PROMPT: You are an expert educator specializing in evolution, with a focus on the evolution of human culture. Create a 6-month personalized learning plan for understanding how human institutions embedded in human culture change and how new institutions are created. My goal is reflected in the essay I uploaded earlier. I have 15 hours per week.

📘 MONTH 1 — FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Theme: Culture as an evolutionary system

Core Ideas

• Culture evolves via variation, selection, and transmission
• Humans are a cumulative culture species
• Culture often evolves faster than genes (your key premise  )

Core Readings

• Joseph Henrich — The Secret of Our Success
• Boyd & Richerson — Culture and the Evolutionary Process (selected chapters)
• Creanza et al. (2017) — “How culture evolves” (you cited this)

Lectures

• Henrich (YouTube lectures you already identified)
• Santa Fe Institute — Intro to complexity & evolution

Weekly Writing Prompts

• Week 1: “What makes cultural evolution different from genetic evolution?”
• Week 2: “What is cumulative culture and why is it uniquely human?”
• Week 3: “How does cultural transmission (teaching, imitation) shape outcomes?”
• Week 4: “Is culture adaptive—or just persistent?”

Output

➡️ 2,000–3,000 word essay:

“Culture as an Evolutionary System”

🧠 MONTH 2 — HUMAN SOCIAL COGNITION

Theme: The evolved brain vs modern institutions

This directly builds your insight about:

• tribal cognition
• biases (groupthink, authority bias, etc.)

Core Ideas

• Humans are ultra-social, not rational individuals
• Cognitive biases are features, not bugs
• Minds evolved for small-group environments

Core Readings

• Michael Tomasello — The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
• Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber — The Enigma of Reason
• Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (selected)

Lectures

• MIT / Harvard lectures on social cognition
• Gazzaniga (split-brain, modular mind)

Weekly Writing Prompts

• Week 1: “Is reason an individual or social tool?”
• Week 2: “Why do cognitive biases persist?”
• Week 3: “What is the ‘social brain’?”
• Week 4: “Why Enlightenment ‘rational man’ is incomplete

Output

➡️ Essay:

“The Social Brain vs Rational Man”

(This directly feeds your critique of Enlightenment assumptions.)

🏛️ MONTH 3 — WHAT ARE INSTITUTIONS?

Theme: Institutions as cultural technologies

Core Ideas

• Institutions = rules + norms + enforcement mechanisms
• They are stored culture
• They evolve through path dependence

Core Readings

• Douglass North — Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
• Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons
• Avner Greif — historical institutional analysis

Key Insight for Your Project

Institutions are solutions to coordination problems, but:

They may become maladaptive when environments change.

Weekly Writing Prompts

• Week 1: “What is an institution?”
• Week 2: “How do institutions emerge?”
• Week 3: “Why do inefficient institutions persist?”
• Week 4: “Institutions as memory systems”

Output

➡️ Build a taxonomy of institutions:

• Economic
• Political
• Cultural
• Informational

🌍 MONTH 4 — CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION & COOPERATION

Theme: Why large societies work (sometimes)

Core Ideas

• Humans cooperate at scale via:
  • norms
  • punishment
  • identity
• Group selection may explain:
  • religion
  • nationalism
  • corporations

Core Readings

• Henrich — WEIRDest People
• David Sloan Wilson — Darwin’s Cathedral
• Fehr & Henrich — strong reciprocity (you cited)

Key Question

Why do people act against their individual interest for group norms?

Weekly Writing Prompts

• “Is altruism real or strategic?”
• “Why do religions persist?”
• “How do norms scale from tribe → nation?”
• “What makes large cooperation fragile?”

Output

➡️ Essay:

“From Tribe to Nation: Scaling Human Cooperation”

⚠️ MONTH 5 — INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE & CHANGE

Theme: Maladaptation in modern systems

This is your core intellectual territory.

Core Ideas

• Institutions lag behind environments
• Feedback loops can lock in bad systems
• Cultural evolution is not necessarily optimal

Core Readings

• Jared Diamond — Collapse
• Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson — Why Nations Fail
• Santa Fe Institute — complexity & systems failure

Key Concepts

• Path dependence
• Lock-in effects
• Elite capture
• Maladaptation (your central thesis)

Weekly Writing Prompts

• “What is maladaptation in culture?”
• “Why do bad systems persist?”
• “How does capitalism create externalities?” (your essay focus  )
• “Why is collective action so hard?”

Output

➡️ Core chapter draft:

“Cultural Maladaptation in Modern Institutions”

 

🔧 MONTH 6 — SYNTHESIS & APPLICATION

Theme: Build your framework

Now we explicitly connect everything to your original questions:

• Trump / political behavior
• climate failure
• capitalism & growth
• fragmentation of global response

(all central in your essay  )

Build Your Framework

Step 1: Define Core Model

Create a model like:

Environment → Cultural Traits → Institutions → Feedback → Adaptation / Maladaptation

Step 2: Apply to Case Studies

Write short analyses:

• COVID response
• Climate change
• Rise of populism
• Capitalism and inequality

Step 3: Key Synthesis Questions

• Why does culture adapt faster than institutions?
• When does adaptation fail?
• Can we intentionally guide cultural evolution?

Final Output (End of Month 6)

➡️ 5,000–10,000 word manuscript section:

“Human Cultural Evolution and the Limits of Institutional Adaptation”

This could become a core chapter of your book.

🧩 OPTIONAL (HIGH VALUE ADD-ONS)

1. Build a Concept Map (Ongoing)

Track relationships between:

• cognition
• norms
• institutions
• incentives
• environment

2. Weekly “Maladaptation Journal”

Each week:

• Identify 1 real-world example
• Explain it using evolutionary logic

3. Santa Fe Institute Track

Given your interest in networked intelligence  :

• Study complexity theory
• Focus on:
  • emergence
  • networks
  • tipping points

🧠 KEY INTELLECTUAL SHIFT (IMPORTANT)

Your essay is already circling a powerful insight:

Humans are not failing because they are irrational.

They are behaving exactly as evolved social organisms—

but inside environments their cognition did not evolve for.

This program is designed to help you:

• formalize that idea
• connect it to institutions
• make it academically and analytically rigorous

👍 If you want next steps

I can:

• Turn this into a downloadable DOCX syllabus
• Add specific weekly reading page assignments
• Build a custom “theory of maladaptation” framework diagram
• Or help convert Month 6 into a publishable chapter for THE HEIST

Just tell me how far you want to push this.