Joseph Henrich

So that's a case where his intuitions didn't serve him well.

And he turned out to be wrong for decades.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I try to implement the ideas of the collective brain.

So in my lab at Harvard, I have postdocs and graduate students with backgrounds in evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, economics.

I mean, some of my favorite collaborators are economists.

And we're just bringing ideas from very different places.

But

Across the social sciences, even the biological sciences, we're often trying to explain the same kind of phenomena, economic decision-making, cooperation, things like ethnicity, why does it exist, stuff like that.

Yeah.

The way we silo science is a big problem.

And especially in the social science, I think it's even a bigger problem.

One of my experiences, so I've been a professor of anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology.

And just even the standards of evidence and what constitutes good research and how you tackle a problem really varies.

So the academic disciplines are like different cultural worlds, different tribes.

And just pulling the best from them has kind of been my approach.

No, it's a series of different networks.

So David Reich and I, for example, are always talking about how to, I mean, we want to read culture from the genes.

So if humans have had a long history of gene culture co-evolution, and we want to understand what

paleolithic populations were doing, we might be able to see imprints of it in the genes.