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Joseph Henrich — Humans Defeated Smarter Species With Cultural Evolution

Dwarkesh Podcast

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  • Eurasian Expansion Drivers
    • Eurasian expansion 70,000 years ago wasn’t solely due to genetics, as Neanderthals had larger brains.
    • Institutional or technological changes, like projectile weapons, might have played a crucial role. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel 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? Joseph Henrich Yeah. So a typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic, they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic changes. Now, Reich’s lab, you know, there’s no obviously big changes in the DNA. So it’s a little bit of a puzzle. Neanderthals, for example, had larger brains. And in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities, more ability to solve problems. So the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa, have actually been less able at an individual level to process information. But if you look back over the more recent period of human history, you can see that it’s a story of expansions of different populations. So for example, in Africa, we have the Bantu expansion about 5,000 years ago, which actually eliminates a whole bunch of hunter-gatherer populations that previously existed in Africa. We have the remnant populations in parts of the Congo, in the Kalahari, in the Hadza, for example, in Tanzania. If you look at the Austronesian expansion, so that’s the peopling of the Pacific. That was the expansion of one group of people at the expense of others. And of course, the Neolithic expansion into Europe is another example. So really, human history is a story of these different expansions. And it could be that this expansion across Eurasia, which then led to interbreeding, so we know it’s the same species. Humans interbred with Denisovans and Neanderthals, as well as probably other species. There’s a ghost species in there. 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 with some evidence that the expanding populations had projectile weapons, so bows and arrows. And humans have periodically gained and lost bows and arrows in different parts of the world. (Time 0:01:09)
  • Eurasian Collective Brain
    • Eurasia’s size, east-west axis, and large population facilitated idea flow and innovation (collective brain).
    • This collective brain likely contributed to complex state bureaucracies and further advancements. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel 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 like no domesticated animals. But again, it’s like such a… Joseph Henrich Right. Although the new world, everybody has dogs and you can pull carts with dogs. Yeah. So I’ve never really bought that. And of course, you can use llamas in the new world to pull carts as well. People do that today. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. So what’s your explanation for why there’s no wheels in the new world? Joseph Henrich 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 way through to the Mediterranean. And ideas are just flowing back and forth there. (Time 0:03:11)
  • Inuit Expansion
    • The Inuit expansion across the Arctic exemplifies how a package of social practices and technologies (bows, dogs, boats) can enable a group to outcompete others.
    • Conversely, the Dorset, despite potentially superior technology, declined due to fragmentation and loss of interconnectivity. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Case that you have these sort of convalescing waves of expansion, and David Reich’s lab’s evidence suggests that this expansion was quite violent based on, you know, 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 the 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 figure 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 learning over And it’s not necessarily a selective process. It’s more a sort of accumulative process. Joseph Henrich Well, eventually the groups have to meet and they’re going to compete over territories. And a bunch of different things can occur. So groups can copy each other. So we know that from the ethnographic record and historical cases, sometimes group will say, oh, those guys have really good technology tools. Maybe they’ll get some migrants or something like that. And then they can adopt the practices. So that definitely happens. But there’s also plenty of evidence of violent conflict. And the Reich Lab’s evidence and lots of other ancient DNA suggest that there are these dead-end genetic lineages. So, I mean, the Neanderthals are dead-end in a sense, although we interbred with them, so they’re in us in some sense, but they don’t have their own pure lineage or anything like that. Dwarkesh Patel And if you had to guess, so whenever this big wave happens, is it more of a sort of concrete technology or is it more of a, 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 england maybe it’s like it’s hard to imagine it’s like a single technology it 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 i’m Curious how you think about like what possibly be this driving engine. The way I describe it in The Secret is that it’s a package of things. Joseph Henrich So another good example would be the Inuit expansion out of the north slope of Alaska. 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 they’re exterminating as they go along, 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 outcompete and eventually exterminate the Dorset. 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. (Time 0:05:50)
  • Cultural Evolution Startup Problem
    • Cumulative cultural evolution is rare because developing social learning is less valuable without existing knowledge, creating a startup problem.
    • This is solved by environmental change, tool use, and large group sizes, increasing the chances of encountering useful information. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel In The Secret, you described 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. Joseph Henrich So how is this problem solved? Yeah. So before I get to solving the problem, I just want to sketch for the listeners that the question is, is why is this cumulative cultural evolutionary process that is so important for Humans relatively uncommon in the natural world? It seems like just our lineage. I mean, there was a bunch of splinoff lineages, but now it’s just us. So to understand that is this idea that you just mentioned where you’re imagining an increase in brain tissue that’s going to 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 going to be very much useful information in the minds of everybody else. So I should use that brain tissue for individually solving problems. And so it’s hard to get this runoff where our brains get bigger for the purposes of learning from others. So, and then the question is, how do you get past that valley? (Time 0:09:26)
  • Lost Explorers and Cassava
    • Lost European explorers, despite modern technology, often starved in environments where indigenous people thrived for millennia due to accumulated cultural knowledge.
    • Processing bitter cassava, which requires a complex process to remove cyanide, illustrates this. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel So in The Secret, you discuss a lot of these 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 without which even these people with modern technology will starve. And as I was reading that, I was wondering, like, I’m still not sure how I understand the process by which if you need – there’s like a 10-step process to making sure this bean is actually Nutritious. And without any one of those steps, you might like poison yourself or something. And it’s like at no point do you understand why this process works. You don’t have a scientific explanation. How do you even like learn that in the first place? Right. Joseph Henrich So if – I mean one of the things we know, even in young children, there’s a tendency to preferentially learn from healthier, more successful individuals. And so if you’re processing it better – so something like bitter cassava, which has cyanide in it. If you just eat bitter cassava, 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. 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 going to be very strong and people are going to sort of do sensible things. But then it gets a little more mysterious. And we know this because bitter cassava gets transported to Africa. And Africans immediately begin eating it improperly processed and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it. (Time 0:13:03)
  • Survival vs. Reason
    • Humans, lacking innate knowledge of environmental survival, rely on transmitted cultural knowledge.
    • This leads to reliance on custom and tradition, sometimes explained through religious beliefs and taboos, prioritizing survival over individual reasoning. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. So this 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. And that maybe, as you discuss, like causes these like religious beliefs and taboos and mystical understandings of the world to arise where you just like think like, look, you’re in A burn in hell. If you don’t do this 10 step process for refining your beans or something. In some sense, this requires you to abdicate reason because you have to just be like, I don’t understand this. This is the way it’s been done, so we’re going to do it. Basically, how much reason do you necessarily have to abdicate to survive in the ancestral environment? Joseph Henrich I mean, one of the ways we research this is by going out to societies that make bows and arrows or have food taboos that protect them from dangerous marine toxins and ask them questions About why they do it and see if they – and they don’t understand the underlying causal stuff. But then why do they say they do it? Well, because that – a typical answer is that it’s our custom. Yeah. Or it’s, you know, important to people around here to do it this way. So we do it this way. So just Hadza bows, for example, you know, I didn’t do this research, Jacob Harrison, 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, different materials, and they had never tried anything else, but what they learned how to make this bow. So they couldn’t speak to a lot of that stuff. And the things about the compression of the wood is very important. I didn’t understand that. (Time 0:17:00)
  • Offloading Survival Skills
    • Humans, unlike other animals, offload survival skills to culture, making us vulnerable without it.
    • Camels, for example, possess innate survival instincts, enabling them to thrive where humans might fail. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Given the, I mean, what you just said and also the experience of these European explorers suggests that, like, you just got to know a lot of shit to make it in any sort of environment on Earth. But then, like, there’s all these other animals and they seem so dumb and they seem like able to get by. So, like, why did humans such a hard time of it? Yeah. Joseph Henrich Well, so I think we offloaded a lot of stuff into culture. So 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. So the camels survive the lost European explorer challenge because they have innate instincts. They can smell water a mile away. They can detoxify foods in their own. They have a complex digestive system that detoxifies. We’ve lost all that. And we’re worse than chimpanzees at detoxifying foods because we have all these cultural practices that do the work. So we’ve externalized detoxification and a lot of digestion, actually. (Time 0:20:47)
  • AI’s Potential Discontinuity
    • AIs have the potential for a sharp discontinuity due to increased social learning, knowledge accumulation, and efficient communication.
    • However, serendipitous meetings and imperfect copying, crucial for human innovation, might be lacking. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Silicon Valley, let me ask you a little bit about AI. So one of the reasons to suspect some incredibly sharp discontinuity from, 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, you know, anything you can do on a computer screen, the AI can do. One of the reasons to expect a shard discontinuity is that they have potentially the step function increase in social learning and the ability to accumulate knowledge that maybe humans Had, or the magnitude of which maybe humans had between them and non-human primates. And in particular, the fact that you can just copy everything you know. You don’t have to teach a young person because the constraints of biology mean you can’t just replicate brains. And also that you have much more efficient communication. You don’t have to communicate through words. You can just shoot your brain state across. The population size can grow arbitrarily large. So to the extent that a collective 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 skills? Joseph Henrich Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely think it’s pretty interesting and holds great potential for expanding the collective brain. There are 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. So there’s a great paper on Silicon Valley showing that companies will cross-reference each other’s patents more likely when the people at those companies tend to frequent the same Coffee shops and they track people on their cell phones and stuff to figure this out. So serendipitous meetings are important and improper copying. So a huge number of innovations are mistakes where somebody copied incorrectly and then got something better. Dwarkesh Patel I read this interesting theory that maybe evolution designed 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 sparse reward when you’re close to the right sequence. Joseph Henrich Yeah, yeah. So I think that’s a very interesting area of research, and it makes good sense to me. I’m not sure of the current state of the evidence. But different parts of the genome are more or less susceptible to mutation, which is kind of interesting. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. So going back to AI, maybe another way to phrase it is, look, you’re talking about these serendipitous meetings where you 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 AI, as you could really imagine, like, holding the whole internet in context, right? So everything that maybe these human groups, I mean, will be equivalent to like those people isolated in Tasmania, according to the AIs, right? Because like they just like have everything in context. If you get a PhD, you can get a PhD in every single field and you can amortize that across all your copies. Yeah. So, I mean, are you sort of like banking on in the next 10 years the, you know, you’re just going to be living in the singularity or something because of your belief in the value of cultural Knowledge? Joseph Henrich Yeah. Although I haven’t totally seen, I see there’s various potentials and I’m particularly interested in using AIs to augment problem solving in human groups. So you can imagine getting the humans together because the humans have the big advantage of having stuff they care about, right? There’s stuff they want to invent. So, I mean, the AI is still a tool at some point. So I’m interested in that, but I’m interested in how these things like running out of training data is going to be dealt with, 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. (Time 0:32:00)
  • Cultural Evolution’s Creativity
    • Human cultural evolution generates creative solutions beyond technological advancements.
    • The Catholic Church’s unintentional dismantling of kinship systems, fostering individualism, exemplifies this. Transcript: Joseph Henrich One of the things missing from our conversation is the kind of creativity that cultural evolution has figured out. So to give you an example, at some point in human history, religions invented big, powerful, moralizing gods. And this may have increased the people’s ability to cooperate. So the kind of, forget about the technological element. Some of the most important features of innovation over human history have been institutional and things that people to cooperate. So in my work, I argue that one branch of Christianity resulted in the transformation of the families in European societies into small monogamous nuclear families. I’m not sure an AI would have thought of that. Cultural evolution thought of it because of how it affected how the societies operated. So it sorted this out over historical time. (Time 0:36:58)
  • Weird Psychology and the Church
    • The “weirdest people” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) exhibit unique psychological traits.
    • The Catholic Church’s dismantling of kinship systems in Europe fostered these traits, indirectly leading to the Industrial Revolution. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Okay. So we’ve been dancing around this, the thesis of your book following the secret, which is the weirdest people 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. Yeah. Joseph Henrich So the 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, willingness to cooperate with strangers. So the question is, how can we explain the global variation 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 industrial revolution that happened in Europe, which Reshapes the world. And the story is, is that 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, 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 because 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. 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. (Time 0:45:05)
  • Europe vs. China
    • Despite China’s larger population (collective brain), Europe’s post-1000 CE surge in innovation stemmed from increased interconnectivity.
    • The church’s dismantling of kinship ties facilitated movement, urbanization, occupational diversity, and knowledge flow. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel Um, if you compare what’s happening in Europe at this time to, uh, the rest of the world. So starting with China, um, you know, in 1500, uh, The population of England, where a couple centuries later the Industrial Revolution starts, is 3 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 what is the best way to understand what went wrong here? Joseph Henrich Why weren’t they able to use their— 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. So a lot of European invention or a lot of stuff used in Europe is flowing in gunpowder, paper, printing press stuff 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, 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, and we have birth and death locations. So we find out that the church arrives and suddenly people are free to move around. So you have a flow of individuals around and you have rising urbanization. So Europe passes China around 1,200 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. 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 things Like that. So it greatly intensifies the interconnectedness (Time 0:55:30)
  • IQ in the Age of AI
    • IQ tests measure cognitive abilities relevant to 20th-century institutions, not necessarily future skills.
    • The AI-augmented future will likely favor different cognitive abilities, so high IQ might not be the primary driver of success. Transcript: Dwarkesh Patel But what’s the reason for thinking that the average IQ of a society isn’t super important in how much progress that society is going to make, not just the population size. Right. So the first thing that we need to do, though, is to zoom back out and think about what we mean by IQ. Joseph Henrich And so Michael Muthu, Krishna and I have made the case that IQ is just a set of cognitive abilities that leads to success in 20th century contemporary institutions that have come to dominate The world. So it’s a culturally evolved system. And we talked before about the Flynn effect, which illustrates that, and the fact that IQ is associated with all these positive outcomes now, but certainly wouldn’t be in pastoralist Societies. Trevor Burrus Right. Trevor Burrus So that would mean that if you raise the average IQ of your society, might lead them to have more abstract thoughts and do better science. And so that certainly fits. But the interesting thing for me is that the world of the future is going to be quite different than the one now. So the set of cognitive abilities, which is going to be favored in the new AI world, is not going to be the same set that was favored in 1900 when they designed the IQ test. So for example, in the IQ test, they ask you to remember digits backwards. I’m not sure how useful remembering lists of digits backwards. It was in a previous world where we had to write everything down and remember a lot of stuff. But in some sense, we’re interfacing with our technology and we got to figure out how do we, what are the set of cognitive abilities which is going to make people best able to solve problems? And like we talked about, it’s even the case that the most creative people aren’t the highest IQ people. Right. I guess one of the things I’m trying to say is that the minds that might lead us into the new world might not be the ones that have the highest IQ, because once you’re sort of augmented with AI and all these kind of technological aids we have, the specialized thing that leads someone to do something creative, probably not going to be the same abilities that did it in 1910. (Time 1:45:16)