Joseph Henrich

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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

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.

minor increases in fitness and like it actually has to be like a quite a significant thing for it to like it's i think it's 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 um 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 yeah

But we know culture can spread adaptive traits super quickly if it's a really big effect.

I mean, one of the ways we research this is by going out to societies that make bows and arrows or have food taboos that protect them from dangerous marine toxins and ask them questions about why they do it and see if they – and they don't understand the underlying causal stuff.

But then why do they say they do it?

Well, because that – a typical answer is that it's our custom.

Yeah.

Or it's, you know, important to people around here to do it this way.

So we do it this way.

So just Hadza bows, for example, you know, I didn't do this research.

Jacob Harrison, Kim Hill, and Rob Boyd did it.

But they asked Hadza about their bows and about how they work and what the mechanics are.

So they understood some stuff.

So you use the bow and you get some mechanical understanding.

But if you ask them, you know, what if you used a different wood, different materials, and they had never tried anything else but what they learned how to make this bow.

So they didn't, you know, they couldn't speak to a lot of that stuff.

And the things about the compression of the wood is very important.

I didn't understand that.

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