Joseph Henrich

And – but if you do this whole long process that the populations in South America developed, then you're totally fine.

You never get any accumulation.

So you can imagine that initially this is going to be very strong and people are going to sort of do sensible things to – but then it gets a little more mysterious.

And we know this because bitter cassava gets transported to Africa and Africans immediately begin eating it improperly processed and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it.

So then that's going to be a slow evolution where groups that do this are going to be more successful and individual families are going to be more successful.

So, for example, you might have a household where they process the cassava more seriously than another family.

And they're going to have more kids and they're going to be like, oh, that family is really good.

And then people copy what they do in all kinds of ways.

But one of them could be copying recipes.

But I think if you go back to a world where...

You know, there's a lot of improperly processed meat.

People don't have refrigerators.

And the leading cause of death in children is diarrhea.

People carry high pathogen loads.

If you can knock that pathogen load down, we know from modern research, you want to make people healthier and even smarter, right?

IQ goes up if you knock the pathogen load down.

minor increases in fitness and like it actually has to be like a quite a significant thing for it to like it's i think it's it operates a lot like natural selection in the sense that natural selection will pick up tiny things if you give it long enough right um so cultural evolution will do the same thing if you give it long enough because you know just small differences in who you're paying attention to will affect things but it might take a thousand years as opposed to decades right yeah

But we know culture can spread adaptive traits super quickly if it's a really big effect.

I mean, one of the ways we research this is by going out to societies that make bows and arrows or have food taboos that protect them from dangerous marine toxins and ask them questions about why they do it and see if they – and they don't understand the underlying causal stuff.

But then why do they say they do it?