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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“I think it operates a lot like natural selection in the sense that natural selection will pick up tiny things if you give it long enough. Right. So, cultural evolution will do the same thing if you give it long enough. Because, you know, just small differences in who you're paying attention to will affect things, but it might take a thousand years as opposed to decades, right? We know culture can spread adaptive traits super quickly if it's a really big effect.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it has to be a big enough effect to matter. But I think if you go back to a world where there's a lot of improperly processed meat, people don't have refrigerators, and the leading cause of death in children is diarrhea. People carry high pathogen loads. If you can knock that pathogen load down, we know from modern research, you want to make people healthier and even smarter, right? IQ goes up if you knock the pathogen load down.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Families are going to be more successful. So, for example, you might have a household where they process the cassava more seriously than another family, and they're going to have more kids and they're going to be like, oh, that family's really good. And then people copy what they do in all kinds of ways. But one of them could be copying recipes.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So if, I mean, one of the things we know, even in young children, there's a tendency to preferentially learn from healthier, more successful individuals. And so if you're processing it better, so something like bitter cassava, which has cyanide in it. If you just eat bitter cassava, it won't taste great. So if you then rinse it somewhat, it'll taste better. And maybe you could eat it, but you're going to accumulate cyanide over the long run. So it doesn't kill you right away. But if you do this whole long process that the populations in South America developed, then you're totally fine. You never get any accumulation. So you can imagine that initially this is going to be very strong and people are going to sort of do sensible things, but then it gets a little more mysterious. And we know this because bitter cassava gets transported to Africa. And Africans immediately begin eating it improperly processed and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it. So then that's going to be a slow evolution where groups that do this are going to be more successful in individual”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so talking about the expansion, like that's something where the ancient DNA is useful, because Neanderthals in Europe, the DNA suggests they lived in very small groups, but the DNA of the expanding group suggests a larger population. So those would have been two different collective brains there as well.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so, I mean, lots of different evidence suggests that groups were moving trade goods. So well back into the Paleolithic, we see trade. Often we see some genetic transmission.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More chance that there's someone doing something useful in the larger group. And so that means it's easier to get across the threshold. So, those are three of the main factors that might have allowed our lineage as opposed to all the other lineages around to cross this. We're already a big brain primate. We had hands. We're living in these large groups on the savannah and the climate change during this period so as to make us, yeah.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of theory shows that there's a certain rate of change, which is favorable to cultural evolution, it's got to be slow enough so that the information is of your parents and the previous generation is useful, but not so slow that you might as well just encode it in the genes. So that's one. Second thing is we're a ground dwelling ape, which means we have hands like chimpanzees and gorillas, and we can potentially use tools and whatnot. But unlike them, our ancestors may have been savanna-dwelling apes, which meant we may lived in large groups. So in mammals, mammals live in larger groups when they have to deal with predators. And the predator guild in Africa at that point was quite thick. There were a lot of deadly predators. So paleoanthropologists think that our ancestors may have lived in large savanna dwelling apes. And if you have a lot of individuals, if the culture is sparse, the bigger the group,”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To understand that is this idea that you just mentioned where you're imagining an increase in brain tissue that's going to be costly. And I can put that towards individually figuring the problem out for myself, or I can put it into learning from others. And in a world without very much cumulative culture, there's not going to be very much useful information in the minds of everybody else. So I should use that brain tissue for individually solving problems. And so it's hard to get this run off where our brains get bigger for the purposes of learning from others. So, and then the question is, how do you get past that valley? So the case I make in secret is that in the, say, three million years ago, 2 million years ago, there were several factors that came together. The first factor is the rate of change of environments. So you get this increase in the fluctuation of environments. So you're getting more environmental changes. And in cultural evolution, a lot of...”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So before I get to solving the problem, I just want to sketch for the listeners that the question is, why is this cumulative cultural evolutionary process that is so important for humans relatively uncommon in the natural world? It seems like just our lineage. I mean, there was a bunch of splinoff lineages, but now it's just us.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the tough part that humans have always had is to stay unified because of the natural effect of geography and learning locally is going to tend to fragment us.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a cultural evolutionary dynamic that's part of this because languages will naturally diversify. And then as that diversify, there's less contact. People sometimes get inclined to marry endogamously, and especially if there's enough people around locally, why go all the way over there? And those people are getting more culturally different, so they're seeming a little bit like outsiders.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way I describe it in the secret is that it's a package of things. So another good example would be the Inuit expansion out of the north slope of Alaska. And they expand all the way across the Arctic and eventually get to Greenland. And they have a whole package of social practices.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Reich Labs evidence and lots of other ancient DNA suggest that there are these dead end genetic lineages. So, I mean, the Neanderthals are dead end in a sense, although we interbred with them. So they're in us in some sense, but they don't have their own pure lineage or anything like that.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, eventually, the groups have to meet and they're going to compete over territories. And a bunch of different things can occur. So groups can copy each other. So we know that from the ethnographic record and historical cases, sometimes a group will say, oh, those guys have really good technology tools. Maybe they'll get some migrants or something like that. And then they can adopt the practices. So that definitely happens. But there's also plenty of evidence of violent conflict.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things rituals that interconnected populations. So rather than having local rituals and local myths, many communities would get together periodically to initiate the young men, and this would help bond that whole group there be an exchange of technology and teaching that goes on. They'd spend a few months in the same place, so there was a lot of time for transmission.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we definitely don't know exactly what it was. So we know that this population expanded and there does seem to be some tool indicators to suggest more complex technology. Probably technology usually goes along with social organization. So for example, if you look at Australia, which is a continent of hunter-gatherers, there's an expansion about 6,000 years ago out of northern Australia, which eventually takes up seven-eighths of the continent. And they had a new social organization, including rules about who you marry. You had linguistic exogamy.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you can think of institutions that eventually lead to state capacity as just part of the innovative process of the collective brain. So if you have more groups experimenting with more different ways of governing groups of people, gradually you get the accumulation of the pieces that you can put together into different kinds of states.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you also ended up with more complex state bureaucracies and the kinds of things that allow you to organize and move people around and whatnot.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there were wheels on Mayan carts or Mayan toys. My explanation is just the collective brain. So almost every single first invention of something big that we think is important for humans was invented in Eurasia. And Eurasia, as Jared Diamond famously pointed out, building on other people's work, it's the largest continent by far. It has the biggest population. It's also oriented along an east-west axis, which allows ideas and people to more easily flow. And there's a belt, which the historian Ann Morris calls the lucky latitudes, which runs from basically southern China all the way through to the Mediterranean. And ideas are just flowing back and forth there.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, although the New World, everybody has dogs and you can pull carts with dogs. So I've never really bought that. Unfortunately, you can use llamas in the New World to pull carts as well. People do that today.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This could be just institutional changes. So if you have institutions, for example, that interconnect your population, you can maintain more sophisticated technology. And some paleoanthropologists, for example, have speculated with some evidence that the expanding populations had projectile weapons, so bows and arrows. And humans have periodically gained and lost bows and arrows in different parts of the world. So in Australia, for example, bows and arrows are never invented. In the New World, when the arrivals populations probably didn't have bows and arrows, but then later developed bows and arrows.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the Austronesian expansion, so that's the peopleing of the Pacific. That was the expansion of one group of people at the expense of others. And of course, the Neolithic expansion into Europe is another example. So really, human history is a story of these different expansions, and it could be that this expansion across Eurasia, which then led to interbreeding. So we know it's the same species. Humans interbred with Denisovans and Neanderthals, as well as probably other species. There's a ghost species in there.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic, they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic changes. Now, Reich's lab, there's no obviously big changes in the DNA, so it's a little bit of a puzzle. Neanderthal's, for example, had larger brains. And in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities, more ability to solve problems. So the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa might have actually been less able at an individual level to process information. But if you look back over the more recent period of human history, you can see that it's a story of expansions of different populations. So, for example, in Africa, we have the Bantu expansion, about 5,000 years ago, which actually eliminates a whole bunch of hunter-gatherer populations that previously existed in Africa. We have the remnant populations in parts of the Congo, in the Kalahari, and the Hadsa, for example, in Tanzania.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source