Joseph Henrich

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 food.

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've externalized detoxification and a lot of digestion, actually.

Well, I mean, in cultural evolutionary models, there are 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 on the genes.

And if it's changing a minute speed, then culture is the best way to go.

And if it's fast, then individual learning.

Yeah.

And the idea of the individual learning is favored because if it's changing too quickly, the previous generation doesn't know anything worth knowing because the world you're dealing with is just so much different from their world.

And so it's this intermediate range.

So myself and others have argued that the increase in the frequency of change during the plioplasticine transition 2.5 million years ago is a change that increases the value of cultural transmission of learning from others.

I'm not sure what your guest was thinking.

I mean, but as our brains are not very good at solving problems, otherwise the lost European explorers could survive.

And human brain size has been declining for the last 10,000 years.

So we've actually been getting dumber, fewer neurons, less computational power.

Yeah.