Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

1. 0:00 – 10:13

   Humans didn’t succeed because of raw IQ

   1. JHJoseph Henrich0:00

      Human brain size has been declining for the last 10,000 years. We distribute the overall brain power amongst a society, so it could be that we're becoming more of a superorganism. The rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe's collective brain. The key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe. The destruction of the kinship group opens the floodgates to people moving around.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:22

      In a world where the Roman Empire never existed, do you still have this collective brain in Europe emerge?

   3. JHJoseph Henrich0:27

      Really, human history is a story of these different expansions. The Dorset probably had better technology, but they expanded, they spread out. Their languages diversified, they lost contact, and they began losing technology. The way human bureaucracies institutions work is they kind of corrode from the interior, just the way cancer spreads in a cell. So you just gotta kill it and make a new one.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel0:46

      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, uh, he said like, "Look, uh, eventually, you just gotta have Joseph Henrich on and ask him these questions 'cause he's the one who'd know." So let me ask you one of the questions which I was super intrigued by, which he raised, and I didn't, uh, we didn't come up with, to an answer to. So, one of the things he's discovered through his genetic evidence is that 70,000 years ago, um, across Eurasia, there's so many different, uh, human species from, uh, the Denisovans to the Neanderthals to the Hobbits. Uh, and then apparently, there's this one group which was p- potentially the size of 1 to 10,000 people, uh, 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? (laughs) What, what did they figure out?

   5. JHJoseph Henrich2:04

      Yeah, so, um, a w- a typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic, they're, they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic cha, uh, changes. Now, uh, Reich's lab, you know, th- there's no, there's no obviously big changes in the, in the DNA, so it's a little bit of a puzzle. Neanderthals, for example, had larger brains.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel2:23

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JHJoseph Henrich2:23

      And in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities and more ability to solve problems. So, the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa, might've actually been less abil- uh, 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-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel2:46

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JHJoseph Henrich2:47

      ... 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. Um, 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-

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel3:07

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJoseph Henrich3:07

       ... 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. Humans interbred with Denisovans and, uh, uh, Neanderthals, as well as probably other species. There's a ghost species in there. Um, this could be just institutional changes, so if you have institutions, for example, that interconnect your population, you can maintain more sophisticated technology. And some paleoanthropologists, for example, have speculated, uh, with, with some evidence, uh, that the, the expanding populations had, uh, projectile weapons, so bows and arrows. And humans have periodically gained and lost bow, bows and arrows in different parts of the world. So in Australia, for example, uh, b- bows, bows and arrows are never invented. Uh, in the New World, the, when the arrivals populations probably didn't have bows and arrows, but then later develops bows and arrows.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel3:58

       It's also really interesting how, um, some technologies you would just think of as extremely, um... I don't know what the word is, but f- uh, the, the New World like not having the wheel or something, uh-

   13. JHJoseph Henrich4:08

       Right.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel4:09

       ... is, um... I, I guess it kind of makes sense with like no domesticated animals, but again, it's like such a...

   15. JHJoseph Henrich4:14

       Right, although the New World, everybody has dogs, and you can pull carts with dogs.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel4:18

       Yeah.

   17. JHJoseph Henrich4:19

       So I've never really bought that, and of course, you can, you can use llamas in the New World to pull carts as well. People do that today.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel4:23

       Yeah, so what's your actually, what's your explanation for why there's no (laughs) wheels in the New World?

   19. JHJoseph Henrich4:26

       Uh, so Mice well... So there were wheels on Mayan carts or May- Mayan toys.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel4:30

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JHJoseph Henrich4:31

       Uh, my explanation is just the collective brain. So almost every single first invention of, uh, something big that we think is important for humans was invented in Eurasia.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel4:39

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JHJoseph Henrich4:40

       And Eurasia, as Jared Diamond famously pointed out building on other peoples' work, it's, uh, the largest continent by far. It has the biggest population. It's also oriented along an east-west axis-

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel4:50

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JHJoseph Henrich4:50

       ... which allows ideas and people to more easily flow. And there's a belt, which the historian Ann Morris calls the Lucky Latitudes-

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel4:57

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JHJoseph Henrich4:57

       ... which runs from basically southern China all the way through to the Mediterranean, and ideas are just flowing back and forth there.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel5:03

       Hmm, interesting.

   29. JHJoseph Henrich5:04

       But you also ended up with more complex, uh, state bureaucracies and the kinds of things that allow you to w- organize and move people around and whatnot.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel5:13

       Mm-hmm. And what's the explanation for why the collective brain leads to state capacity, or is it the other way around?
2. 10:13 – 21:34

   How cultural evolution works

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel10:13

      So in The Secret, you describe this interesting startup problem where if you don't have that much accumulated cultural knowledge, developing the ability to do social learning isn't as valuable. But if you don't have the ability to do social learning, you don't have that much accumulated cultural knowledge in your tribe or group. So how, how is this problem solved?

   2. JHJoseph Henrich10:31

      Yeah. So before I get to solving the problem, I just wanna sketch for the listeners that, um, uh, the question is, is why is this cumulative cultural evolutionary process that is so important for humans, uh, relatively uncommon in the natural world? It seems like just our lineage.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel10:46

      Yeah.

   4. JHJoseph Henrich10:46

      I mean, there was a bunch of split-off lineages, but, uh, now it's just us. So to understand that is this idea that I, that you just mentioned where you're imagining an increase in brain tissue that's gonna be costly, and I can put that towards individually figuring the problem out for myself, or I can put it into learning from others. And in a world without very much cumulative culture, there's not gonna be very much useful information in the minds of everybody else, so I should use that brain tissue for individually solving problems. And so you, it's hard to get this runoff where their brains get bigger for the purposes of learning from others. So, uh, and then the question is how do you get past that valley? So the case I make in Secret is that in the, say, three million years ago, two million years ago, there were several factors that came together. The first factor is, uh, the change of, rate of change of environments. So you get this increase in, uh, the fluctuation of environment, so you're getting more environmental changes. And in cultural evolution, a lot of theory shows that, uh, there's a certain rate of change which is favorable to cultural evolution. It's gotta be slow enough so that the information is, um, uh, y- of your parents and the previous generation is useful, uh, but not so slow that you can might as well just encode it in the genes.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel12:04

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JHJoseph Henrich12:04

      So that's one.Second thing is, we're a l- ground-dwell- dwelling ape, which means we ha- have hands like chimpanzees and gorillas, and we can potentially use tools and whatnot. But unlike them, our ancestors may have been savanna-dwelling apes, which meant we may lived in large groups. So in mammals, mammals live in larger groups when they have to deal with predators. And the predator guild in Africa at that point was quite thick. There were a lot of deadly predators. So paleo-anthropologists think that our ancestors may have lived in large savanna-dwelling apes. And if you have a lot of individuals, well, if the culture is sparse, there's a, the bigger the group, the more chance that there's someone doing something useful in the larger group. And so that means it's easier to get across the, the threshold. So those are s- three of the main factors that might have allowed our lineage, as opposed to all the other lineages around, to cross this. We're already a big-brained primate, we had hands, we're living in these large groups on the savanna, and the climate changed during this period-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel13:03

      Yeah.

   8. JHJoseph Henrich13:03

      ... so as to make us, yeah.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel13:04

      And how big were these groups?

   10. JHJoseph Henrich13:06

       Well, I mean, nobody's really sure, but maybe a few hundred individuals.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel13:10

       Okay. And before the Agricultural Revolution, was there still this transmission of information across different groups?

   12. JHJoseph Henrich13:20

       Yeah. So, uh, I mean, lots of different evidence suggests that groups were, were moving, uh, trade goods.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel13:26

       Mm-hmm.

   14. JHJoseph Henrich13:26

       So well back into the Paleolithic, we see trade. Uh, often we see some genetic transmission. Um, I mean-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel13:33

       Right, uh, the expansions and so forth.

   16. JHJoseph Henrich13:35

       Yes. And so, eh, talking about the expansion, like, that's something where the ancient DNA is useful 'cause the Neanderthals in Europe, the DNA suggests they lived in very small groups. But the DNA of the expanding group suggests a larger population. So those would've been two different collective brains there as well.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel13:49

       Uh, so in The Secret, you discuss a lot of these, um, lost European explorers with modern technologies, as of at least a couple centuries ago, encountering peoples who have, for tens of thousands of years, discovered ways of hunting and processing foods and so forth that, um, uh, w- w- without which even these people with modern technology will starve. And I, as I was reading that, I was wondering like, h- like, I'm still, like, not sure how I understand the process by which, if you need, there's like a ten-step process to, um, making sure this bean is actually nutritious. And without it, without any one of those steps, you might, like, poison yourself or something. Um, and it's like you, at no point do you understand why this process works. You don't have a scientific explanation. Um, how do you even, like, learn that in the first place? (laughs)

   18. JHJoseph Henrich14:35

       Right. So if you, I mean, one of the things we know, even, even in young children, there's a tendency to preferentially learn from healthier-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel14:41

       Hm.

   20. JHJoseph Henrich14:41

       ... more successful individuals. And so if you're processing it better, so something like, um, bitter cassava, which has cyanide in it, if you just eat bitter cassava, it'll, it'll, it won't taste great. So if you then rinse it somewhat, it'll taste better and maybe you could eat it, but you're going to accumulate cyanide over the long run. So it doesn't kill you right away. And, uh, 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 gonna be very strong and people are gonna sort of do sensible things to, to ... But then it gets a little more mysterious. And we know this 'cause bitter cassava gets transported to Africa, and Africans immediately begin eating it, but improperly processed-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel15:21

       Mm-hmm.

   22. JHJoseph Henrich15:21

       ... and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel15:25

       Yeah.

   24. JHJoseph Henrich15:25

       So then that's gonna be a slow evolution where, uh, groups that do this are gonna be more successful and individual families are gonna be more successful. So for example, you might have a household where they process the cassava more seriously than another family, and they're gonna, they're gonna have more kids and they're gonna be like, "Oh, that family's really good." And then people copy what they do in all kinds of ways, but one of them could be copying recipes.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel15:46

       Hm. But when you, um ... I, I guess it depends on the mechanism of selection here, 'cause when you consider the different ways in which two different individuals might be different or two different households or even two different groups, um, I guess it makes sense why cyanide poisoning is such a deleterious effect that it is, it is like a noticeable, um, or, you know, like quite a strong signal. But something, I mean, I, I think some of the ... You discussed some other ideas in, in The Secret where it's like, uh, this, the sort of spices in a region sort of match the anti-microbial properties or the antifungal properties you need for the, um, uh, for, you know, to, to like stay, I guess, clean or whatever in the-

   26. JHJoseph Henrich16:23

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel16:23

       ... in that, in that particular region. Um, but the, when I think about like, okay, so it, it sounds like a small effect. And how could s- such a small effect actually create a strong enough signal that when you're deciding who to copy, you notice that, like, this family is healthier because they, like, spice their food in a certain way?

   28. JHJoseph Henrich16:40

       Right.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel16:41

       Or this, like, group, like, takes over the, uh, the area because they've-

   30. JHJoseph Henrich16:45

       Yeah, I mean, it has to be a big enough effect to matter. But I think if you go back to a world where, um, 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.
3. 21:34 – 32:46

   Why is brain size declining?

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel21:34

      Given the, um, I mean, th- what you just said and also the experience of these European explorers suggests that, like, you just gotta know a lot of shit to make it in any sort of environment on Earth. But then, like, there's all these other animals (laughs) , and they seem so dumb, and they seem, like, r- able to get by. So, like, why did humans have such a hard time of it?

   2. JHJoseph Henrich21:53

      Yeah. Well, so I think we offloaded a lot of stuff into culture. So, uh, in one of my Lost European Explorers, there's a case where they're in Australia, and they have camels. And the camels escape, and now Central Australia has lots of feral camels.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel22:05

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JHJoseph Henrich22:06

      So the camels survived the Lost European Explorer challenge 'cause they have innate instincts. They can smell water a mile away. They can detoxify foods in their own... They have a complex digestive system-

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel22:15

      Yeah.

   6. JHJoseph Henrich22:15

      ... that detoxifies. We've lost all that, and we're, we're worse than chimpanzees at detoxifying foods because we have all these cultural practices-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel22:22

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JHJoseph Henrich22:22

      ... that do the work. So we've externalized detoxification and a lot of digestion actually.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel22:27

      Hm. I had this, um, uh, independent researcher and internet writer called Gwern Branwen on my podcast a couple months ago, and we were discussing AI, and I asked him... So his theory is very much like, the brain became bigger, more intelligence, and so then I asked him, like, "Look, if it's this simple, why did it take so long for e- evolution to discover intelligence in the first place?" And he had this interesting answer, which is that there's a very narrow, uh, uh, in terms of, like, the signal that evolution is giving you, there's a very narrow, um, gap between skills that are so useful that they should, like, just be distilled as an instinct, uh, into your genome and then skills that are so worthless that are, they're not worth learning in the first place. And so this narrow gap that's like, um, you need that generalization ability. Like, it's like, it's like not so primal that, like, you know, you're not gonna culturally learn hunger. It's, it's got, you, it just got, gonna be in your genome. I don't know if that sounds like a interesting explanation or, uh, helps explain anything.

   10. JHJoseph Henrich23:27

       Well, I mean, in cultural evolutionary models, there are, a typical thing would be to let genes compete with individual learning to compete with cultural learning, and it turns out the rate of change of the environment affects that.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel23:39

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JHJoseph Henrich23:39

       So if the environment is changing slowly, then you should put it all in the genes.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel23:43

       Yeah.

   14. JHJoseph Henrich23:44

       And if it's changing at a moderate speed, then culture is the best way to go, and if it's fast, then individual learning.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel23:49

       Yeah.

   16. JHJoseph Henrich23:49

       And the idea, the individual learning is favored because if it's changing too quickly, the previous generation doesn't know anything worth knowing 'cause the world you're dealing with is just so much different from their world. And so it's this intermediate range, so, uh, myself and others have argued that the increase in the frequency of change during the Plio-Pleistocene transition 2.5 million years ago is a change that increases the value of cultural transmission of learning from others. Um, I- I'm not sure what your ph- uh, guest, uh, was thinking. I mean, but as, our brains are not very good at, uh, solving problems, otherwise, the lost European explorers could survive. And human brain size has been declining for the last 10,000 years, so we've actually been getting dumber. Um, fewer neurons, less computational power.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel24:34

       Yeah. Why has brain size been declining?

   18. JHJoseph Henrich24:36

       Well, uh, the collective brain argument suggests that, uh, you-... at a certain size, you'll begin farming off specialists. So because, uh, not ev- what you have, there's a store of knowledge in the society, and we can all be generalists and learn how to do all the different skills. But at some point, it makes, uh, efficiency sense for us to specialize in different skills.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel24:55

       Yep.

   20. JHJoseph Henrich24:56

       In order for that to be the case, though, we have to have social agreements of some sort-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel25:00

       Right.

   22. JHJoseph Henrich25:00

       ... that allow us to trade or exchange, things like that. So, but then once we're specializing, we don't necessarily need as large a brain and we, 'cause we distribute-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel25:08

       Mm-hmm.

   24. JHJoseph Henrich25:08

       ... the overall brain power amongst the society. So, it could be that we're becoming more of a superorganism.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel25:13

       Right.

   26. JHJoseph Henrich25:14

       Um, and you see the same thing in ants. When ants get specialized occupational castes, their individual brains shrink.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel25:20

       Interesting. What do you make of, I think David Reich's lab had a result a month or two ago where they showed that the selective pressure on, at least the European samples, which is the samples they studied, was that there's been selection for greater intelligence over the last 10,000 years. I don't know if you saw that or what you make of that.

   28. JHJoseph Henrich25:37

       Well, they didn't say anything about intelligence. They did use the polygenic score for education.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel25:42

       Yeah.

   30. JHJoseph Henrich25:42

       Um, yeah. So, but there was no-
4. 32:46 – 43:20

   Will AGI have superhuman cultural learning?

   1. JHJoseph Henrich32:46

      to.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel32:46

      Yeah. Speaking of Silicon Valley, let me ask you a little bit about AI. So, one of the reasons to suspect some incredibly sharp discontinuity from, um, you know, the world as it exists today to a world with AIs... and by AI I don't mean just like GPT-4, I mean like replacement at least for a f- you know, anything you can do on a computer screen, the AI can do. One of the reasons to expect this hard discontinuity is that they have potentially the step function increase in social learning and the ability to accumulate knowledge that maybe humans had, th- those are the magnitude of which maybe humans had when, between them and non-human primates. Um, and in particular, the fact that you can just like copy everything you know. Like, you don't have to, like, teach a young person, right? You can like... uh, because the, the constraints of biology mean you can't just replicate brains. Um, and also that you have much more efficient communication. You don't have to communicate through words. You can just like shoot your brain state across. Uh, the population size can grow arbitrarily large. Um, so to the extent that the collective brai- brain is the size of the population and how interconnected it is, do you just expect this, like, you know, we wouldn't even recognize the kind of world these AIs can make as a result of their cultural, um, skills?

   3. JHJoseph Henrich34:00

      Yeah. No, I mean, I, I definitely think it's pretty interesting, uh, and holds great potential for expanding the collective brain. Uh, I, I, there are n- little things in there which might make one worry. So if you study the history of innovation, you find out that, for example, serendipitous meetings are super important.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel34:16

      Yeah.

   5. JHJoseph Henrich34:17

      So there's a great paper on Silicon Valley showing that, uh, you know, companies will cross pa- uh, cross-reference each other's patents more likely when the people at those companies tend to frequent the same coffee shops-

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel34:29

      Yeah.

   7. JHJoseph Henrich34:29

      ... and they track people on their cell phones and stuff-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel34:30

      Yeah.

   9. JHJoseph Henrich34:30

      ... to figure this out. So serendipitous meetings are important, and improper copying. So, a huge number of innovations are mistakes-

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel34:37

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJoseph Henrich34:37

       ... where somebody copied incorrectly and then got something better.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel34:40

       Um, I read this interesting theory that maybe evolution designed, uh, transcription and translation to have more errors than it might not, it might, it could otherwise have, just so that, you know, you can have this like sparse reward when-

   13. JHJoseph Henrich34:53

       Yeah.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel34:53

       ... you're close to the right sequence.

   15. JHJoseph Henrich34:54

       Yeah, yeah. Uh, so I, I think that's a very interesting area of research and it makes good sense to me.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel35:00

       Yeah.

   17. JHJoseph Henrich35:00

       I'm not sure of the current state of the evidence, but there are... different parts of the genome are more or less susceptible to mutation-

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel35:05

       Right.

   19. JHJoseph Henrich35:05

       ... which is kind of interesting.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel35:07

       Yeah. So going back to AI, maybe then, uh, um, another way to phrase it is, look, you're talking about these serendipitous meetings where it can learn something another person knows. And the great advantage these AIs have is that they can sort of like meet with everybody at once, like, you know, future versions of AIs you could really imagine like holding the whole internet in context, right? So everything that maybe these human groups... I mean, we'll be the equivalent of, like, those people isolated in Tasmania, according to the AIs, right? 'Cause like they just like have everything in context. If you get a PH- you can get a PhD in every single field and you can amortize that across all your copies.

   21. JHJoseph Henrich35:38

       Right.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel35:39

       Yeah. So I mean, are, are you sort of like banking on, in the next 10 years, the, um, you know, you're, you're just gonna be living in the singularity or something because of your belief in the value of cultural knowledge?

   23. JHJoseph Henrich35:49

       Yeah. Although I'm not... I haven't totally seen... I, I see there's various potentials, and I'm particularly interested in using AIs to augment, uh, problem-solving in human groups. So you can imagine getting the humans together, 'cause the, the humans have the big advantage of having stuff they care about, right? They, they, there's stuff they want to invent. Uh, so I mean, the AI is still a tool at some point. So I'm interested in that and... but I'm interested in how these things, like, um, running out of training data is gonna be dealt with, um, the value of making mistakes and serendipity, if you get rid of all those things or how you're going to reintroduce them, those kinds of things.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel36:24

       Yeah. I mean, it's quite funny 'cause up until recently, people were saying the big mist- the big, um, issue with LLMs is that they hallucinate and make mistakes. (laughs)

   25. JHJoseph Henrich36:31

       (laughs)

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel36:32

       Um, uh, and at some level, hallucination is no different than creativity.

   27. JHJoseph Henrich36:35

       Well, may- maybe there's a way to harness that, right?

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel36:37

       Right.

   29. JHJoseph Henrich36:37

       But maybe we just didn't know how to harness it.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel36:38

       That's right. What, what do you make of the idea that you could have AI firms or AI c- uh, tribes, whatever the right way to think about it, is if like the effective population size-... that can communicate with each other is such an important contributor to how much progress a group and history was able to make. If you could just, like, literally run billions of AIs and they have this immediate ability to communicate with each other, and again, I'm not talking about current models, I'm talking about, like, future, like human equivalent, um, basically, I- I guess I'm just throwing out a bunch of different intuition bombs and I'm curious which one you find the most, um, most promising or most interesting.
5. 43:20 – 56:16

   Why Industrial Revolution happened in Europe

   1. JHJoseph Henrich43:20

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel43:20

      Interesting. Yeah, and then the reason I'm especially curious about this is because it informs the following question. Um, uh, h- if the industrial revolution didn't happen in Europe, but hap- it started somewhere else, how different would the world look like today? So obviously, you discussed the fact that breaking apart these kin ties was necessary for the industrial revolution. But to the extent that was necessary, whichever place had the industrial revolution first would have had that, right? But I mean, separate from the technologies or cultural practices which were necessary for the industrial revolution in the first place, still, how different would the world look? Um, like how much variation was possible given our level of technology?

   3. JHJoseph Henrich43:59

      Yeah. I- I have a lot of trouble trying to answer that because... So say, I mean, China or, uh, some place in the Middle East might have been the obvious alternative place for the industrial revolution to happen. But you- I feel like you have to give those places a lot of stuff that developed only in Europe. So for example, universities begin spreading-

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel44:19

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JHJoseph Henrich44:19

      ... uh, in the high Middle Ages. So you'd want them to have universities. You'd want them to have universal schooling, which began to spread and, and wasn't present, uh, i- these places prior to that. So that begins to spread in this, uh, well, 16th, 17th century. And so by the time you add all this stuff, it basically (laughs) starts to look a lot like Europe. Um, so...

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel44:38

      Interesting.

   7. JHJoseph Henrich44:39

      And these are all things that are global now, right? So the universal schooling that we find around the world today, you know, begins with the Protestant Reformation, you know, in Germany and then later England.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel44:48

      Right.

   9. JHJoseph Henrich44:48

      Um, universities models are the European university-

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel44:52

       Right.

   11. JHJoseph Henrich44:52

       ... and globalized.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel44:53

       I guess, uh, one obviously very salient example of variance, which might not have been replicated, but I'm curious if you think it might have been, is, um, it seems like the British Empire was, like, the first thing in history, first major institution which decided that, like, slavery is just morally wrong and we're gonna throw our weight around to-

   13. JHJoseph Henrich45:12

       Right.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel45:12

       ... eliminate it. And it seems like... I- I don't know if you think that sort of just naturally follows the development of social technologies, uh, that the industrial revolution would have brought about, but that seems super contingent. But I- I'm curious if you disagree.

   15. JHJoseph Henrich45:26

       Yeah. Well, so my story is that the, the rise of the industrial revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe's collective brain, and one of the things that it requires is trust in strangers and at least the beginnings of moral universalism.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel45:38

       Interesting.

   17. JHJoseph Henrich45:38

       And it's that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, "We've got to stop with the slave trade thing."

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel45:45

       Yeah.

   19. JHJoseph Henrich45:45

       Uh, and, you know, it's a moral decision that they made 'cause it's no longer consistent with the, the changing moral values over time.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel45:51

       Right. Okay, so we've been dancing around this, um, the thesis of your f- book following The Secret, which is we're the weirdest people in, in the world. And before we just sort of, like, really jump into it, maybe you can give me a summary of what the thesis there is.

   21. JHJoseph Henrich46:06

       Yeah. So the, uh, first observation is that there's a great deal of global psychological variation around the world. So European, American, Australian populations tend to be highly individualistic. They're inclined towards analytic thinking over holistic thinking. They have a lot of impersonal prosociality, so trust in strangers. They're against conformity, um, willingness to cooperate with strangers. So the question is, how can we explain the global variation i- in these features of psychology? And towards the end of the book, I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the, uh, industrial revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world. Um, and the, the story is, is that (clears throat) the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, where the Catholic Church, what becomes the Catholic Church, systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe-

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel46:57

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JHJoseph Henrich46:57

       ... leading to small, monogamous nuclear families. And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions. So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies 'cause people don't have their families to rely on. People begin moving around. There's occupational sorting into different occupations. You get urbanization is rising. Charter towns are on the rise. Universities pop up. New kinds of monasteries pop up. Uh, and then Europe begins to urbanize, and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual, contract law, and then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the industrial revolution.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel47:36

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JHJoseph Henrich47:36

       So that's the, that's the argument in a nutshell.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel47:38

       Uh, can you explain again what, what exactly the church did which led to the kin-based existing system breaking down?

   27. JHJoseph Henrich47:45

       Yeah. So the church, uh, outlaws polygyny and so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot and creating kind of a giant family through that. Uh, it outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth cousins at some point-

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel48:00

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JHJoseph Henrich48:00

       ... as well, and that included, uh, spiritual kin and other kinds of sort of, you know, non-genetic relatives as well as the cousins. Uh, it, it frees up inheritance. So it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal patrilineal inheritance. And a simple example here is in most societies, you get, you inherit access to land corporately, uh, so which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land, and it might be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father's brother. Uh, and so you can't sell it, you can't move it around, and you're also tied to it. It's where your ancestors are buried, and so there's this big importance of land. So the church allows people to give land to the church. The church becomes the largest landowner in Europe because you can do it by testament.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel48:42

       Mm-hmm.
6. 56:16 – 1:21:55

   Why China, Rome, India got left behind

   1. JHJoseph Henrich56:16

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel56:16

      And i- um, if you compare what's happening in Europe at this time to, uh, the rest of the world, so starting with China, um, (smacks lips) you know, in 1500, uh, the population of England, where a couple centuries later, the Industrial Revolution starts, is three million, and then in Ming Dynasty China, it's somewhere between 100 million to 160 million. And if we take your previous perspective of the size of the collective brain really matters a lot, the size of the collective brain in China just seems like so much bigger. So h- what is the best way to understand what went wrong here? Why weren't they able to use their...

   3. JHJoseph Henrich56:48

      Right. So when you're thinking about China, the first thing to remember is that for a lot of the history, we can actually see that size difference mattering a lot.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel56:55

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JHJoseph Henrich56:55

      So a lot of European invention, or a lot of stuff used in Europe is flowing in, gunpowder, paper, printing press, uh, stuff, um, is flowing into Europe. And so, okay, so then what happens after about 1000 CE? Well, the argument is that the destruction of the kinship group opens the floodgates to people moving around. So a recent analysis that we've done is after a bishopric arrives at a 1.5 by 1.5 grid cell in Europe, uh, people begin flowing in and out of that grid cell more. And what we do to calculate that is we have a big database of a few million famous people.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel57:29

      Mm.

   7. JHJoseph Henrich57:29

      And we have birth and death locations. So we find out that the Church arrives and suddenly people are free to move around.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel57:34

      Mm.

   9. JHJoseph Henrich57:34

      So you have a flow of individuals around and you have rising urbanization. So Europe passes China around 1200 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.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel58:13

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JHJoseph Henrich58:13

       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-

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel58:23

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JHJoseph Henrich58:23

       ... things like that. So it, it, it, it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness of the collective brain and the amount of cognitive diversity.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel58:29

       Mm. What do we know about India during this period? Because from what I've read, it's sort of a histor- from a sort of, um, perspective of like how much written history we have, it's kind of a black box, but we know that there was trade between India and other parts of the world, and we know it had a big population. Do we know why India before the Mughal period or before the British period wasn't, uh... Yeah, wh- wh- what was the effect of like not having maybe a, um, Abrahamic gods or w- with the kind of other cultural practices India had?

   15. JHJoseph Henrich59:00

       Yeah, I mean, definitely not an expert on this one, but I mean, fr- some of David Reich's evidence suggests that the caste system is quite old.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel59:07

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JHJoseph Henrich59:07

       'Cause you can actually see it in the genetic system. Uh, and the caste system is not good for innovation 'cause you can't, you know, if you happen to be good at another skill, but your caste doesn't do that skill, you can't switch over.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel59:18

       Yeah.

   19. JHJoseph Henrich59:19

       Um, so it, it's gonna prevent the sort of availabil- using the genetic diversity. Um, complex families, intensive kinship, there's reason to think that those things-

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel59:28

       Right.

   21. JHJoseph Henrich59:28

       ... were all important. Uh, yeah, so patchwork of polities.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel59:30

       Yeah.

   23. JHJoseph Henrich59:31

       But there was lots of interesting, uh, 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.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel59:43

       Right.

   25. JHJoseph Henrich59:44

       Zero is probably developed... I mean, In- Indians were huge with numbers. It's kind of interesting.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel59:48

       Yeah.

   27. JHJoseph Henrich59:48

       Perhaps related to the religion.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel59:50

       Uh, not that this would be a justification for the caste system, but is there any, uh, is there any way in which the specialization it en- engendered would be good from the perspective of this, uh, collective brain perspective?

   29. JHJoseph Henrich1:00:02

       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 the, in Oceania there were different clans. In each clan there'd be like a canoe-building clan-

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel1:00:19

       Mm-hmm.

Episode duration: 1:53:51