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 these large families.

Definitely intensive kinship for sure, patrilineal, patrilocal.

Women, of course, don't have any rights.

And, you know, republicanism, but the formation of Rome is built around a series of elite families.

So it's a clan operation.

And they call it republican because the clans all have some say in what's going on.

So people sometimes see representative government where it's not really individuals being representative, but families.

And so this fools a lot of people into thinking there was a lot more

individualistic voting and things like that.

There was actually no voting.

But yeah.

So in Greece, in Athens, Athens is unique because it does a bunch of things in the laws of Solon that break down the intensive kinship.

So for example, in Greece, you get monogamy for the first time.

And Athens is considered unusual.

So males can only marry one Athenian woman, which has potentially positive effects among the competition among

Athenian men, but they can have as many slave concubines as they want.

So when Christianity spreads, it ends the whole slave concubine thing, which was also common in Rome.

And that's another effect on this whole thing.

Well, we know that, I mean, in the book I talk about data where we can look at contemporary kinship practices and we can look at the number of centuries that that part of Europe was under the church based on the diffuse.

So we have a database of the diffusion of bishoprics and there's a clear connection between the intensive kinship practices and the number of years under the church.

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