Joseph Henrich

and that seems to be culturally transmittable.

So this suggests that, you know, I can't rule out that there's been any genetic evolution, but I can show that culture can operate on this quickly and powerfully.

Yeah.

He doesn't actually fit any cultural evolutionary models.

And if you include that people are learning from parents and learning from their social milieu, your parents determine where you are in the social milieu.

So you're surrounded by people who are being more –

patient and behaving in certain economic ways, then that's going to have a huge effect.

I just told you about how if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're going to patent in computers.

It's not because you have genes for computers.

Yeah.

Right.

So we have a paper under review right now in which we show that from 1850 roughly to 1940, a big driver of U.S.

innovation, both the quality and quantity of patents, is the cultural diversity of counties.

And we actually use immigration as a kind of way of showing the causal effect of this.

So what you want is a lot of cultural variation.

Now, if you get people from societies that are more distant from whatever the current U.S.

culture is at the time, it's going to take more time until they're able to fully integrate.

So if they're coming from a very distrusting society, they're not going to be able to latch into the collective brain immediately.

So you see this in early – around 1900.

There's data from people mostly coming from southern Italy and coming from Germany and Britain.