought by the new discipline of Cultural Evolution. So, I didn’t bother analyzing Harari’s argument further.

But yesterday, thanks to a repost by Joe Henrich, I found such an analysis by the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath on his Substack, Harari vs. Henrich.

Heath’s post deals with four distinctive characteristics of humans. Here’s how he defines them.

Human beings have four distinct qualities (traits, capabilities, behaviours, etc.) that make us quite different from other animals. These are fairly obvious, but there is unfortunately an entire subgenre of academic pedantry that involves challenging items on the list, saying “other animals do that too!” because there are of course similar capabilities to be found elsewhere.* So in the list below I have added the qualifications needed to disarm these objections and pick out what is absolutely distinctive about humans.

1. Intelligence. Humans possess superior intelligence, not just with respect to instrumental tasks, but also in the ability to engage in mathematical, hypothetical/counterfactual, and logical reasoning.

2. Language. Humans employ complex grammatical speech, with propositional differentiation providing context-independent representation of states of affairs.

3. Cooperation. Humans exhibit a distinctive form of ultrasociality, involving complex cooperation among large groups of genetically unrelated individuals.

4. Culture. Humans engage in domain-general transmission of learned behaviours, producing a large body of cultural artifacts and knowledge that exhibits cumulative improvement over time.

Harari’s argument in Sapiens, according to Heath, is that intelligence evolved first (with the Cognitive Revolution c. 70,000 years ago), followed by language, cooperation, and culture. Thus, the sequence is 1—2—3—4. This is the exact opposite of the account of human evolution developed by cultural evolutionists, such as Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson. The best popular book, which explains the sequence, 4—3—2—1, is Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (it’s a great read, heartily recommended).

Pointing out that the two explanations, Harari vs. Henrich, are mirror-opposites of each other, is a great insight (and shows why we need philosophers). I strongly recommend that you read Heath’s deconstruction of the Harari argument before you continue with my post. In particular, why our evolutionary sequence couldn't start with our superior intelligence? (Hint: the oversized human brain is so energetically and developmentally expensive — human females face very high risks during childbirth — that it’s not clear selection for what could overcome these costs.)

In my post I will expand a bit on the sequence proposed by cultural evolutionists (including myself, as I am a member of this field). As Heath correctly says, we argue that culture was the primary, original adaptation that provided the basis for the evolution of the other three traits (cooperation, language, and intelligence). Culture is socially transmitted information. Other animals also have culture, but humans are unique in that our stocks of socially transmitted information have been massively cumulative.

The key basis for the possibility of cumulative culture, as Heath writes, “was the emergence of imitativeness. Human infants got really good, not just at copying what other people do, but at mindlessly copying others – repeating the exact behaviours that they observe.”

But Heath doesn’t explain what were the selection forces that drove the evolution of human capacity for “mindless” imitation that enabled cumulative culture. This explanation was developed by Pete Richerson and Rob Boyd some years ago, which they continue on refining. Two weeks ago I participated in a workshop, organized by Russ Genet and Pete Richerson, Major Evolutionary Transitions: Biological, Human, and Planetary (UC Davis, September 15-17, 2026). In his talk, titled External Influences on the Evolution of Human Culture, Richerson gave an update on this work. Here’s the key slide, which shows how global climate fluctuated over the past 100,000 years:

Millennial and sub-millennial scale variation from Greenland GRIP core (slide by Peter Richerson, based on data in Ditlevsen et al. 1993).

The most recent period (on the left of the chart), the Holocene (last 11,700 years), has had remarkably stable (and warm) climate. By contrast the preceding geological epoch, Pleistocene, was the time of violent climatic chaos, with recurrent ice ages separated by relatively warm (but brief) interglacial periods. The argument of Richerson and Boyd is that adapting to such violently changing conditions by means of genetic evolution couldn’t work for humans with our relatively long generation times. Genetic evolution, simply, is not fast enough to track rapidly changing environment.

Cultural evolution, on the other hand, while not instantaneous, was fast enough to enable humans to evolve culturally transmitted behaviors that enabled them to survive during the Pleistocene. Although just barely — several times our species was on the brink of extinction. A recent article, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans, estimates that the numbers of all humans on Earth during the Pleistocene could fall as low as a few thousand, or even less.

Early in his post, Heath throws down the gauntlet, challenging theorists to translate their verbal theories into mathematical models (a methodological challenge with which cliodynamicists heartily agree):

What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model... and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any the items on the above list that formal modeling has been where the most interesting action has occurred over the past several decades of research.

Well, as it happens the explanation linking Pleistocene climatic chaos to the evolution of human culture has been translated into a formal mathematical model by Boyd and Richerson:

Source: Boyd, R, and P J Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

In other words, Boyd and Richerson built the model… and realized that “it” could have evolved this way.

Note that cumulative culture doesn’t require language, because social information can be transmitted simply by observing and imitating behaviors of other people. In fact, the next adaptation, which cumulative culture made possible, was not language but cooperation.

The long story is in my book Ultrasociety, so here’s the TL;DR version. Cooperation produces collective benefits, but is privately costly. It’s difficult for it to evolve because “agents” are tempted to free-ride on the efforts of others. The general mechanism by which cooperation evolves is multi-level selection. What many non-specialists don’t realize is the key importance of variation. For cooperation to evolve, variation within groups should be minimized, while variation between groups needs to be maximized. And that’s precisely what “mindless” imitation of other group members does. OK, this is probably still a bit cryptic, so if you are interested in a fully developed explanation I refer you to my book.

The causal chain that cultural evolutionists argue for, thus, starts with the Pleistocene climatic chaos that drove the evolution of culture. Culture enabled the evolution of cooperation by concentrating variation at the between-group level, while minimizing it within groups. Next, as cooperation deepens and becomes more complex, it needs much more sophisticated means of communication, which is a strong selection force for language. Finally, massively cumulative culture, cooperation among increasingly large groups, and capacity for sophisticated communication drove the evolution of intelligence — this trait comes last, not first as Harari (and twentieth century thinkers thought).

To elaborate on the connection between cooperation in large groups and intelligence, consider that cooperation is hard to sustain because of the temptation by people to free-ride. A huge chunk of our cognitive capacities is devoted to keeping track of who is a good cooperator, and who is not, as well as remembering all the gossip (language!) about what Anne did to Sam, and how Karen imposed (or not) sanctions on defectors. (This explanation often goes by the name Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis).

We humans are smart not because we excel in individual cognitive ability, but due to our social intelligence. This is the secret of our success as Henrich’s book explains.

And once human acquired culture, cooperation, language, and intelligence, the Pleistocene ended and we experienced the Great Holocene Transformation. But I don’t need to repeat this story here, as I’ve written about it extensively on this Substack before. 

3728. What Science Actually Says About Human Evolution: Harari vs. Henrich

By Joseph Heath, In Due Course, October 15, 2026

Every so often, some ordinary person, just trying to live his life, winds up getting stuck in the unfortunate position of having to make small talk with me. Even though “What do you do for work?” is usually a reliable conversation-starter, in my case the response (“I’m a philosophy professor”) tends to have a deadening effect. Once in a while, though, someone comes along who’s willing to play ball. Blue-collar guys will sometimes get excited: “Philosophy, cool, I’ve got my own philosophy. We should get some beers someday, and I’ll tell you about it.” On the other hand, tech bros who are willing to play ball often come back with something more bookish, like “What do you think of René Girard?” or “What do you think of Yuval Harari?” 

In fact, just the other day I was talking to a guy who went with the Harari gambit. So I told him that I didn’t like Sapiens. He looked a bit crestfallen and asked me why I didn’t like it. I told him I didn’t like it because the theory of human evolution that Harari presented was totally unscientific and wrong. The guy then went to the natural follow-up, which was to ask me what was wrong with it. At that point, I had to exercise considerable self-restraint. Because frankly, I would have loved nothing better than to explain to him everything that was wrong with Harari’s account of human evolution. The problem is that it would have turned into a 20-minute monologue, which is incompatible with the rules of small talk. It would have led me to exhibit the personality flaw that professors develop over time (i.e. lecturing people). So I just mumbled something about it being complicated and moved on. 

And yet the answer to his question remained, fully formed in my mind, itching to be released. Since Substack seems as good a place as any to unburden myself, here we go: Not only did Harari’s book annoy me, but all of the critical commentary that I see online is just quibbling (like, “he simplifies this a bit” or “he overstates his claim here”), rather than pointing out the glaring errors in his account.

 Furthermore, a lot of people who have read Harari’s book have also read Joseph Henrich’s work and yet don’t seem to realize that the theory Harari is defending is the exact opposite of Henrich’s. Part of the problem is that readers have trouble picking out the structure of these theories, because they don’t understand precisely what the theories are trying to explain. They treat them more like stories than scientific hypotheses. So it’s helpful to start out with some understanding of what the explanatory goals of a theory of human evolution are. 

Human beings have four distinct qualities (traits, capabilities, behaviours, etc.) that make us quite different from other animals. These are fairly obvious, but there is unfortunately an entire subgenre of academic pedantry that involves challenging items on the list, saying “other animals do that too!” because there are of course similar capabilities to be found elsewhere.* So in the list below I have added the qualifications needed to disarm these objections and pick out what is absolutely distinctive about humans. 

1. Intelligence. Humans possess superior intelligence, not just for instrumental tasks, but also in their ability to engage in mathematical, hypothetical/counterfactual, and logical reasoning. 

2. Language. Humans employ complex grammatical speech, with propositional differentiation providing context-independent representation of states of affairs. 

3. Cooperation. Humans exhibit a distinctive form of ultrasociality, involving complex cooperation among large groups of genetically unrelated individuals. 

4. Culture. Humans engage in domain-general transmission of learned behaviors, producing a large body of cultural artifacts and knowledge that improves cumulatively over time. 

What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model... and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any of the items on the above list that formal modeling has been where the most interesting action has occurred over the past several decades of research. 

Compounding the mystery is that the evolutionary timeline for all of this is extremely short. (Homo erectus only shows up 2 million years ago, etc.) Evolution is very slow. A species like ants, which have been around for 150 million years, have had time to evolve all sorts of fancy adaptations. The entire homo lineage, on the other hand, has simply not been around for very long. This makes it extremely improbable that all four of those items on the list above evolved independently. Furthermore, these complex abilities are highly unlikely to have evolved “from scratch,” as self-standing cognitive modules. Again, due to shortage of time, they are more likely to have emerged through some relatively small “tweak” or modification to a pre-existing system that can already be found in primates. 

To pick just one example, humans share with other primates two innate heuristics for making judgements about numbers: a subitization system, which allows us to ‘count’ to three, and a guesstimation system, which allows us distinguish “many” from “few” when eyeballing sets of objects. Testing on human infants shows essentially no difference in the way that these systems work in humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, etc. And yet we are invited to believe that somehow, in the last million years or so, some other evolutionary force came along that, without improving either of these two existing systems, endowed humans with a third “mathematics” module, that gave us the ability, not just to count past three, but to do algebra, geometry, calculus, real analysis, linear algebra, etc. This is not believable. As a result, the most widely held view is that our mathematical abilities must be a byproduct of some other ability, most likely language. 

For the past 40 years or so, the big prize in human evolutionary theory has been promised to the theorist able to identify a single, relatively small modification of primate behaviour (ability, capacity, cognition, etc.) that could have produced all four of these distinctive human qualities. Because the most plausible theory would posit only a single adaptation, this means that every contending theory in this space must posit an order of explanation among the four traits listed above. Such a theory would start by picking one of the four items as having arisen first, then show how the other three could have developed as a consequence of this initial modification (probably in sequence). 

So every theory is going to have a similar structure: it will posit an initial modification, show how it was adaptive, then explain how it gave rise to a second major trait, then the third, and then finally the fourth. For example, Harari posits the following sequence: 1. intelligence, 2. language, 3. cooperation, 4. culture. (This is in fact why I presented them in that order. What Harari is adopting here is the traditional order of explanation, which was assumed to be correct for the better part of the 20th century.) Henrich, by contrast, posits the following sequence: 4. culture, 3. cooperation, 2. language, 1. intelligence. This is the exciting hypothesis that has been generating interest and attention over the past few decades. 

You see now why I said that Henrich’s view is the exact opposite of Harari’s – it literally reverses the order of explanation. So let me say a bit about Harari’s sequence and why scientists have cooled off on that view, before moving on to a quick account of Henrich’s. The intelligence-first position is obviously a scientific version of the familiar idea, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, that human rationality is the major quality that elevates us above the brutes. It also points to a prominent physiological feature of human beings, clearly present in the fossil record, of encephalization. We have big brains, housed in big skulls. This leads many people to assume that the first stage of human evolution must have been that we became smarter, presumably in direct response to some environmental challenge that made it adaptive (e.g. allowed us to make better tools, to become better hunters, etc.). 

The problem with taking intelligence as the starting point, which, strangely enough, Harari acknowledges, is the enormous costs that our big brains impose upon us, both physiologically (they use a lot of energy) and reproductively (they create high levels of mortality in childbirth). It is simply not clear what sort of compensating benefits would have been available in the African savannah to make these tradeoffs worthwhile. If the goal was just to survive and reproduce, by controlling fire and making a few stone tools, the human brain seems strangely overengineered for the task, not to mention massively costly and inefficient. Nevertheless, this is the story that Harari goes with. 

Next up is language. Here Harari engages in straight-up handwaving. Language was just a fluke: “The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation.” 

 

There are a couple of things wrong with this, beyond the obvious. First, the explanation suffers from a start-up problem. In order for this amazing mutation that made complex language possible to have been adaptive, it would have had to confer some benefit on the first individual to possess that mutation. Being the first person born with the ability to communicate in some “unprecedented way” is not that useful, because who are you going to talk to? The communicative competence would have to have been a byproduct of something else, which spread because it was directly adaptive. Only once it became widespread in the population could language have developed. The alternative would be a gradualist account of how language arose out of a more primitive signaling system that permitted communication with those who did not have the mutation – but then one does not need the mutation to explain it. 

This gets us to the second problem with the explanation, which is that lots of animals make noises and engage in signaling, the reason that it doesn’t evolve into anything more complex is that without cooperation language is uninformative. If you take a bunch of antisocial primates, endow them with the ability to speak, the things that they are going to say will be just an expression of their interests. Nothing will be believable, above and beyond what you can infer from watching their behaviour. This is why the signaling systems that we do see in nature are so often costly – this is necessary in order to make the signal credible. Human language, by contrast, is all just cheap talk, and yet somehow manages to be informative. This seems to be possible only because of a prior disposition to engage in cooperative behavior. So the order of explanation seems wrong – you need to have cooperation in place before you are going to see the evolution of language. 

Harari, however, claims that things are the other way around – that cooperation is a consequence of language. This idea, which used to be fairly common, has suffered enormously from the development of evolutionary game theory. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, it was often assumed that superior intelligence would give people the rational insight that they should cooperate with one another. Greater attention to the prisoner’s dilemma, however, made it clear that the baseline tendency of superior intelligence would be to entrench uncooperative behaviour, by making people better free-riders. 

Harari is aware that the old Kropotkin story about mutual aid cannot be right, and also that group selection is not plausible as a biological account of cooperativeness among humans. So instead he pulls out two theories about how linguistic ability might have made humans more cooperative. The first is derived from an indirect reciprocity model, which suggests that humans cooperate in order to maintain good standing in the community, which is enforced through the circulation of gossip, which tells people who is trustworthy. The second is a variant on the so-called Big God theory, which suggests that people used language to construct mythic systems, which provided them with a credible commitment device that allowed them to cooperate. 

The problem with both of these explanations is that they are either regressive or question-begging. Think of the basic problem of human sociality as a collective action problem. The structure of the interaction gives people no incentive to cooperate with one another. The solution cannot be that they cooperate because, if they don’t, people will warn others about them, and they will have fewer opportunities to cooperate in the future. Why would people bother to warn others? As some sort of public service? That’s just another collective action problem. Same thing with big gods. Where does the mythology come from? Why do people believe it, rather than just pretend to believe it? All of these ‘solutions’ to the free rider problem are themselves undermined by free rider problems. 

Finally, the most self-evidently false component of Harari’s story is his account of complex culture. This is last in his order of explanation. Technically, he doesn’t believe in culture; his account rather is sociobiological, because he does not treat culture as an inheritance system subject to evolutionary dynamics. Instead, he argues that the development of cooperation allows more people to work together on things like tools, which gives rise to the production of more complex artifacts. This is, quite simply, not an accurate account of technological progress. If one looks at the development of plough agriculture, for example, what one sees is not a group of contemporaries getting together to create more advanced machinery, but rather a process of very gradual, piecemeal improvement over time. 

Surveying the landscape, one can see that the traditional order of explanation, despite retaining a certain common-sense appeal, has become hobbled by objections at every step. This is why it was exciting when theorists began to make a serious case for genuinely “outside the box” approaches, such as the one defended by Henrich. Most of this theory, I should note, was pioneered by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (here, here, and here). Henrich was Boyd’s student, which is where he got most of it from. Also, I should note that while Henrich has been the most effective at communicating with a broader audience, his own enthusiasm for story-telling sometimes gets in the way of a clear presentation of the view. People always remember the examples that he gives to illustrate the theory, but often fail to grasp the point that the examples were intended to illustrate. 

The biggest departure in Henrich’s view is the claim that culture is the primary, original adaptation. The claim is a bit more specific than this. Human culture is made possible by a particular style of social learning, and so the original adaptation – the “tweak” to the basic primate capacities – was the emergence of imitativeness. Human infants got really good, not just at copying what other people do, but at mindlessly copying others – repeating the exact behaviours that they observe. This created the possibility for more complex culture to evolve, somewhat ironically, by freeing it from the bottleneck imposed by individual intelligence. Chimpanzees learn from observing others, but they tend to view the behaviour as a source of inspiration, then use their own intelligence to reproduce the performance. They observe the wheel and then, in a sense, reinvent it for themselves. Human infants, by contrast, are disposed to copy others even when they don’t understand what they are seeing. This means that over time, something like a tool-making procedure can become more and more complex, as people make little improvements to it, yet the next generation of humans is still able to reproduce it, precisely because they do not need to figure out how it works in order to copy it. (Making the evolutionary case for all this, by the way, is a complex modeling challenge. Nothing that I described above is straightforwardly adaptive, which is presumably why one does not see this style of social learning elsewhere in the animal kingdom.) 

Readers who have been overexposed to the humanities may be inclined to think that once you bring in culture, suddenly we become free to do whatever we like, and so the rest of the story should be easy. This is clearly wrong. If culture develops through imitation of others, and you start out with an uncooperative species, then the culturally transmitted behaviours are going to be uncooperative as well. If culture somehow gave rise to cooperation, something other than imitation will be needed to explain this. Indeed, the most clever part of the Boyd-Richerson-Henrich story is the way that they account for the transition from culture (4) to cooperation (3). 

The first point to grasp is that if human infants learned only from their parents, then no behaviour pattern could emerge culturally that could not also have evolved biologically. This would rule out the cultural evolution of cooperation. Yet as we all know, children learn from sources other than their parents. The two most important additional sources of social learning are role models and peer groups. Each is governed by a powerful heuristic: “imitate the successful” in the case of role models and “imitate the majority” in the case of peers (the latter bias being known to us all as conformism). The big idea – which I’m not going to be able to do justice here – is that conformist social learning increases homogeneity within social groups, thereby potentiating group selection as a force in human cultural evolution. The mechanism of between-group conflict, which is a weak force supporting cooperativeness in biological evolution, becomes a strong force favoring cooperativeness in cultural evolution. Groups with more prosocial behavioural norms are more likely to establish cultural dominance over others. Because of this, human cultures became more cooperative over time. 

But that’s not the end of the story. Cultural expectations might have become more cooperative, but human beings were still aggressive, antisocial, individualistic primates. The second component of the theory is the claim that, as cultural expectations diverged from our biological dispositions, cultural conformity began to act as a force for social selection, which set off a process of self-domestication in the human species. (Richard Wrangham has written most entertainingly on this.) The claim, roughly, is that in this new more cooperative cultural context, excessively aggressive and dominant males wound up having their reproductive opportunities curtailed, which led to a series of biological changes that made humans more prosocial by disposition. (This is why Henrich is so interested in gene-culture coevolutionary processes, such as how cultural innovations, like cooking, gave rise to biological changes, like modification of our digestive system.) Cooperativeness, according to this view, started out as just a cultural pattern, but then became partially embedded in our nature through a process of gene-culture coevolution. 

Once these two steps in the explanation are in place, the other two are not so difficult. Humans are obviously going to be more interesting to talk to once there is some possibility that they will tell you the truth (or follow rules). There are lots of different versions of how a simple signalling system could have expanded once speakers began to act cooperatively (e.g. here). As far as intelligence is concerned, there is fairly widespread agreement that the direct fitness cost of our brains is so extreme that it must have arisen through some runaway process internal to the species (like the antlers of the Irish elk) and not in response to some fixed environmental challenge. Henrich’s view is that encephalization was driven by the explosive growth of culture. Particularly as cultural adaptations allowed humans to move into environments where we were biologically ill-equipped for survival, the ability to grasp as much of the ambient culture as quickly as possible conferred survival benefits. So the returns to improved cognition and memory became large, as culture provided us with more things worth knowing. My own inclination, as a philosopher, is to put more emphasis on the role that language played in the development of rationality (I am particularly partial to Andy Clark’s account of the “language upgrade” that our biological brains received). This suggests that step 3 must largely have preceded 4, whereas Henrich thinks they could have gone on simultaneously. 

So there’s my brief summary of the view. One could go back over this, by the way, and put large question marks beside each of the major claims. None of this is settled science; my subtitle is an exaggeration. I am merely describing where the cutting edge of evolutionary thinking has been over the past several decades. I feel that the theory is worth explaining because, apart from being just monumentally clever, it is also one of the most exciting developments in the human sciences to have occurred during my lifetime. The fact that it is not more widely understood is a pity. One cannot blame the scientists involved for this – most of the major players in the development of the theory have spent a lot of time trying to communicate it to broader audiences in non-technical terms. The problem, I think, lies in how deeply taken-for-granted the traditional order of explanation has become, which results in many readers failing to appreciate how completely this new approach inverts that explanation. But it is also a problem when people like Harari come along and make things more difficult, by taking the old, obsolete view and presenting it as though it were compatible with recent scientific thinking. ____________________ 

 * Many people do this because they think they are scoring points against religion by demonstrating continuity between the behaviour of humans and other animals. This is fine, except that it can cause problems when it comes to explaining the distinctive accomplishments of human beings. This is the major weakness in Frans de Waal’s work. He was so focused on showing that chimpanzees are just like us that he wound up making it harder to explain how human beings manage to accomplish anything different. Most obviously, if chimpanzee politics is just like human politics, then why don’t they have states, or laws, or armies?