The Secret of Our Evolutionary Success Is Faith

The staunch atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that “the most overrated of the virtues is faith.” It’s a reasonable conclusion if you believe, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan did, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”¹ To believe something without evidence—or have faith—is, in their view, something to avoid (and, when called for, to mock).

Yet it was arguably faith—rather than reason—that had been instrumental to our ancestors’ survival. That’s just one of the many intriguing and paradoxical claims that Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, defends in his new book, . His central thesis, reiterated confidently, isthe “only process capable of creating complex adaptations.” Cultural evolution, he says, is