YouSaid · the spoken record

Joseph Henrich

lines on the record: 124
first: 2025-03-12
most recent: 2025-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's a tough word that Well, I've never actually focused on that. I mean, I guess my immediate reaction was there must be a better way to transmit the knowledge than the whole conquest and so.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, so I think the Roman Empire plays a big role because, for example, there were Roman roads in parts of Europe which allow people to flow, and you have communities which were part of Rome and relatively sophisticated. Now, they go into bit of decline, but there's still the memory of the empire. So, you know, Charlemagne wants to be crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, even though there's not very much left of it. But it was still an ideal. And that Carolingian Empire actually had real effects because they worked with the Pope in order to enforce a lot of the marriage and family program. And the Carolingians had their own agenda because they were trying to use these marriage and family practices to weaken some of the other aristocratic families. But they had the religious tools that they could put to work. And if you didn't have those religious beliefs, then you couldn't put them to work.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there was a lingua franca Latin, and so intellectuals would all write and communicate in Latin for a long time. So even though they were speaking different dialects of French and German and whatnot, they were able to communicate in Latin. And Christendom basically formed an overarching network that helped. And one of the key things that this world religion does and other world religions do it too is you have to marry other Christians, but it dissolves the tribal line. So Europe has tons of tribes in the pre-Christian world. But because of how you have to marry other Christians, you had, you know, Celtics marrying Franks. And in fact, the early arrival of Christianity into England is when a Frankish princess is Marian and Anglo, an angle in Kent. And so, you know, they're marrying back and forth. And this is going to dissolve the tribes because intermarriage, what's the kid? So that's how you get rid of the tribes, but you need a world religion to do that.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, a better system, but it seems hard to evolve, is one in which we all select into occupations in which we think we're good at. But for that world to exist, you need a world of voluntary associations with emphasis on the individual rather than on the group. So this is the world that evolves in Europe once you demolish the intensive kinship units, because otherwise you're going to get castes and clans and all these things we see elsewhere, where we see a division of labor, but it's transmitted through a kin network than the knowledge.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so specialization is good. And so the interesting thing about most human societies is specialization automatic, well not automatically, it tends to evolve along some kind of kinship line. So in Oceania, there were different clans, and each clan there'd be like a canoe building clan and a warrior clan. So that allows specialization, but it doesn't allow you to harness the genetic diversity because it's not like the canoe building clan had special canoe building genes. It's just that you would pass down this cultural knowledge.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was lots of interesting ideas actually that are developed in India, and they move into Central Asia, eventually end up as in the Islamic world, and then get into Europe. So, for example, Arabic numbers are actually Indian numbers. Zero was probably developed. I mean, Indians were huge with numbers. It's kind of interesting, perhaps related to the religion.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, definitely not an expert on this one, but I mean, some of David Reich's evidence suggests that the caste system is quite old because you can actually see it in the genetic system. And the caste system is not good for innovation because you can't, you know, if you happen to be good at another skill, but your caste doesn't do that skill, you can't switch over. So it's going to prevent the sort of availability using the genetic diversity, complex families, intensive kinship. There's reason to think that those things were all important. Yeah, so patchwork apologies. Yeah.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Master's and apprenticeships developing where strangers will become an apprentice to a master, learn from him, move somewhere else as a journeyman, learn from that master, and then eventually set up a separate shop, lots of opportunities for a flow of ideas. So it has to do with how the kinship system transformed the movement of people, the rising of urbanization, the nature of guilds, and then eventually you get universities and things like that. So it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness of the collective brain and the amount of cognitive diversity.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, okay, so then what happens after about a thousand CE? Well, the argument is that the destruction of the kinship group opens the floodgates to people moving around. So a recent analysis that we've done is after a bishopric arrives at a 1.5 by 1.5 grid cell in Europe, people begin flowing in and out of that grid cell more. And what we do to calculate that is we have a big database of a few million famous people, and we have birth and death locations. So we find out that the church arrives and suddenly people are free to move around. So you have a flow of individuals around, and you have rising urbanization. So Europe passes China around 1200 in the percentage of the population that lives in cities. And cities are where a lot of the action is, cities and towns. And you have the diversification of occupations. So normally clans would specialize in different crafts, and you'd learn from your clan brothers and clan fathers how to do the occupation. In Europe, you get guilds.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So when you're thinking about China, the first thing to remember is that for a lot of the history, we can actually see that size difference mattering a lot. So a lot of European or a lot of stuff used in Europe is flowing in, gunpowder, paper, printing press stuff is flowing into Europe.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so, although it's hard to know there was a lot of randomness going on in the diffusion of the church, but also as the church arrived, these places over a period of time became more successful. So you can see rising urbanization in the wake of the church's arrival. That would have meant more trade. The citizens' rights began developing because they were trying to attract citizens to the towns. That would have given the church more cachet ability to move. There's also the appearance of these voluntary associations, which are new kinds of monasteries. And so the monasteries begin spreading throughout Europe, but they're all linked in a network because like the Cassertians, they're all connected and they have big meetings. So they're actually spreading a lot of knowledge around Europe as well. So that's part of this kind of collective brain story.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, in the record, I've never been able to find much evidence that they were thinking about the destruction of kinship ties. There is a great quote from St. Augustine where he talks about the benefits of forcing people to marry more distantly. But this is something that was debated repeatedly in church councils all across Europe. Yeah, it doesn't seem to pop up very often.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and it actually benefited the church because it released people's responsibilities to their families and allowed them to migrate in and join the church and more heavily invest in the church. And these later prohibitions against priest marrying and stuff was all an effort to get greater investment in the church because you weren't torn between helping your son and then investing in the church.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. So, I mean, what you're talking about is just the idea that culture has imbued institutions and various practices with a logic that we might not understand. So it's not calling for never changing the institutions. It's saying make sure you figure out the logic and the costs and benefits. So I've been, I was an expert witness in Canada for the Attorney General of British Columbia asked the Supreme Court of British Columbia whether the statutes against polygyny were legal. And so my job is just to inform the court that polygyny has this unfortunate effect of the elite and high status males tend to get a disproportionate share of the wives and that creates this pool of low status unmarried men. Now you can decide what you want to do with that, but you need to understand.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we know that, I mean, in the book, I talk about data where we can look at contemporary kinship practices and we can look at the number of centuries that that part of Europe was under the church based on the diffuse. So we have a database of the diffusion of bishoprics. And there's a clear connection between the intensive kinship practices and the number of years under the church”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many slave concubines as they want. So when Christianity spreads, it ends the whole slave concubine thing, which was also common in Rome. And that's another effect on this whole thing.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Women, of course, don't have any rights. And Republicanism, but the formation of Rome is built around a series of elite families. So it's a clan operation, and they call it Republican because the clans all have some say in what's going on. So people sometimes see representative government where it's not really individuals being represented but families. And so this fools a lot of people into thinking there was a lot more individualistic voting and things like that. There was actually no voting. But yeah, so in Greece, in Athens, Athens is unique because it does a bunch of things in the laws of Solon that break down the intensive kinship. So, for example, in Greece, you get monogamy for the first time. And Athens is considered unusual. Males can only marry one Athenian woman, which has potentially positive effects among the competition among Athenian men. But they can have as”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there were certainly some interesting things going on in Greece and Rome, but I don't think there's good evidence that you had the kinds of monogamous nuclear families that you would find later. I mean, even European law is built around patrilineau. So if your father's still alive, you are not a full citizen. You are under, you're in the patra house, so you have these large families. Definitely intensive kinship for sure, patrilineal, patrilocal.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those are just some of the examples of the ways it transforms the family structure and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families, which are basically unheard of around the world, at least if you look at the anthropological record. And you can really see this when you can compare individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families. In China, when you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village, and people flow back and forth, and you get these little enclaves of different clans and stuff in the cities and the connections. And this is really important because your ancestors and there's rituals that have to be done back in the home community. But Christianity does away with all those ancestor rituals.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Non genetic relatives as well as the cousins. It frees up inheritance. So it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal patrilineal inheritance. And a simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land. And it might be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father's brother. And so you can't sell it. You can't move it around. And you're also tied to it. It's where your ancestors are buried. And so there's this big importance of land. So the church allows people to give land to the church. The church becomes the largest landowner in Europe because you can do it by testament.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the church outlaws polygyny, and so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot and creating kind of a giant family through that. It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth cousins at some point, and that included spiritual kin and other kinds of sort of.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So our first observation is that there's a great deal of global psychological variation around the world. So European, American, Australian populations tend to be”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagree. Well, so my story is that the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe's collective brain. And one of the things that requires is trust in strangers and at least the beginnings of moral universalism. And it's that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, We've got to stop with the slave trade thing. And, you know, it's a moral decision that they make because it's no longer consistent with the changing moral values over time.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these are all things that are global now, right? So the universal schooling that we find around the world today begins with the Protestant Reformation in Germany and then later England. Universities models are the European university and globalized.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have a lot of trouble trying to answer that because, so say, I mean, China or someplace in the Middle East might have been the obvious alternative place for the Industrial Revolution to happen. I feel like you have to give those places a lot of stuff that developed only in Europe. So, for example, universities begin spreading in the high Middle Ages. So you'd want them to have universities. You'd want them to have universal schooling, which began to spread and wasn't present in these places prior to that. So that begins to spread in the 16th, 17th century. And so by the time you add all this stuff, it basically starts to look a lot like Europe.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the household level, and that even today in populations where most people aren't farmers, this persists. So this is cultural persistence that has to do with whether you had the plow. So this is worked done by Alberto Alicina and Nathan Nunn. A former postdoc of mine now at the Harvard Business School, Anka Becker, has done a similar thing with pastoralism. So if your ancestors were pastoralists, and pastoralists for various reasons have quite strong gender norms, that persist into the modern world and still shapes, for example, female entrepreneurship.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. So I think there's lots of reason to think there was lots of variation. And one of the ways that researchers study this is they look at ecological variables and they compare it to phylogenetic variables. And here they mean culture phylogeny. So if your ancestral populations had matrilineal, matrilocal social organization, how likely are you to have it controlling for ecology? And it turns out both of these things matter. People adapt to their ecology, but you can still see the signal of past society. So some degree of fidelity of transmission of social institutions, how we make our baskets, those kinds of things. There's lots of examples in the modern world, and we see this all over the place. So if you look at gender inequality in the modern world, you find that a history of the plow leads to greater gender inequality. So males had a particular advantage in using the plow because it requires upper body strength. This meant males became the dominant force in economic production.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, as a kind of broad sketch, I think that is pretty interesting. I mean, in the case of, I worry about two high-affidity replication just because it's important to take the details of historical context and time into account. So that same thing, if you fix it, it might not really work a decade later when everything else around it has changed, right? So it's kind of a moving target. But you could fix that just by having lots of different variants that are different versions of that. So yeah, that'd be cool.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things missing from our conversation is the kind of creativity that cultural evolution has figured out. So to give you an example, at some point in human history, religions invented big, powerful moralizing gods. And this may have increased the people's ability to cooperate. So the kind of forget about the technological element, some of the most important features of innovation over human history have been institutional and things that get people to cooperate. So in my work, I argue that one branch of Christianity resulted in the transformation of the families in European societies into small monogamous nuclear families. I'm not sure an AI would have thought of that. Cultural evolution thought of it because of how it affected How the societies operated. So it sorted this out over historical time.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or did you just find all of them not as convincing? Yeah, I know. I don't have strong opinions about any of this, but I do think that one thing that in order to make all that work is, you know, humans are constantly getting hit with shocks, right? So there's economic shocks, there's weather shocks, conflict with other groups, there's pandemics, and the shocks have big effects on how things go. They inject new information into the system. So I'd worried about a system that is too homogeneous and doesn't have enough noise adding shocks and new challenges and things like that.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, although I'm not, I haven't totally seen. I see various various potentials, and I'm particularly interested in using AIs to augment problem solving in human groups. So you can imagine getting the humans together, because the humans have the big advantage of having stuff they care about, right? They're stuff they want to invent. I mean, the AI is still a tool at some point. So I'm interested in that, but I'm interested in how these things like running out of training data is going to be dealt with, the value of making mistakes in serendipity. If you get rid of all those things or how you're going to reintroduce them, those kinds of things.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I think that's a very interesting area of research and it makes good sense to me. I'm not sure that current state of the evidence, but there are different parts of the genome are more or less susceptible to mutation, which is kind of interesting.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. No, I mean, I definitely think it's pretty interesting and holds great potential for expanding the collective brain. There are little things in there which might make one worry. So if you study the history of innovation, you find out that, for example, serendipitous meetings are super important. So there's a great paper on Silicon Valley showing that companies will cross-reference each other's patents more likely when the people at those companies tend to frequent the same coffee shops and they track people on their cell phones and stuff to figure this out. So Serendipitous meetings are important and improper copying. So a huge number of innovations are mistakes where somebody copied incorrectly and then got something better.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's definitely something I've thought about and I wrote about in secret, which is that as the rate of cultural change gets faster, and we sort of talked about this with environmental change, the value of older and older members of the previous generation declines because the world that they grew up in and that they honed their skills to is quite different from the current world. So you would expect the degree to which, I mean, optimally, you would look less far back or you would look to relatively younger individuals to get your inspiration from because the world they adapted to is closer to the world you're going to need to adapt to.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I was thinking, so the model here is what to focus your efforts on. So it's that it's the throwing model. So if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you focus your efforts on learning how to code or whatever. And so that means that's where you're likely to make the innovation.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're much more likely to patent in general, but you're probably going to patent in computers. But if you grow up in Boston, it's going to be biotech. So having a father or mother who did biotech and then growing up in Boston, it's an increasing, you're even more likely in biotech. And this is true even if you move to New York. So if you look at people in New York who are from Silicon Valley and from Boston, the Bostoners are more likely to patent in biotech. And the Silicon Valley kids are more likely to patent in computing. So all the same rules apply.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so these are very fine domains. So we're talking about like natural adhesives versus synthetic adhesives. So unless you think there's genes for that, and same thing with transistors and electronics, so very fine domains.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so super important. So we'll take the patent database. And if you're a same-sex parent, it has to be same-sex, patents in a particular domain, you're nine times more likely to patent in that same domain.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I think it's a continuous scale. So if you look at human brains, they're developing and continuing to add new connections and stuff, at least into the mid-20s. Now, there could be even more plasticity after that. Unlike chimps, we're still not totally myelinized for our whole lives. So there's definitely room. It's just there's less room.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a huge mistake would be to assume that those are the right cognitive abilities for the next century. So it'll be a different constellation. If you study, we study herders and cognitive abilities of herders in northern Namibia. And if you're in northern Namibia, you got to be able to move through the landscape. So being able to just take a direction and know where you're going and not get lost is super important. So different suites of cognitive abilities are favored in different environments. This idea that there's this generalized thing applicable across all human environments just doesn't, I mean, education massively increases your IQ, right? If you're uneducated, you have a totally different IQ.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are IQ. So there are polygenic scores for IQ. I think they actually did that one as well. Like you said, it's correlated with education. And yeah, but that doesn't have anything that the things that go into giving you an IQ, I mean, the correlation between brain size and IQ is only about, well, across populations it's 0.24. So it's not very big. So, the other thing is, I mean, IQ is massively misunderstood. So the way to think about IQ, which has been going up over the 20th century by quite a bit. So if you rescale modern scores to 1900, it's about 70. It's called the Flynn effect. I think that those are cognitive abilities for navigating the institutional world that we've constructed. Yeah.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they didn't say anything about intelligence. They did use the polygenic score for education. Yeah, so, but there was no education 8,000 years ago. Yeah, it's correlated. But then the question is, is we don't know what goes into that, right? Is that actually computational software? Or, I mean, people do well in school because they stick to it and they can sit in the same place for long periods of time.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the collective brain argument suggests that you at a certain size you'll begin farming off specialists because there's a store of knowledge in the society and we can all be generalists and learn how to do all the different skills. But at some point it makes efficiency sense for us to specialize in different skills. In order for that to be the case though, we have to have social agreements of some sort that allow us to trade or exchange things like that. But then once we're specializing, we don't necessarily need as large a brain because we distribute the overall brain power amongst the society. So it could be that we're becoming more of a superorganism. And you see the same thing in ants. When ants get specialized occupational casts, they're individual brains shrink.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, in cultural evolutionary models, a typical thing would be to let genes compete with individual learning, to compete with cultural learning. And it turns out the rate of change of the environment affects that. So if the environment is changing slowly, then you should put it all in the genes. And if it's changing emitterate speed, then...”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so I think we offloaded a lot of stuff into culture. So in one of my lost European explorers, there's a case where they're in Australia and they have camels. And the camels escape, and now Central Australia has lots of feral camels. So the camels survive the lost European Explorer challenge because they have innate instincts, they can smell water a mile away, they can detoxify foods in their own, they have a complex digestive system that detoxifies. We've lost all that, and we're worse than chimpanzees at detoxifying foods because we have all these cultural practices that do the work. So we have externalized detoxification and a lot of digestion, actually.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to be able to spot tracks and spore, and there's just we're just very knowledge dependent in terms of our hunting and gathering.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you probably as an adolescent were in school, right? Yeah. So you were probably accumulating some stuff in school, maybe. And here's an interesting fact about a hunter. So anthropologists have studied hunters, hunter gathering societies in different places. And the physical peak that at least males have is in their early 20s, right? That's when they run the fastest. The, they got the best eyesight. But the best hunters in the community are 36 to 40. They're not as fast as those guys, but they just know the track. They know the animals. They know exactly what to do in these different. And then hunting skill begins to decline because basically the physicality of things begins to catch up. And so there's this kind of cycle. And at 18, young hunters aren't even producing enough food to feed themselves. So it's not until they get into their 20s that they're actually in surplus and bringing food home for everybody else. So there's just, and you need to know hundreds at least, animals. You need to know animal behavior.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing is, once something gets good, doing it differently almost always makes it worse. So, and then there's also some things are just different because people do it randomly different. Like they make a mistake. So I think people often underestimate the power of error in generating novelty.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because for a typical answer, it's our custom. Yeah, or it's important to people around here to do it this way. So we do it this way. So just Hadzabose, for example, I didn't do this, we're Circ, Jacob Harrison, Kim Hill and Rob Boyd did it. But they asked Hadza about their bows and about how they work and what the mechanics are. So they understood some stuff. So you use the bow and you get some mechanical understanding. But if you ask them, you know, what if you used a different wood, different materials, and they had never tried anything else but what they learned how to make this bow. So they didn't, you know, they couldn't speak to a lot of that stuff. And the things about the compression of the wood is very important. didn't understand”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one of the ways we research this is by going out to societies that make bows and arrows or have food taboos that protect them from dangerous marine toxins and ask them questions about why they do it and see if they understand and they don't understand the underlying causal stuff.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source