Joseph Henrich

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1,282 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 25 May

Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

Yeah.

So before I get to solving the problem, I just want to sketch for the listeners that...

The question is, 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.

So 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 runoff 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, 3 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 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 have lived in large groups.

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