For this sort of thing, I really enjoyed Scott Alexander's review of The Secret Of Our Success (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-

For this sort of thing, I really enjoyed Scott Alexander's review of The Secret Of Our Success (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...), which contains lots of examples of how culture came to solve problems. Manioc is the big example from that article: when manioc was taken over to Africa as a cheap food, the corresponding culture was not taken with it, with the result that millions of Africans started showing the symptoms of cyanide poisoning twenty years later.