Joseph Henrich

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

So I'd worry about a system that is too homogeneous and doesn't have enough noise-adding shocks and new challenges and things like that.

One of the things missing from our conversation is the kind of creativity that cultural evolution has figured out.

So to give you an example, at some point in human history, religions invented big, powerful, moralizing gods.

And this may have increased the

people's ability to cooperate.

Forget about the technological elements.

Some of the most important features of innovation over human history have been institutional and things that get people to cooperate.

In my work, I argue that one branch of Christianity resulted in the transformation of the families in European societies into small monogamous nuclear families.

I'm not sure an AI would have thought of that.

Cultural evolution thought of it because of how it affected

how the societies operated so it sorted this out over historical time

Yeah, I mean as a kind of broad sketch, I think that is pretty interesting.

I mean in the case of – I worry about too high a fidelity replication just because it's important to take like the details of historical context and time into account.

So that same thing, if you fix it, it might not really work a decade later when everything else around it has changed, right?

So it's kind of a moving target.

But you could fix that just by having lots of different variants that are different versions of that.

So yeah, that would be cool.

So I think there's lots of reason to think there was lots of variation.

And one of the ways that researchers study this is they look at ecological variables and they compare it to phylogenetic variables.

And here they mean cultural phylogeny.

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