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
And so it's this intermediate range.
So myself and others have argued that the increase in the frequency of change during the plioplasticine transition 2.5 million years ago is a change that increases the value of cultural transmission of learning from others.
I'm not sure what your guest was thinking.
I mean, but as our brains are not very good at solving problems, otherwise the lost European explorers could survive.
And human brain size has been declining for the last 10,000 years.
So we've actually been getting dumber, fewer neurons, less computational power.
Yeah.
Why has brain size been declining?
Well, the collective brain argument suggests that at a certain size, you'll begin farming off specialists.
Because there's a store of knowledge in the society, and we can all be generalists and learn how to do all the different skills.
But at some point, it makes efficiency sense for us to specialize in different skills.
In order for that to be the case, though, we have to have social agreements of some sort that allow us to trade or exchange things like that.
But then once we're specializing, we don't necessarily need as large a brain because we distribute the overall brain power amongst the society.
So it could be that we're becoming more of a superorganism.
And you see the same thing in ants.
When ants get specialized occupational casts, their individual brains shrink.
Well, they didn't say anything about intelligence.
They did use the polygenic score for education.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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