I list them here, in the order in which the books were published. The last one, Innate, by Kevin Mitchell, is one that I cover in a long review essay, which I hope will appear early next year.
Note that this is a “notable books on this topic” piece, not a “books of 2019” piece.
You write, “By nurture, I mean the efforts of parents and educators to shape our behavior. By culture, I mean the knowledge, tastes, customs, norms, and tools that we absorb by interacting with others directly or indirectly.”
Is not nurture downstream of culture–in the sense that nurture is one substantiation of culture in society? Parents and educators attempt to shape our behavior via the direct transmission of knowledge and indirectly shape young people’s customs and norms (e.g., getting told to share).
If this is correct, then these recommendations have a tension of sorts: Harris, Pinker, and Mitchell de-emphasize the importance of nurture (and thus culture), while Laland and Henrich emphasize the importance of culture. What distinguishes culture from nurture? I suppose one route is to argue that culture matters, but the culture that matters is the uncontrollable stuff.
(As an aside, I reread your review of LaLand’s book, and you asked why there are no intermediate-culture species between humans and other animals–I think orcas are a good candidate for being an intermediate-culture species [see this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11693%5D.)
The take-away from Harris’ The Nurture Assumption is that environmental factors are very important but the contribution comes mostly from peer effects rather than nurture effects. If this is true then the interesting question is how does culture spread between different peer cohorts and I suspect it is because the cohorts overlap so they is no clear demarcation between them.
I would argue that there were three major intermediate-culture species but they are all now extinct. Jared Diamond calls us the Third Chimpanzee but we are really the fourth hominid (If you consider Diamond’s “great leap” a speciation event). Lucy, Turkana Boy, and Neanderthals represent the first three hominids. Turkana Boy (homo erectus) is the focus of Richard Wrangham’s “Catching Fire” and this social animal and their technology spread across Eurasia.
I’ve now read Kling’s 2017 review of the book Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland. I haven’t read the book but if Kling’s review is accurate I think Laland is wrong about cumulative cultural learning being the key factor. Following on my reply to John Hamilton, I think both homo erectus and neandethals/denisovans would have been very social species that underwent cumulative cultural learning. Erectus probably had fire/cooking and Neanderthals probably had advanced speech.
What distinguishes sapiens, in my opinion, is extreme specialization that accelerated the cumulative cultural learning. Sapiens are eusocial, perhaps super-eusocial since our specialization is fully plastic compared to Deborah Gordon’s ants. Erectus and Neanderthals probably specialized by gender like other great apes but within each gender there was only a ranking hierarchy without specialized roles. They might sing songs but there would be no specialist singers.
The big question in my model is whether archaic sapiens are more like neanderthals/denisovans or specialized like Great Leap sapiens.
the four hominids:
1. Lucy, the walking ape
2. Turkana Boy /Java Man, the cooking ape
3. Neanderrhals/denisovans, the talking ape
4. Sapiens, the specialized ape