Joseph Henrich

So in my own work, for example, we've measured cousin marriage across different populations and shown it correlates with runs of homozygosity in the genes.

Something like polygyny can be revealed by looking at the ratio, the variance in Y chromosomes to X chromosomes.

Fire probably has some – we probably have some special genetic adaptations for dealing with the toxins in fire.

So if you want to know when humans got fire and you see the gene that gives us immunity to toxins in fire, then we can infer that fire is older than that, right?

Yeah.

I mean, all that, any convergence is completely independent because I haven't really spent much time at all.

I mean, I've gone back after people said your work is kind of like Hayek.

I went back and read some Hayek.

I did read The Fatal Conceit in graduate school, but aside from that, I didn't read very much.

And then same thing with Adam Smith.

I mean, I've tackled the wealth of nations and I eventually read The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but it was pretty far into the process.

I had picked up on themes they developed before I knew they had developed them.

Yeah, I think that's right because the assumption, the sort of model that people seem to carry around in their heads is that humans have done all these things because of our individual brain power when really it's been the power of cultural evolution and a network of minds, you know,

gnawing away at problems over long periods of time and gradually accumulating not just the obvious tools, but also the cognitive tools for addressing these things.

So the first thing that we need to do, though, is to zoom back out and think about what we mean by IQ.

And so Michael Muthu Krishna and I have made the case that IQ is just a set of cognitive abilities that leads to success in 20th century contemporary institutions that have come to dominate the world.

So it's a culturally evolved system.

And we talked before about the Flynn effect, which illustrates that.

And the fact that IQ is associated with all these positive outcomes now, but certainly wouldn't be in pastoralist societies.

So that would mean that...