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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So there's just – and you need to know hundreds at least animals.
You need to know animal behavior.
You got to be able to spot tracks and spore.
And there's just – we're just very knowledge dependent in terms of our hunting and gathering.
Yeah.
Well, so I think we offloaded a lot of stuff into culture.
So in one of my Lost European Explorers, there's a case where they're in Australia and they have camels.
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.
Showing 561–580 of 1,282 · page 29 of 65
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