Joseph Henrich

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

Yeah, I mean as a kind of broad sketch, I think that is pretty interesting.

I mean in the case of – I worry about too high a fidelity replication just because it's important to take like 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 would be cool.

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 cultural 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.