Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

Joseph Henrich 0:00 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:22 In a world where the Roman Empire never existed, do you still have this collective brain in Europe emerge?

Joseph Henrich 0:27 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:46 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?

Joseph Henrich 2:04 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:23 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 2:23 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 2:46 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 2:47 ... 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 3:07 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 3:07 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 3:58 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-

Joseph Henrich 4:08 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:09 ... is, um... I, I guess it kind of makes sense with like no domesticated animals, but again, it's like such a...

Joseph Henrich 4:14 Right, although the New World, everybody has dogs, and you can pull carts with dogs.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:18 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 4:19 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:23 Yeah, so what's your actually, what's your explanation for why there's no (laughs) wheels in the New World?

Joseph Henrich 4:26 Uh, so Mice well... So there were wheels on Mayan carts or May- Mayan toys.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:30 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 4:31 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:39 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 4:40 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 4:50 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 4:50 ... which allows ideas and people to more easily flow. And there's a belt, which the historian Ann Morris calls the Lucky Latitudes-

Dwarkesh Patel 4:57 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 4:57 ... which runs from basically southern China all the way through to the Mediterranean, and ideas are just flowing back and forth there.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:03 Hmm, interesting.

Joseph Henrich 5:04 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:13 Mm-hmm. And what's the explanation for why the collective brain leads to state capacity, or is it the other way around?

Joseph Henrich 5:20 Well, you can think of institutions that eventually lead to state capacity as just part of the innovative process of the collective brain.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:26 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 5:26 So if you have more groups experimenting with more different ways of governing, uh, groups of people, gradually, you get the accumulation of the pieces that you can put together into different kinds of states.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:35 Got it. Okay, so going back to what happened 70,000 years ago, is the basic answer like, it could be something like bows, but we don't know exactly what it was, or is it-

Joseph Henrich 5:43 Yeah, we definitely don't know exactly what it was.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:44 Okay.

Joseph Henrich 5:44 So we know that this population expanded, and there does seem to be some tool indications to suggest-

Dwarkesh Patel 5:50 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 5:50 ... uh, more complex technology. Um, probably, the technology usually goes along with social organization.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:56 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 5:57 So for example, if you look at Australia, which is a continent of hunter-gatherers, the gr- there's an expansion about 6,000 years ago out of northern Australia, which eventually takes up seven-eighths of the continent, and they had a new social organization, including rules about who you marry.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:10 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 6:10 They had linguistic exogamy, um, and, uh...... things that, ret- rituals that interconnected populations. So rather than having local rituals and local myths, many communities would get together periodically to initiate the young men, and this would help bond that whole group. There'd be an exchange of technology, uh, and teaching that goes on at these ... M- they'd spent a few months in the same place, so-

Dwarkesh Patel 6:31 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 6:31 ... there was a lot of time for transmission.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:33 And then in terms of mechanism, so, uh, if it's the case that you have these sort of, uh, convalescing waves of expansion and, um, uh, David Reich's labs evidence suggests that this e- expansion was quite violent, uh, based on, you know, whe- whether the genes are passed down through the maternal line or the paternal line. When you think about the mechanism in which technologies develop or these social institutions develop, how much of it is like, look, there's all these different groups that are trying different things and one of them maybe figures something out and then they just kind of explode? And how much of it is that within each group, they are experiencing sort of accumulations of, um, uh, learning over time and, uh, it's not necessarily a selective process, it's more a sort of a cumulative process?

Joseph Henrich 7:18 Well, eventually, the groups have to meet and they're gonna compete over territories.

Dwarkesh Patel 7:22 Right.

Joseph Henrich 7:22 And this c- uh, a bunch of different things can occur. So w- uh, groups can copy each other. So we know that from the ethnographic record-

Dwarkesh Patel 7:29 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 7:29 ... and historical cases, sometimes a group will say, "Oh, those guys have really good, uh, technology tools. Maybe they'll get some migrants," or something like that, and then they can adopt the practices. Uh, so that definitely happens. But there's also plenty of evidence of, uh, violent conflict. And, uh, the r- the Reich labs evidence and lots of other ancient DNA suggests that there are these dead-end genetic line- lineages.

Dwarkesh Patel 7:50 Right.

Joseph Henrich 7:50 So, I mean, the Neanderthals are a dead end in a sense, although we interbred with them, so they're in us in some sense.

Dwarkesh Patel 7:56 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 7:57 Uh, but, but they don't have their own pure lineage or anything-

Dwarkesh Patel 7:59 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 8:00 ... like that.

Dwarkesh Patel 8:00 And if you had to guess, so, um, whenever this big wave happens, is it more of a sort of concrete technology or is it more of a ... Like, I mean, especially if you consider the range of expansion that can often happen, right? It's like literally that same group goes from Siberia to, uh, England. Uh, maybe it's like, it's, uh, hard to imagine it's like a single technology lets you explore this wide range. But it's also, like, the idea that, like, some cultural artifact is enough that, like, it gets transmitted, transmitted over tens of thousands of years and that's what gives you the edge.

Joseph Henrich 8:29 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 8:29 I'm curious how you think about, like, wh- what could possibly be this, like, driving engine?

Joseph Henrich 8:33 The way I describe it in The Secret is that it's a package of things. So another good example would be, uh, the Inuit expansion out of the north slope of Alaska.

Dwarkesh Patel 8:41 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 8:41 And they expand all the way across the Arctic and eventually get to Greenland. And they have a whole package of social practices, which helps keep them interconnected, and then they have bows and arrows, which the group there are exterminating as they go along-

Dwarkesh Patel 8:51 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 8:52 ... uh, the Dorset doesn't have. They have dogs and sleds. They have, along the coast, they have boats, so they're doing whaling. So there's a whole package that puts together that allows them to out-compete and eventually exterminate the Dorset.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:04 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 9:04 And one of the things that happens, though, is the Dorset probably had better technology, but they expanded, they spread out, their languages diversified, they lost contact and they began losing technology.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:14 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 9:14 So you wanna see this as a dynamic pulse. There were probably expansions and then collapses, another expansion, another collapse, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 9:21 Oh, interesting.

Joseph Henrich 9:21 It's not one giant long march to victory.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:24 And then this process, which I, uh, has happened many times where the, you know, the population gets cut off or something, um, is that ... Wh- when you say it's a sort of cycle, is there some reason why the y- over time that knowledge gets fragmented and breaks apart and populations disperse, or is it-

Joseph Henrich 9:44 Yeah. I think there's a cultural evolutionary dynamic that's part of this, 'cause, uh, languages will naturally diversify.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:49 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 9:50 And then as that diversify, there's less contact. People sometimes get inclined to marry endogamously, and especially if there's enough-

Dwarkesh Patel 9:56 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 9:56 ... people around locally, why go all the way over there? Uh, and those people are getting more culturally different, so they're seeming a little bit like-

Dwarkesh Patel 10:03 Interesting.

Joseph Henrich 10:03 ... outsiders and then, yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:04 Interesting. Okay.

Joseph Henrich 10:05 So the tough part that humans have always had is to stay unified, because of the natural effect of geography and learning locally is gonna tend to fragment us.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:13 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?

Joseph Henrich 10:31 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:46 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 10:46 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 12:04 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 12:04 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 13:03 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 13:03 ... so as to make us, yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:04 And how big were these groups?

Joseph Henrich 13:06 Well, I mean, nobody's really sure, but maybe a few hundred individuals.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:10 Okay. And before the Agricultural Revolution, was there still this transmission of information across different groups?

Joseph Henrich 13:20 Yeah. So, uh, I mean, lots of different evidence suggests that groups were, were moving, uh, trade goods.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:26 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 13:26 So well back into the Paleolithic, we see trade. Uh, often we see some genetic transmission. Um, I mean-

Dwarkesh Patel 13:33 Right, uh, the expansions and so forth.

Joseph Henrich 13:35 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:49 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)

Joseph Henrich 14:35 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 14:41 Hm.

Joseph Henrich 14:41 ... 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 15:21 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 15:21 ... and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it.

Dwarkesh Patel 15:25 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 15:25 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 15:46 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-

Joseph Henrich 16:23 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:23 ... 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?

Joseph Henrich 16:40 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:41 Or this, like, group, like, takes over the, uh, the area because they've-

Joseph Henrich 16:45 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:58 Hm.

Joseph Henrich 16:58 Uh, people carry high pathogen loads. If you can knock that pathogen load down, we know from modern research, if, you know, you wanna make people healthier-

Dwarkesh Patel 17:05 Hm.

Joseph Henrich 17:05 ... and even smarter, right? IQ goes up if you knock the pathogen load down.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:08 Got it. So, um, th- this process of cultural accumulation you're talking about, uh, you think it, like, is not strong enough to pick up, uh, minor increases in fitness and, like, it, it actually has to be, like a, quite a significant thing for it to like ...

Joseph Henrich 17:25 It's, I think it, uh, it's, it operates a lot like natural selection-

Dwarkesh Patel 17:28 Right.

Joseph Henrich 17:28 ... in the sense that natural selection will pick up tiny things if you give it long enough.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:31 Right.

Joseph Henrich 17:32 Um, so cultural evolution will do the same thing if you give it long enough. 'Cause you know, just small differences in who you're paying attention to will affect things, but it might take 1,000 years as opposed to decades, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 17:42 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 17:42 But we know culture can spread adaptive traits super quickly if it's a really big effect.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:46 Yeah. So this, um, the situation in which our ancestors found themselves, in some ways it's sort of like epistemic hell in the sense of like you don't know why certain things are working, but you do know that if you break with tradition, you might just kill, doom yourself and your family. Um, and that maybe as, as you discuss, like ...... causes these, like, religious beliefs and taboos and mystical understandings of the worlds to rise, where you just, like, think, like, "Look, you're gonna burn in hell if you don't do this 10-step process (laughs) for refining your beans," or something. Like, in some sense, this, like, requires you to abdicate reason 'cause you have to just be like, "I don't understand this. Um, this is the, this is th- the way that it's been done, so we're gonna do it."

Joseph Henrich 18:22 Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:22 Um, basically, how much of reason do you necessarily have to abdicate to survive in the ancestral environment?

Joseph Henrich 18:27 I mean, one of the ways we research this is by going out to societies that make bows and arrows or in, have food taboos that protect them from dangerous marine toxins and ask them questions about why they do it-

Dwarkesh Patel 18:36 Ah.

Joseph Henrich 18:37 ... and see if they under, and they don't understand the underlying causal stuff.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:39 Right. But then, why do they say they do it?

Joseph Henrich 18:41 Well, because that, for w- a typical answer is that's, uh, "It's our custom."

Dwarkesh Patel 18:44 Hm.

Joseph Henrich 18:45 Um, yeah. Or it's for, you know, important t- to people around here to do it this way, so we do it this way. So, eh, just Hadza bows, for example, you know, uh, I didn't do this resear- Jac- Jacob Harris and, um, Kim Hill and Rob Boyd did it. But they asked Hadza about their bows and about how they work and what the mechanics are, so they understood some stuff. So you use the bow, and you get some mechanical understanding. But if you ask them, you know, "What if you used a different wood, uh, different materials..." And they had never tried anything else but what they learned to, how to make this bow. So they didn't un, you know, they, they couldn't speak to a lot of that stuff.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:15 Ah.

Joseph Henrich 19:15 And the things about the compression of the wood is very important. Didn't understand that.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:19 (laughs) Okay, so th- that's quite interesting, right? Because you would think that you have to transmit cultural knowledge over time, but you also need to experiment in order to innovate. But it sounds like because of the belief in these customs, you would be less inclined to innovate.

Joseph Henrich 19:34 Right. And the thing is, once something gets good, innov- eh, doing s- doing it differently almost always makes it worse.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:39 Right.

Joseph Henrich 19:40 So, a- and then, there's also, some things are just different because people do it randomly different, like they make a mistake, so I think people often underestimate the power of error-

Dwarkesh Patel 19:49 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 19:49 ... uh, in generating novelty.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:50 One question I have is why this process of cultural learning? So, you know, humans have extended childhoods, presumably as a re, uh, to give us more time to accumulate culture, and then relive after menopause, presumably because older people, our grandparents can teach us about the situation we find ourself in. Um, and it, like, 18 years is such a long time, and when I think back to, like, m-, I mean, obviously I didn't grow up in the ancestral environment, (laughs) but when I think back to, like, what I was doing as a teenager, like, I don't think I was, like, learning that much. I was just, like, less productive for no sort of, like, obvious biological reason. And I guess I don't intuitively understand why this process of cultural learning is, uh, takes decades, and w- w- yeah, why it can't happen more rapidly.

Joseph Henrich 20:33 Um, well, you probably, as a adolescent, were in, in school, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 20:35 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 20:36 So you were probably accumulating some stuff in school maybe.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:39 Yeah (laughs) .

Joseph Henrich 20:39 Um, and here's an interesting fact about, uh, hunters. So, l- anthropologists have studied hunters, hunter-gatherer societies in different places, and the physical peak that at least males have is in their early 20s, right? That's when they run the fastest. They're the, they got the best eyesight. But the best hunters in the community are, uh, 36 to 40.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:57 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 20:57 Right? They're not as fast as those guys, but they just know, they know the track, they know the animals, you know, they know exactly what to do in these difference... And then hunting skill begins to decline because basically the physicality of things b- begins to catch up, uh, and so there's this kind of cycle. And at 18, um, young hunters aren't even producing enough food to feed themselves.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:17 Hm.

Joseph Henrich 21:17 So it's not until they get into their 20s that are, they're actually in surplus and bringing food home for everybody else.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:22 Huh.

Joseph Henrich 21:22 So there's just... And you'd need to know, um, hundreds, at least, animals. You need to know animal behavior. You gotta be able to spot tracks and spore, and there's just a l- we're just very knowledge-dependent in terms of our hunting and gathering.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:33 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:34 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?

Joseph Henrich 21:53 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 22:05 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 22:06 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 22:15 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 22:15 ... 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 22:22 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 22:22 ... that do the work. So we've externalized detoxification and a lot of digestion actually.

Dwarkesh Patel 22:27 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.

Joseph Henrich 23:27 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 23:39 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 23:39 So if the environment is changing slowly, then you should put it all in the genes.

Dwarkesh Patel 23:43 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 23:44 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 23:49 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 23:49 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 24:34 Yeah. Why has brain size been declining?

Joseph Henrich 24:36 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 24:55 Yep.

Joseph Henrich 24:56 In order for that to be the case, though, we have to have social agreements of some sort-

Dwarkesh Patel 25:00 Right.

Joseph Henrich 25:00 ... 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 25:08 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 25:08 ... the overall brain power amongst the society. So, it could be that we're becoming more of a superorganism.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:13 Right.

Joseph Henrich 25:14 Um, and you see the same thing in ants. When ants get specialized occupational castes, their individual brains shrink.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:20 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.

Joseph Henrich 25:37 Well, they didn't say anything about intelligence. They did use the polygenic score for education.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:42 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 25:42 Um, yeah. So, but there was no-

Dwarkesh Patel 25:43 Which is correlated, right?

Joseph Henrich 25:44 ... education 8,000 years ago. Yeah, it's correlated.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:45 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 25:46 Um, but then the question is, is we don't know what goes into that, right? Is that actually computational software? Or, I mean, people do well in school because they stick to it and they can sit in the same place for long periods of time.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:56 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 25:57 Um, so...

Dwarkesh Patel 25:58 I guess, well, it would be interesting for them to sort of deduct the docility polygenic score from (laughs) the education, 'cause we don't have a polygenic score for intelligence yet, right? So, which is why you need this proxy.

Joseph Henrich 26:08 Well, there is, there are IQs. So, uh, there are polygenic scores for IQ. I think they actually did that one as well. Like you said, it's, it's correlated with education. Uh, and yeah, that, but that doesn't have anything t- that, the things that go into giving you an IQ, I mean, the correlation between brain size and IQ is only about, well, across populations, it's 0.24, um, so it's n- not very big.

Dwarkesh Patel 26:32 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 26:32 So, the other thing is, I mean, uh, IQ is massively misunderstood. So the way to think about IQ, which has been going up over the n- over the 20th century, uh, by quite a bit. So if you rescale modern scores to 1900-

Dwarkesh Patel 26:46 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 26:46 ... it's about 70. It's called the Flynn effect. Uh, I think that those are cognitive abilities for navigating the institutional world that we've constructed.

Dwarkesh Patel 26:53 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 26:53 And a huge mistake would be to assume that those are the right cognitive abilities for the next century. Uh, so it'll be a different constellation.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:00 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 27:01 If you study, we study herders and cognitive abilities of herders in northern Namibia. And if you're in northern Namibia, you gotta be able to move through the landscape. So being able to just pick a direction and know where you're going and not get lost is super important.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:13 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 27:13 Um, so different suites of cognitive abilities are favored in different environments. This idea that there's this generalized thing applicable across all human environments just doesn't, I mean, uh, education massively increases your IQ, right? If you're uneducated, you have a totally different IQ.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:28 And then is the way in which your, um, horsepower is directed, is that a thing that you think is basically set by the time you're an adult? Or, like, if somebody's 30 now and the AI thing is gonna happen n- next and they have to, like, totally reorient away from knowledge work, is that a thing?

Joseph Henrich 27:44 Well, so I think it's a r- it's a continuous scale. So if you look at human brains, they're developing and continuing to add-

Dwarkesh Patel 27:50 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 27:50 ... new connections and stuff at least into the mid 20s.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:53 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 27:53 Now, there could be even more plasticity after that. Unlike chimps, we're still not totally myelinized for, for, for our-

Dwarkesh Patel 27:59 Right.

Joseph Henrich 27:59 ... whole lives. Uh, so there's definitely room. It's just there's less room.

Dwarkesh Patel 28:02 Yeah. A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what's possible. Through Scale's Data Foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. Scale's research team, SAIL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, Scale published Humanity's Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems' expert-level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you're an AI researcher or engineer and you wanna learn more about how Scale's Data Foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com/dwarkesh. The kind of social learning for which our learning biases are fit, right, like where you pay attention to, to elders because they survived somehow and they've accumulated the knowledge from past generations, how much do you think that actually, uh, basically applies to the way in which the modern knowledge work economy accumulates knowledge? Um, and how much do you think is just an artifact of the kind of environment our ancestors found themselves in?

Joseph Henrich 29:36 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 29:36 Right now, we're in Silicon Valley, um, or in San Francisco, and it's very common here for a 20-something to make a new product or service which, um, without that much, they don't have that much context of how the world works, but they can, like, make big, big innovations and big changes. Um, but at the same time, people, eh, on average maybe are more productive in their 40s and 50s in terms of wages or something. So, yeah, basically, like, this sort of, like, social learning you're describing, how much does it actually describe the world as it exists today?

Joseph Henrich 30:03 Yeah. And so, uh, super important, so we'll take the patent database, and if your, uh, same-sex parent, has to be same sex, patents in a particular domain, you're nine times more likely to patent in that same domain.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:15 How do you d- just separate the genetic versus cultural effect there?

Joseph Henrich 30:18 Um, well, so these are very fine, uh, domains. So we're talking about, like, um, natural adhesives versus synthetic adhesives.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:27 (laughs)

Joseph Henrich 30:27 So unless you think there's genes for that. Um, and same thing with transistors and electronics. So very fine domains. And if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're much more likely to patent in general, but you're probably gonna patent in computers.... but if you grow up in Boston, it's gonna be biotech. Uh, so having a father or a mother who did biotech and then growing up in Boston, you know, that's, you know, it's an increasing, you're even more likely in biotech. And this is true even if you move to New York. So, if you look at people in New York who are from Silicon Valley and from Boston, the Bostonians are more likely to take, to patent in biotech, and the Silicon Valley kids are more likely to patent in computing.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:03 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 31:04 So, all the same rules apply.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:05 Well, I'm not sure because, um, maybe the... yeah. M- uh, so maybe the, like, the location, you, like, learn a lot from, uh, the environment. But the fact that it's just kids, and so, you know, if you think these old rules of cult- cultural accumulation and collective brains apply, you would think, like, "Ah, you're 50 by the time you're writing your first useful line of Python code or something." When in fact it's, like, often a big, a lot of these big innovations come from people who are much, much younger, before they should have accumulated much of the kno- know-how that this theory implies. Doesn't that-

Joseph Henrich 31:33 Well, I guess I was thinking, uh, so the model here is what to, what to focus your efforts on. So it's that, it's the throwing model.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:40 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 31:40 So, uh, if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you focus your efforts on learning how to, uh, code or whatever.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:46 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 31:46 And so that means that's where you're likely to make the, the innovation.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:49 Right. But in terms of, um, um, you know, when there's, like, 2% growth a year and a lot of the technologies that are dominant in the economy today, or a lot of the industries didn't even exist many generations ago, um, basically does that suggest this model of like... or should we just like mistrust our instincts of who to give prestige to and what kinds of people we want to pay attention to-

Joseph Henrich 32:10 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 32:11 ... um, whether it's professors or elders or whatever?

Joseph Henrich 32:14 Yeah. So that, yes, that's definitely something I've thought about and I wrote about in Secret, which is that in, as the rate of cultural change gets faster, and we sort of talked about this with environmental change, um, the value of older and older members of the previous generation declines because the world that they grew up in and that they honed their skills to is quite different from the current world. So you would expect the degree to which, I mean, optimally, you would look less far back or you would look to relatively younger individuals to get your inspiration from 'cause the world they adapted to is closer to the world you're gonna need to adapt

Joseph Henrich 32:46 to.

Dwarkesh Patel 32:46 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?

Joseph Henrich 34:00 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:16 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 34:17 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 34:29 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 34:29 ... and they track people on their cell phones and stuff-

Dwarkesh Patel 34:30 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 34:30 ... to figure this out. So serendipitous meetings are important, and improper copying. So, a huge number of innovations are mistakes-

Dwarkesh Patel 34:37 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 34:37 ... where somebody copied incorrectly and then got something better.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:40 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-

Joseph Henrich 34:53 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:53 ... you're close to the right sequence.

Joseph Henrich 34:54 Yeah, yeah. Uh, so I, I think that's a very interesting area of research and it makes good sense to me.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:00 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 35:00 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 35:05 Right.

Joseph Henrich 35:05 ... which is kind of interesting.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:07 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.

Joseph Henrich 35:38 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:39 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?

Joseph Henrich 35:49 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:24 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)

Joseph Henrich 36:31 (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 36:32 Um, uh, and at some level, hallucination is no different than creativity.

Joseph Henrich 36:35 Well, may- maybe there's a way to harness that, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 36:37 Right.

Joseph Henrich 36:37 But maybe we just didn't know how to harness it.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:38 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.

Joseph Henrich 37:14 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:14 Or did you just find all of them-

Joseph Henrich 37:15 Well-

Dwarkesh Patel 37:16 ... not as convincing?

Joseph Henrich 37:17 Yeah. No. I- I don't have strong opinions about any of this, but, uh, I do think that one thing that in order to make all that work is, you know, humans are constantly getting hit with shocks, right? So there's, uh, economic shocks, there's weather shocks, um, there's f- eh- conflict with other groups, there's pandemics, and the shocks have big effects on how things go. They inject new information into the system.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:37 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 37:38 So I'd worry about a system that is too homogeneous and doesn't have enough n- noise adding shocks and-

Dwarkesh Patel 37:43 Right.

Joseph Henrich 37:43 ... new challenges and things like that.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:45 Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 37:45 One of the things missing from our, our conversation is the, kind of, creativity that cultural evolution has figured out.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:50 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 37:51 So to give you an example, um, at some point in human ev- in human history, religions invented big, powerful, moralizing gods, and this may have increased the people's ability to cooperate.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:02 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 38:02 So the kind of... Forget about the technological elements. Some of the most important features of, of innovation over human history have been institutional, uh-

Dwarkesh Patel 38:10 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 38:10 ... and things that get people to cooperate. So in my work, I argue that one branch of Christianity resulted in the, in the, um, transformation of the families in European societies into small monogamous nuclear socie- uh, families. I'm not sure an AI would have thought of that. Cultural evolution thought of it, uh, because of its, because of how it affected, um, how the societies operated, so it sorted this out over historical time.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:34 Yeah. Uh, can I play with that idea?

Joseph Henrich 38:35 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:36 'Cause that's quite interesting. So again, I think this might even reinforce the, um, the advantages of AIs in this sense. So, you know, to the extent that this sort of random fluke by the, um, by the church led to this, you know, um, modernity and the great divergence or whatever, and it was a result of like there's a bunch of variation and then you can select over some group that's doing the right thing.

Joseph Henrich 39:00 Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel 39:00 Um, the advantage you have with AIs is that you can just w- uh, you can have much more high fidelity replication of culture and much more sort of like, you can explore a wider range of potential cultures. Sorry, and it, it sounds really vague when you talk about AIs in this way. So what do I mean? Um, like, one problem companies have today is that suppose a company's working really well. Um, maybe it's like early Apple or early Tesla or SpaceX or something, and suppose it has to do with the culture or the people, something, it's not clear how you replicate that culture not only across different institutions, right? It's, like, not clear if I'm, like, running a company and that is... I don't know how to copy SpaceX. Um, you can't even co- uh, not only can you not replicate it across institutions, you can't even replicate it across time. So over time, many institutions tend to decay. Uh, their culture fades as people leave or die or something. And then imagine if all of SpaceX, at least maybe at the time you thought it was, like, the most effective, are just like AIs where you know every single byte and when you, you can make a copy of it 1,000 times and you can put it against every single hardware problem we have in the world, um, and then you can... if you think there's another team that might have some different culture which is, like, better, you can do the same thing with them. And culture here includes not only how they think about their work, but also even, like, how does the board make decisions, right? Do they do this, like, Monte Carlo tree simulation? Do they, um, uh... E- e- there's so many different v- vari- um, things you could do here. So because of the wider range of possibilities you can explore and the fact that you can have higher fidelity transmission of cultural information, maybe the ability to do this random evolution also increases.

Joseph Henrich 40:42 Mm.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:42 But I'm curious to get your take on that.

Joseph Henrich 40:43 Yeah. I mean, as a kind of broad, uh, sketch, I think that is pretty interesting. I mean, the, in the case of... I worry about too high a fidelity replication just 'cause it's important to take, like, the details of historical context and time into account. So that same thing, if you fix it, it might not really work a decade later when everything-

Dwarkesh Patel 41:02 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 41:02 ... else around it has changed, right? So it's kind of a moving target. Um, but you could fix that just by having lots of different variants that are different versions-

Dwarkesh Patel 41:09 Right. Exactly.

Joseph Henrich 41:11 ... of that.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:11 Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 41:11 So yeah, that'd be cool.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:12 Sorry. That, that gives us a good opportunity to go into WEIRD, but before we get there, uh, one more question about, um, uh, before the agricultural revolution. You know, obviously many d- groups around the world were different, um, and many of the- d- those differences were probably inspired by the fact that they were living in different environments or they needed to come up with different technologies and adaptations to survive best there. How much, uh, just random differences, uh, that had nothing to do with their environment do you expect to, uh, there to have been, um, you know, in terms of... I don't even know what the right category would be like, but in the modern world, you might imagine something like does a society have slavery or not?

Joseph Henrich 41:48 Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:48 And maybe pre-modern societies all had slavery, so that's not the ver- right way to think about variation, but that kind of like, um...

Joseph Henrich 41:54 Yep. So I think there's lots of, uh, reason to think there was lots of variation, and one of the ways that researchers study this is they c- they look at ecological variables and they compare it to phylogenetic variables, and here they mean cultural phylogeny.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:06 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 42:07 So if your ancestral populations had, uh, matr- matrilineal, matrilocal social organization, how likely are you to have it controlling for ecology? And it turns out both of these things matter. People adapt to their ecology, but you can still see the signal of past society, so some degree of fidelity of transmission of social institutions, how we make our baskets, those kinds of things. There's lots of examples in the modern world, and we see this all over the place. So, um, if you look at, uh, gender inequality in the modern world, you find that a history of the plow leads to greater gender inequality. So males had a particular advantage in using the plow because it requires upper body strength. This meant males became the dominant force in economic production at the household level, and that even today in populations where nobody, most people aren't farmers, uh, this persists. So this is cultural persistence that has to do with whether you had the plow. So this is work done by Alberto-

Dwarkesh Patel 43:01 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 43:01 ... Alesina and Nathan Nunn. Um, a former post-doc of mine now at the Harvard Business School, Anca Becker, has done a similar thing with pastoralism.So if your ancestors were pastoralists, you tend... And pastoralists for various reasons have quite strong gender norms that persists into the, to the modern world and still shapes, for example, female entrepreneurship.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:20 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?

Joseph Henrich 43:59 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 44:19 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 44:19 ... 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...

Dwarkesh Patel 44:38 Interesting.

Joseph Henrich 44:39 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:48 Right.

Joseph Henrich 44:48 Um, universities models are the European university-

Dwarkesh Patel 44:52 Right.

Joseph Henrich 44:52 ... and globalized.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:53 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-

Joseph Henrich 45:12 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:12 ... 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.

Joseph Henrich 45:26 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:38 Interesting.

Joseph Henrich 45:38 And it's that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, "We've got to stop with the slave trade thing."

Dwarkesh Patel 45:45 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 45:45 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:51 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.

Joseph Henrich 46:06 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 46:57 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 46:57 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:36 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 47:36 So that's the, that's the argument in a nutshell.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:38 Uh, can you explain again what, what exactly the church did which led to the kin-based existing system breaking down?

Joseph Henrich 47:45 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 48:00 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 48:00 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 48:42 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 48:42 Um, so those are just some of the examples th- of the ways it transforms the family structure, and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families, which are basically unheard of around the world, at least if you look at the anthropological record. And you can really see this when you can compare. Individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families. In China, when you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village-

Dwarkesh Patel 49:05 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 49:05 ... and people flow back and forth and you get these, um, little enclaves of different clans and stuff in the cities and the connections. And this is really important 'cause your, your ancestors and there's rituals that have to be done back in the home community. But Tr- Christianity does away with all those ancestor rituals.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:21 Okay, great. Let's jump into it by starting before the m- much before even the church. I wonder how much of the v- uh, how much of the things that, let's say, ma- make Europe weird existed even in antiquity. If you read, um...... about, like, how Roman society worked or how these Greek polities worked. Um, already you have, like, a lo- emphasis on nuclear families. You have these sort of like universal norms around, "Hey, we believe in republicanism or we believe in democracy." And, uh, we c- like, the sort of like, the structure of the system matters more necessarily than, um... I guess at least before the empire, right? Uh, um, so yeah. W- was Europe already weird before the, the things this church did?

Joseph Henrich 50:05 Well, there were certainly some interesting things going on in Greece and Rome, but I don't think there's good evidence that the, you had the kinds of monogamous nuclear families that you would find later. I mean, even European law is built around, uh, patrilineage. So if your father's still alive, you are not a full citizen. You are under, you're in the, the pater house.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:23 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 50:23 So these, they had these large families. Um, definitely intensive kinship for sure. Patrilineal, patrilocal. Um, women, of course, don't have any rights. Uh, and, you know, republicanism, but the formation of Rome is built around a series of, uh, elite families. So it's a clan operation. And they call it republican because the clans all have some say in what's going on. So people sometimes see representative government where it's not really individuals being represented, but families. And so this fools a lot of people into thinking there was a lot more, uh, individualistic voting and things like that, where there's actually no voting. Um, but yeah, so, um... And so in, in Greece, uh, in Athens, Athens is unique because it does a bunch of things, the, in the laws of Solon that break down the intensive kinship. So for example, in Greece you get this, you get monogamy for-

Dwarkesh Patel 51:14 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 51:14 ... for the first time, and Athens is considered unusual. So, uh, males can only marry one Athenian woman, which has potentially positive effects among the competition among Athenian men, but they can have as many slave concubines as they want.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:28 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 51:28 So when Christianity spreads, it ends the whole slave concubine thing, which was also common in Rome. And that's another effect on this whole thing.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:35 I guess the extent to which these practices were already formed hundreds or thousands of years before the church's intervention, maybe this suggests that Europe was already on this trajectory and the church didn't necessarily move the needle that much. Or what do you make of that thesis?

Joseph Henrich 51:51 Well, uh, we know that the... I mean, in the book I talk about data where we can look at m- contemporary kinship practices, uh, and we can look at the number of centuries that that part of Europe was under the church-

Dwarkesh Patel 52:03 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 52:03 ... based on the diffu- so we have a database of the diffusion of bishoprics, and there's a clear connection between the intensive kinship practices and the number of years under the church.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:11 Mm. And then if you, if you think about, like, what the church basically did, I, I think your work is often used to justify Ches- the, this idea of Chesterton's Fence, where if you don't necessarily understand a cultural practice, um, you should keep it around because, uh... I mean, the, the stuff we were talking about, The Secret, where, like, you don't understand why the 10 steps lead to-

Joseph Henrich 52:28 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:28 ... the bean being edible, but, um, uh, uh, but, you know, you should trust the sort of wisdom of the ages. Um, if you think about what the church did here, right? Like, uh, isn't this sort of like a, not, not necessarily a justification, but at least an example of just, like, breaking down Chesterton's Fence? The church doesn't really understand why these kin-based networks that have existed-

Joseph Henrich 52:49 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:50 ... for thousands of years might have utility. It still just gets rid of all of them, and that results in this lottery ticket that leads to The Great Divergence. So m- is there evidence for anti-Chesterton's Fence from th- uh, the weirdist people?

Joseph Henrich 53:02 Uh, sure. Sure. So I mean, that, all th- the, what you're talking about is just the idea that culture has imbued institutions and various practices with a logic that we might not understand.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:11 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 53:11 So it's not calling for never changing the institutions. It's saying make sure you figure out the logic and the costs and benefits.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:17 Right.

Joseph Henrich 53:17 So I've been, uh... I was an expert witness in, um, in Canada for the, the, uh, the attorney general of British Columbia asked the, the Supreme Court of British Columbia whether the, the statutes against polygyny were legal.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:31 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 53:31 And so my job was just to inform the court that polygyny has this unfortunate effect of the elite and high-status males tend to get a disproportionate share of the wives, and that creates this pool of low-status unmarried men.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:43 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 53:44 Now, you can decide what you want to do with that, but you need to understand the kind of underlying social dynamics that you're gonna unleash if you, if you, you know, legalize or decriminalize polygyny.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:54 Right. But a- a- again, like, going back to the church, like, the church didn't understand-

Joseph Henrich 53:57 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:58 (laughs) The sort of, like-

Joseph Henrich 53:59 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:59 ... positive or negative effects they're gonna have, right? They just like-

Joseph Henrich 54:01 Yep.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:01 ... "Let's rip the Band-Aid. Let's see what happens."

Joseph Henrich 54:03 That's right, and the, and it actually benefited the church 'cause it released people's responsibilities to their families-

Dwarkesh Patel 54:09 Right.

Joseph Henrich 54:09 ... and allowed them to migrate in and join the church and more heavily invest in the church. And these later prohibitions against priests marrying and stuff was all an effort to get greater investment in the church because you weren't torn between, you know, helping your son and then investing in the church.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:24 Mm. And then w- was, uh, that end result, which benefited the church, was that their conscious intention, uh, in breaking apart these kin-based ties? Or was that just the accidental byproduct?

Joseph Henrich 54:35 Yeah, I mean, i- in the record I've never been able to find much evidence that they were thinking about the destruction of kinship ties. There is a great quote from Saint Augustine where he talks about the benefits of forcing people to marry-

Dwarkesh Patel 54:47 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 54:47 ... more distantly. But, you know, this is something that was debated repeatedly in church councils all across Europe.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:53 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 54:53 And, um, yeah, it doesn't seem to pop up very often.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:58 And, um, the church doing this and, you know, just like, I mean, for obviously, like, selfish reasons, um, uh, was that, um, was that any, in any way related to why the church spread through Europe in the first place? Or did it end up spreading for separate reasons and it won out over the other potential religious competitors for separate reasons? And then this, um, it did... You know, basically, like, was this part of the selective mechanism which allowed the Catholic Church to become dominant in Europe in the first place?

Joseph Henrich 55:29 Um, ye- I think so, although it's hard to, it's hard to know. There was a lot of randomness going on in the diffusion of the church. But also as the church arrived, these places...... over a period of time, became more successful. So you can see rising urbanization in the wake of the church's arrival. That would've meant more trade. Uh, their citizens' rights began developing 'cause they were trying to attract citizens to the towns. Um, that would've given the church more cachet, ability to move. There's also the imper- appearance of these voluntary associations, which are new kinds of monasteries. And so the monasteries begin spreading throughout Europe, but they're all linked in a network, because like the Cistercians, they're all connected and they have big meetings. So they're actually spreading a lot of knowledge around Europe as well. So that's part of this kind of collective brain story.

Dwarkesh Patel 56:16 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...

Joseph Henrich 56:48 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 56:55 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 56:55 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:29 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 57:29 And we have birth and death locations. So we find out that the Church arrives and suddenly people are free to move around.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:34 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 57:34 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 58:13 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 58:13 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 58:23 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 58:23 ... things like that. So it, it, it, it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness of the collective brain and the amount of cognitive diversity.

Dwarkesh Patel 58:29 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?

Joseph Henrich 59:00 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:07 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 59:07 '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.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:18 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 59:19 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 59:28 Right.

Joseph Henrich 59:28 ... were all important. Uh, yeah, so patchwork of polities.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:30 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 59:31 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:43 Right.

Joseph Henrich 59:44 Zero is probably developed... I mean, In- Indians were huge with numbers. It's kind of interesting.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:48 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 59:48 Perhaps related to the religion.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:50 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?

Joseph Henrich 1:00:02 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:19 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 1:00:19 ... and a warrior clan. So that allows specialization, but it doesn't allow you to harness the genetic diversity 'cause it's not like the canoe-building clan had special canoe-building genes. It's just that you would pass down-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:28 Right.

Joseph Henrich 1:00:29 ... this cultural knowledge. Uh, now a better system, but it seems hard to evolve, is one in which we all opt, select into occupations in which we think we're good at. But in, for that world to exist, you need a world of voluntary associations with emphasis on the individual rather than on the, on the group. So this is the world that evolves in Europe, uh, once you demolish the intensive kinship units, 'cause otherwise you're gonna 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, th- the knowledge.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:00 And then why wasn't there, um, uh, another sort of stultifying... 'Cause we began the conversation by talking about there does seem to be this cycle where over time because of cultural differences, because of kin, uh, whatever else, um, over time groups will tend to diverge, languages, culture, other things you mentioned, um, tend to diverge over time. Why didn't the same thing happen in Europe where, let's say in the third century or fifth century, the Church starts doing this stuff, and then by a thousand years later, you know, if you're like part of this guild or whatever, now this, that's become like the new kin and now there's actually less mobility again?

Joseph Henrich 1:01:38 Um, 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, um, com- able to communicate in Latin. And Christendom basically formed an overarching network-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:54 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 1:01:55 ... that helped. And one of the key things that, uh, this world religion does, and other world religions do it too, is y- 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:11 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 1:02:11 ... Celtics marrying Franks, and in fact, the early arrival of Christianity into England is when a Frankish princess is marrying an Anglo-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:19 Mm.

Joseph Henrich 1:02:19 ... an Angle, uh, in Kent. And so, you know, they're, they're marrying back and forth. And this is gonna dissolve the tribes because intermarriage, what's the kid, you know? Uh, so, so that's how you get rid of the tribes, but you need a world religion to do that.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:31 Right. And so it seems like, um, there are two very important features, uh, that, that were relevant here. One, it seems like... Well, obviously the competition between different European groups, which gave incentive for monasteries or universities or cities to attract the best people and make all these advancements. But secondly, the fact that they were descended from a common empire, uh, from the Roman Empire. Basically in a world where, like, the Roman Empire never existed, do you still have this, um, uh, this collective brain in Europe emerge?

Joseph Henrich 1:03:08 Yeah, no, so I think the Roman Empire plays a big role, uh, because for example, there were Roman roads in parts of Europe-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:14 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:03:14 ... which allow people to flow, and you have communities which were part of Rome and relatively sophisticated. Now, they go into a bit of decline, but there's still the memory of the empire. So, you know, Charlemagne wants to be crowned emperor of the-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:27 Right.

Joseph Henrich 1:03:27 ... of Holy Roman Empire in 800, uh, even though there's, you know, not very much left of it. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:31 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:03:31 But it was still, you know, an ideal, and, and, and th- that Carolingian Empire actually had real effects 'cause they worked with the Pope in order to enforce a lot of the marriage and family program.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:42 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:03:42 And the Carolingians had their own agenda 'cause they were trying to use these marriage and family practices to weaken some of the other aristocratic families.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:50 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:03:50 But they had the religious tools that they could put to work, and if you didn't have those religious beliefs, then you couldn't put them to work.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:56 And what's your take on... Sometimes people defend ancient conquerors b- ba- based on, like, s- a similar idea of, like, they spread different, um... They, they spread knowledge around the world, and they set up these lines of communication. People say that about Alexander and then, like, causing Hellenistic, uh, expansion and trade and so forth. They say that about Genghis Khan and the Silk Road. They say... I mean, obviously he also led to the Black Plague, so-

Joseph Henrich 1:04:24 (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:25 (laughs) ... it's, it's, uh, tough where that nets out.

Joseph Henrich 1:04:26 Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:26 They say that about Napoleon and the Napoleonic Codes and so forth. Where do you basically come out on that story of, like, actually this sort of like, um, uh... Yeah. Are, are... Have the great conquerors been good for the collective brain or bad for the collective brain?

Joseph Henrich 1:04:41 Well, I've never actually focused on that. I mean, I guess my immediate reaction was there must be a better way to-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:47 (laughs)

Joseph Henrich 1:04:47 ... tr- transmit the knowledge than the whole conquest and-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:49 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 1:04:49 ... (laughs) so...

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:50 And then I g- I guess there's also the open question of how dis- the disruptions that are caused by them.

Joseph Henrich 1:04:55 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:56 How much did they set back the-

Joseph Henrich 1:04:57 And p- uh, population decline-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:58 Right.

Joseph Henrich 1:04:58 ... spreading disease and stuff. So certainly it could have been done better.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:01 Right. (laughs)

Joseph Henrich 1:05:02 (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:03 And g- g- going back to David Reich's work, if we do see... If your theory implies that there should have been a decrease in genetic similarity in Europe as of after, you know, the fifth century or something as a result of the culture, uh, the Church's practices, do we see that in the genetic record?

Joseph Henrich 1:05:21 Yeah. Yeah, so E- Europeans are quite well-mixed compared to other populations. And so we were talking about India, you know, if you do a principal components analysis of this two-dimensional plot of the genetic similarity-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:32 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:05:32 ... you can actually see the class, and people are pretty spread out. If you do the... put the Europeans on the same plot, they're, you know, they're well-mixed.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:38 Right. But what about, um... Do we see the period of greatest mixing starting in the fifth century?

Joseph Henrich 1:05:45 Yeah, good question. I don't know the answer to that question. So that would be... That's a nice piece of evidence, uh, so... You know, there's a couple of groups working on medieval ancient DNA, so h- hopefully we'll have more, uh, answers on that question. Uh, I mean, there is enough now for, of pre-Roman burials, so Bronze Age type stuff, um, showing that, you know, early Europeans definitely had complex intensive kin groups, patrilineal, uh, patrilocal resonance, uh, kinds of stuff, polygyny.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:15 And then stepping back, you know, I- I've read there's so many different, um, theories of the Industrial Revolution and of modernity. And, you know, there's, like, uh, Robert Allen and the i- uh, the economic historian who thinks it's a result of higher wages because of the Black Death. There's Gregory Clark, who thinks it's because of this positive eugenics in England where the higher, uh, the upper classes were having more babies. Um, I mean, you, you just go... Like, there's, like, pro- you know, 20, 30, uh, probably hundreds of different theories of why it happened, where it happened, um, and when it happened. And so each one of these, when I read them, sounds plausible. Uh, I don't, uh, have a knockdown argument against any of them. But I'm not sure how to think about which one is correct, and so, yeah, if we're c- stacking all of these up against each other, um, why think this story is any more accurate than any other story that people tell? Is it overdetermined?

Joseph Henrich 1:07:10 Well, I mean, the first thing to think about is, um, those other authors, I mean, possibly, uh, Greg Clark is an exception, but they don't think about the psychological variation that exists. So there's good reason to think there's all these psychological differences, and you have to believe they don't cash out. And if you think they exist, then you have to explain them, uh, and so you need a theory that explains them. So Bob Allen has... I mean, it's, he's a blank, he's a blank on the psychological variation.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:34 (laughs)

Joseph Henrich 1:07:34 So let me give you some evidence that I think is, um, pretty good evidence.So we have a database of the diffusion of Roman bishoprics through Europe, and then what we do is we look at what happens when a bishopric arrives. And I mentioned before, you get a flow of people, but another fact is, if you look at the production of famous people, these places where the bishopric has arrived start producing more creative individuals relative to non-creatives. So there's an uptick, and it keeps going up for centuries, so the relative increase, and so that suggests you're producing more authors and inventors and writers and whatnot. And then if you take each of those, uh, and you look at ... you correlate it with modern patents, places that spent more time under the Church produced more patents between 1980 and 2014 based on European patent data. Uh, and this holds if you just compare regions within the same country. Uh, so you can see long-term effects of this and you can see immediate effects in the historical record-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:29 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 1:08:29 ... on the production of creatives.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:30 And then, so what would you make of, um, a theory that says, like, all of these theories are basically correct, all of these stories are basically correct, and it's, like, it's them stacking up that leads to the Industrial Revolution rather than any of one of them being the most important proximal cause? And maybe there's, like, reasons, like, there's, like, I don't know, let's say, like, there's ten of these stories and you had to stack them all up and China had, like, five of them, but they also had, like, and maybe independently, like three other ones, but they also had, like, two stories which go against them or something, and it's like, um, no one of them is that proximately important, um, it's- it's their combination, right? So, like, I guess your theory seems compatible with Robert Allen's that, like, coal being cheap and wages being high was important, um ...

Joseph Henrich 1:09:16 W- well, so he's, I mean, I guess one of the things that I think is a mistake is to focus too narrowly on England 'cause, I mean, England was benefiting from ideas that were flowing in from France.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:26 Right.

Joseph Henrich 1:09:26 There was a lot of great science being done in France, and I- I mean, I don't think Gregory Clark's right. I can explain almost everything he explains with cultural evolution, uh, and he doesn't even really take that seriously.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:37 Oh, interesting.

Joseph Henrich 1:09:38 Yeah. So patience, so one of the things he argues is patience. So in the, in WEIRD, I use the exact same data, I actually get the data from him-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:44 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:09:45 ... uh, to show that you have this increase in patience, but we know that people can culturally learn patience, and this can all be culturally transmitted, and in this world, it leads to more success. So if you're the kind of person who doesn't, you know, waste a lot of his money and we begin to value thrift and stuff, which Protestantism does, then we should expect there to be an increase in- in fewer murders and, uh, lower interest rates.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:06 What- what's the reason to think that ... I mean, his main explanation, I think, is genetic, right? Is there some reason to think that that is less likely to be as important a factor as culture?

Joseph Henrich 1:10:17 Well, we know that populations, uh, migrants into the US and Europe shift their psychology over a few generations-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:23 Mm-hmm.

Joseph Henrich 1:10:23 ... of being there, and we know there's been, like, natural experiments done by economists like Chris Blattman where you actively try to ch- teach people, train them essentially, to discount the future less, um, and that seems to be culturally transmittable. So this suggests that, you know, y- y- I can't rule out that there's been any genetic evolution, but I can show that culture can operate on this quickly and powerfully.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:46 Right. I think one of his key pieces of evidence, I don't remember the exact numbers on this or so- uh, the, even the particular detail, but it was something like if you look at the inheritance of, um, wealth or titles or I forget what the exact thing is, um, the- the sort of, like, correlation across generations points to the kind of pattern you would see with genetic inheritance rather than cultural, um, spreading.

Joseph Henrich 1:11:14 Yeah, he doesn't actually fit any cultural evolutionary models, and if you include that people are learning from parents and learning from their social milieu, your parents determine where you are in the social milieu, so you're surrounded by people who are being more, um, uh, patient and behaving in certain economic ways, then that's gonna have a huge effect. I just told you about how if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're gonna patent in computers.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:36 Right.

Joseph Henrich 1:11:36 Um, it's not 'cause you have genes for computers. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:38 Yeah. Given the persistence of these cultural effects, how should that change how we think about, um, uh, w- whether it makes sense to have more immigration from societies that are already WEIRD or, uh, whether that matters or not?

Joseph Henrich 1:11:52 Right. So we just, we have a paper under review right now in which we show that from, uh, the, 1850 roughly to 1940, a big driver of US innovation, uh, both the quality and quantity of patents, is the cultural diversity of counties, and we actually use immigration as a kind of way of showing the causal effect of this. So what you want is a lot of cultural variation. Now, if you get people from societies that are more distant from whatever the current US culture is at the time-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:21 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:12:21 ... it's gonna take more time until they're able to fully integrate. So if they're coming from very distrusting society, they're not gonna be able to latch into the collective-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:30 Yeah.

Joseph Henrich 1:12:30 ... brain immediately. So you see this in early, in, uh, around 1900. There's data from people mostly coming from Southern Italy and coming from Germany and Britain, and the Southern Italians are coming from a society that has a high distrust of strangers, so their immediate effect on the patenting system is low. But it, these, the strength of these cultural, uh, traits seems