ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains where new cultural things come from and how they become concentrated in the collective agreements and patterned behavior we call cultures. It takes the view that there's no meaningful difference between individual learning and social learning. Evolutionary anthropologists, however, reformulated the problem as a distinction between individual learning by trial-and-error and social learning by copying. In 1957, Noam Chomsky proposed that language learning assumed the existence of a specific neural structure. Our minds use one mechanism to take information from the sensory fields in which we exist to create new ways to act and think about the world all the time, automatically, largely unconsciously, unexpectedly, and with error. Because no one can learn through directed teaching about institutionalized assumptions and norms by authorities without error, social learning cannot take place without individual trial-and-error learning.
