Joseph Henrich

So it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness of the collective brain and the amount of cognitive diversity.

yeah i mean definitely not an expert on this one but i mean for some of david reich's evidence suggests that the cast system is quite old because you can actually see it in the genetic system uh and the cast system is not good for innovation because you can't you know if you happen to be good at another skill but your cast doesn't do that skill you can't switch over yeah um so it's going to prevent the sort of availability using the genetic diversity um complex families intensive kinship there's reason to think that those things were all important

Yeah.

So patchwork apologies.

Yeah.

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.

Right.

Zero was probably developed.

I mean Indians were huge with numbers.

It's kind of interesting.

Yeah.

Perhaps related to the religion.

Yeah.

So specialization is good.

And so the interesting thing about most human societies is specialization automatic or 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.

Right.