Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years.I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious.How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error?Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain?The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe.Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------SponsorsScale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/p/advertise.----------Joseph’s booksThe WEIRDest People in the WorldThe Secret of Our Success----------Timestamps(0:00:00) - Humans didn’t succeed because of raw IQ(0:09:27) - How cultural evolution works(0:20:48) - Why is human brain size declining?(0:32:00) - Will AGI have superhuman cultural learning?(0:42:34) - Why Industrial Revolution happened in Europe(0:55:30) - Why China, Rome, India got left behind(1:21:09) - Loss of cultural variance in modern world(1:31:20) - Is individual genius real?(1:43:49) - IQ and collective brains Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Joseph Henrich, who is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and an author of two of my favorite books, The Weirdest People in the World, and before that, The Secret of Our Success.
And I was just mentioning to you that I remember reading this, I don't know, many, many years ago when I was in college, and at the time, I didn't think I would get a chance to ask you questions about it. I recently had your colleague David Reich on, and we were discussing certain things in the
record of human history where he said, like, look, eventually you just got to have Joseph Henrich on and ask him these questions because he's the one who would know. So let me ask you one of the questions which I was super intrigued by, which he raised, and we didn't come up to an answer to. So
One of the things he's discovered through his genetic evidence is that 70,000 years ago, across Eurasia, there's so many different human species from the Denisovans to the Neanderthals to the Hobbits. And then apparently there's this one group, which was potentially the size of 1,000 to 10,000 people in the Near East, which subsequently explodes.
And now everybody who's descended from Eurasia descends from this one group. And so I guess the question is, like, what happened? What did they figure out?
Yeah. So a typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic, they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic changes. Now, Reich's lab, you know, there's no obviously big changes in the DNA. So it's a little bit of a puzzle. Neanderthals, for example, had larger brains.
And in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities, more ability to solve problems. So the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa, might have actually been less able at an individual level to process information. But if you look back over the more recent period of human history, you can see that it's a story of expansions of different populations.
So, for example, in Africa, we have the Bantu expansion about 5,000 years ago, which actually eliminates a whole bunch of hunter-gatherer populations that previously existed in Africa. We have the remnant populations in parts of the Congo, in the Kalahari, in the Hadza, for example, in Tanzania. If you look at the Austronesian expansion, so that's the peopling of the Pacific.
That was the expansion of one group of people at the expense of others. And of course, the Neolithic expansion into Europe is another example. So really, human history is a story of these different expansions. And it could be that this expansion across Eurasia, which then led to interbreeding. So we know it's the same species.
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