Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

约瑟夫·亨里奇——人类凭借文化进化战胜了更聪明的物种

Dwarkesh Podcast

2025-03-13

1 小时 52 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain? The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe. Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. ---------- Sponsors Scale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh. To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/p/advertise. ---------- Joseph’s books The WEIRDest People in the World The Secret of Our Success ---------- Timestamps (0:00:00) - Humans didn’t succeed because of raw IQ (0:09:27) - How cultural evolution works (0:20:48) - Why is human brain size declining? (0:32:00) - Will AGI have superhuman cultural learning? (0:42:34) - Why Industrial Revolution happened in Europe (0:55:30) - Why China, Rome, India got left behind (1:21:09) - Loss of cultural variance in modern world (1:31:20) - Is individual genius real? (1:43:49) - IQ and collective brains Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • 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 Raikkon, and we were discussing certain things in the...

  • record of human history where he said like look you eventually just got to have Joseph Henryk on and ask him these questions

  • because he's the one who would know so let me ask you one of the questions which I was super intrigued by which he raised and I didn't we didn't come up to an answer to so One of the things he's discovered through his genetic evidence is that 70,000 years ago,

  • across Eurasia,

  • there's so many different human species from the Denisovans to the Neanderthals to the Hobbits.

  • apparently there's this one group which was potentially the size of one to ten thousand people in the Near East which subsequently explodes and now everybody who's descended from Eurasia descends from this one group.

  • And so I guess the question is like what happened?

  • What did they figure out?

  • A typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic,

  • they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic changes.

  • Now, Reich's lab...

  • There's no obviously big changes in the DNA.

  • So it's a little bit of a puzzle.