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

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.

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,

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