Joseph Henrich

speaker

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

Yeah.

So specialization is good.

And so the interesting thing about most human societies is specialization automatic or not automatically, it tends to evolve along some kind of kinship line.

So in Oceania, there were different clans and each clan, there'd be like a canoe building clan and a warrior clan.

So that allows specialization, but it doesn't allow you to harness the genetic diversity because it's not like the canoe building clan had special canoe building genes.

It's just that you would pass down this cultural knowledge.

Right.

Now, a better system, but it seems hard to evolve, is one in which we all select into occupations in which we think we're good at.

But for that world to exist, you need a world of voluntary associations with emphasis on the individual rather than on the group.

So this is the world that evolves in Europe once you demolish the intensive kinship units because otherwise you're going to get castes and clans and all these things we see elsewhere where we see a division of labor, but it's transmitted through a kin network, the knowledge.

Well, so there was a lingua franca Latin, and so intellectuals would all write and communicate in Latin for a long time.

So even though they were speaking different dialects of French and German and whatnot, they were able to communicate in Latin.

And Christendom basically formed an overarching network that helped.

And one of the key things that this world religion does, and other world religions do it too, is –

You have to marry other Christians, but it dissolves the tribal line.

So Europe has tons of tribes in the pre-Christian world.

But because of how you have to marry other Christians, you had, you know, Celtics marrying Franks.

And in fact, the early arrival of Christianity into England is when a Frankish princess is marrying an Anglo, an Angle in Kent.

And so, you know, they're marrying back and forth.

And this is going to dissolve the tribes because intermarriage, what's the kid, you know.

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