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 Europe passes China around 1,200 in the percentage of the population that lives in cities.

And cities are where a lot of the action is, cities and towns.

And you have the diversification of occupations.

So normally clans would specialize in different crafts, and you'd learn from your clan brothers and clan fathers how to do the occupation.

In Europe, you get guilds, and you get masters and apprenticeships developing where strangers will become an apprentice to a master, learn from him, move somewhere else as a journeyman, learn from that master, and then eventually set up a separate shop.

Lots of opportunities for a flow of ideas.

So it has to do with how the kinship system transformed the movement of people, the rising of urbanization, the nature of guilds, and then eventually you get universities and things like that.

So it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness of the collective brain and the amount of cognitive diversity.

yeah i mean definitely not an expert on this one but i mean for some of david reich's evidence suggests that the cast system is quite old because you can actually see it in the genetic system uh and the cast system is not good for innovation because you can't you know if you happen to be good at another skill but your cast doesn't do that skill you can't switch over yeah um so it's going to prevent the sort of availability using the genetic diversity um complex families intensive kinship there's reason to think that those things were all important

Yeah.

So patchwork apologies.

Yeah.

But there was lots of interesting ideas actually that are developed in India and they move into Central Asia eventually end up as in the Islamic world and then get into Europe.

So for example Arabic numbers are actually Indian numbers.

Right.

Zero was probably developed.

I mean Indians were huge with numbers.

It's kind of interesting.

Yeah.

Perhaps related to the religion.

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