Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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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're discussing certain things in the record of human history where he said like, look, event
Yeah. So 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. Neanderthals, for example, had larger brains, and in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities, more ability to solve problems. So, the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa, might have actually been less able at an individual level to process information. But if you look back over the more r
It's also really interesting how some technologies you would just think of as extremely I don't know what the word is, but the new world, like not having the wheel or something is I guess it kind of makes sense with no domesticated animals, but again, it's such a
Right. Although the new world, everybody has dogs and you can pull carts with dogs. Yeah. So I've never really bought that. Unfortunately, you can use llamas in the New World to pull carts as well. People do that today.
Yeah. So what's your actually what's your explanation for why there's no wheels in the New World?
So my well, so there are wheels on Mayan carts or Mayan toys. My explanation is just the collective brain. So almost every single first invention of something big that we think is important for humans was invented in Eurasia. And Eurasia, as Jared Diamond famously pointed out, building on other people's work, it's the largest continent by far. It has the biggest population. It's also oriented along an east west axis, which allows ideas and people to more easily flow. And there's a belt, which the historian Ann Morris calls the Lucky Latitudes, which runs from basically Southern China all the w
And what's the explanation for why the collective brain leads to state capacity or is it the other way around?
Well, you can think of institutions that eventually lead to state capacity as just part of the innovative process of the collective brain. So if you have more groups experimenting with more different ways of governing groups of people, gradually you get the accumulation of the pieces that you can put together into different kinds of states.
Got it. Okay, so going back to what happened seventy thousand years ago, is the basic answer like it could be something like Bose, but we don't know exactly what it was?
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