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

There was a lot of randomness going on in the diffusion of the church.

But also, as the church arrived, these places—

over a period of time became more successful.

So you can see rising urbanization in the wake of the church's arrival.

That would have meant more trade.

Their citizens' rights began developing because they were trying to attract citizens to the towns.

That would have given the church more cachet, ability to move.

There's also the appearance of these voluntary associations, which are new kinds of monasteries.

And so the monasteries begin spreading throughout Europe.

But they're all linked in a network because, like, the Cistercians, they're all connected and they have big meetings.

So they're actually spreading a lot of knowledge around Europe as well.

So that's part of this kind of collective brain story.

So when you're thinking about China, the first thing to remember is that for a lot of the history, we can actually see that size difference mattering a lot.

So a lot of European invention or a lot of stuff used in Europe is flowing in, gunpowder, paper, printing press, stuff is flowing into Europe.

And so, okay, so then what happens after about 1,000 CE?

Well, the argument is that the destruction of the kinship group opens the floodgates to people moving around.

So a recent analysis that we've done is after a bishopric arrives at a 1.5 by 1.5 grid cell in Europe, people begin flowing in and out of that grid cell more.

And what we do to calculate that is we have a big database of a few million famous people and we have birth and death locations.

So we find out that the church arrives and suddenly people are free to move around.

So you have a flow of individuals around and you have rising urbanization.

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