In Episode 3 of the series Joseph Henrich and Rufus Pollock continue on the Culture Evolution conversation.

In this episode the significance of family structures and the church takes center stage in their role towards shaping human societies. Joseph explains that different kinship networks influence behaviors, trust, and cooperation within societies and how the Catholic Church played an unintentionally role in shaping Western societies by implementing rules against cousin marriage and polygyny. These rules inadvertently fostered individualism, trust in non-kin relationships, and analytic thinking. These cultural shifts and networks of horizontal connections led to the development of "WEIRD" psychology – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, a topic discussed in Henrich’s latest book. These cultural transformations resulted in the development of different psychological traits that help to explain the remarkable economic success, innovations, and current challenges faced by Western societies.

This conversation forms part of the Cultural Evolution: A New Discipline is Born Series.

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About Joseph Henrich

Joseph Henrich is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is author of several books, most recently 'The Weirdest People in the World' and 'The Secret of Our Success'. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions.

About Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Find out more about his work on his website: ⁠rufuspollock.com⁠.

Further Reading

The WEIRDest People in the World - Professor Joseph Henrich, Korey Jackson, et al.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter - Professor Joseph Henrich

Transcript

Taken directly from Otter.ai with only minor edits. If you would like to support with editing the transcript get in touch

SUMMARY KEYWORDS societies, cultural evolution, people, work, group, trust, church, psychology, marriage, lots, family, point, taboos, problem, culture, kinship, happen, cultural, weird, led

SPEAKERS Rufus Pollock, Joe Henrich

Rufus Pollock 00:03 So welcome to part two of our special series with Joseph hemorrhage. Joe is the Ruth Moore professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, most recently to widely read popular books, the weirdest people in the world, and the secret of our success. He has had a unique career trajectory in having been a professor across multiple disciplines, anthropology, Economics, Psychology, and human evolutionary biology. Thank you again for joining us, Joe, in this series. I wonder right now at the very start that we briefly just summarize, in part one, we kind of, we just sort of ensure it was like, humans are the cultural species. And in part two, today, we're going to look more at like, what is cultural evolution look like? But just in a nutshell, what can we summarize part one for us that what does it mean for humans to be the cultural

Joe Henrich 01:06 species? Yeah, I mean, the key idea that, I mean, the secret of our success focuses on humans as a cultural species is that more than any other species, we've evolved genetically to learn from each other, and rely on acquiring this vast body of cultural knowledge from other members of our social group. And in particular, humans, culture is cumulative. So over generations and aggregates, and this is what led to the process of us relying so heavily on learning from others. So rather than distinguishing, you know, cultural explanations, explanations from genetic explanations. Once you have this idea, you can think of cultural explanations as a kind of evolutionary explanation, which rests on our genetically evolved capacities for learning from each other. And then there's all kinds of interesting ways that culture can evolve, to help us understand cooperation and the origins of religion and why psychology varies across societies, once you have that basic framework.

Rufus Pollock 02:05 Perfect. So today, let's start out it's to say, so we have this metaphor loss, or maybe just myself and this is, so if you like the bad, but useful, like hardware software distinction that we might have, if there's this kind of our brain, our brain is change. Unlike normal computer, by the software we're running, which is you might say, as cultural the learn things we acquire. From us, there's a push to put it simply, you know, I, I work out how to fish with a harpoon, or I work out how to use a phone, an iPhone, I don't want that on my own, I won't learn it from others, that learning is kind of culturally transmitted. And what we just said is we've evolved a species to be specifically good at acquiring and transmitting that work out who to learn from etc. So let's now come to kind of cultural evolution. What would what mean in simplest way what tell me what do we mean by cultural evolution?

Joe Henrich 03:01 Yeah, I mean, the core idea is, you want to think about humans as populations of learners. So you know, one of the things that that's impressive about humans as infants is that we come into the world and rapidly begin begin learning stuff from other members of our social group. And you know, by age one, children are beginning to learn language, and acquire all kinds of other things. But then it looks like we have an extended childhood that allows us to, you know, spend a lot of time learning acquiring social norms, and middle childhood and whatnot. So I mean, that's a core element of cultural evolution, then the, the cultural part comes from the fact that you have a group of individual learners all acquiring from each other over several generations. And that's at the core. Now, there's lots of interesting higher level things. So In cultural evolution, different groups, and ended up with different social norms, and then the norms can evolve according to how they influence competition among groups.

Rufus Pollock 03:58 Let's let's start even though with the simplest thing, if I would kind of explain this as it were to, you know, my my, I don't know, my mother is like, the simplest, let's say, I have some way of making I don't know a spear. And you won't we mean, just to really make it concrete, what is cultural evolution meet? Like, I've got a, you know, I've got some tool artifact or some other thing or even a norm, can you give a concrete example of, of cultural evolution or improvement that we might know about? Or, or even as things kind of example, made up?

Joe Henrich 04:30 Well, I mean, just that the idea that you're learning how to make a sphere, or how to use a computer from other members of your social group. And you might be learning from multiple models. So what you actually end up doing is not anything that exactly everyone else is doing, but it's some mixture and modification of the different things you've learned from other people. I mean, that's the kind of thing we have in mind. So it could be techniques. It could be the materials you use,

Rufus Pollock 04:57 that kind of thing. Okay, and do we have an exam Pull from historical record where we can trace this kind of evolution in something like, like to us like, we can see it now in the lab, you know, people modify and improve something, and then it passes on to the next generation as some kind of selection going on in this metaphor.

Joe Henrich 05:18 I mean, there's a, there's a few different ways of looking at that. One is, as you mentioned, there's laboratory studies where you can study the evolution of how people make spaghetti towers, or how they make knots or things like that, where you have the accumulation of techniques, over time they get better and better at solving some experimental problem could be lifting a chair, or making the spaghetti tower as high as you want it. There's also historical examples where you can trace the steam engine or the light bulb or something like that through time. So you have many, many different instantiations. And you can see how different bits were added to gradually improve things over time, and then figure out where those bits came from.

Rufus Pollock 05:57 Yeah, and so the thing also, that you emphasize is one of the most visible examples, there are things that are almost technologies, some of the most interesting examples are also about social norms. And that really brings us to maybe the weirdest people in the world as a good example, because that that really was a package of cultural norms that were evolving over time. Is that would that be the way that you would put it all? Yeah, yeah,

Joe Henrich 06:24 I mean, I think that's a, that's a good way to put it. So social norms, like just think about religion or something, you can often track different elements of a religious package that a community might have across space and time. So a lot of them will go back to previous generations. But then each generation might add new stuff, different rituals, different taboos, different interpretations of religious texts, things like that. So I mean, in the case of trying to explain the psychological peculiarity of European populations, so this idea that European populations are weird, so that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, but also psychologically peculiar. I mean, I I've tried to trace that to Christianity, in particular, to the particular set of family practices, forms of social organization taboos that really were developed in late antiquity in one particular branch of Christianity, the one that led to the Catholic Church.

Rufus Pollock 07:26 Okay, so let's write up just for a second and say, what, what does for this one is weird? What is What do you mean when you say the term weird? And yeah, let what are the kind of psychological features and a bit of detail that distinguishes that group?

Joe Henrich 07:43 Yeah, so the I think the main thing to remember about the weird acronym is that it was it's a consciousness raising device. And so methodologically, some colleagues and I, starting around 2005, began to review this literature in psychology. And what we found is that most of the participants that psychologists and experimental economists and others were using at that time came from the psychologically peculiar population. So psychologists were relying heavily on American undergraduates, and even if you people got really exotic, they would, you know, get participants from the US and the UK or something like that, or also Swiss participants or something. And, and what we found is that whenever we had data that would allow us to seek those populations in a more global distribution, they were often unusual. So they were by the end of the tail of the distribution, or just about the outliers in some way, not always, but often. So as a consciousness raising device, we dubbed these populations weird, which is an acronym standing for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. And it was meant to remind researchers mostly to to consider their subject pools and to be cautious about generalizations and you know, hopefully to encourage people to study cultural diversity and try to explain the variation among populations. But then that always left me with this puzzle, which how, you know, there is still this set of unusual psychologically unusual populations. So how can we explain why those populations are unusual psychologically? What is it about them? And so following on work by other anthropologists and historians, I pursued this idea that it may lie in the structure of families and the Europeans are well established that they have these unusually simple found so monogamous nucular families, relatively unimportant extended relatives compared to other societies, no clans, no cousin marriage, things like that. So then the question is, where to When did European societies become like that? And that leads into the historical record, and that's where I think Christianity plays a role.

Rufus Pollock 09:54 And just again, so what is different let's say about western edge Hadean, industrialized, rich and democratic. And I'm just quoting for your book here. Suppose something happened historically, that made people less conforming, less obedient, less willing to defer to elders, traditional authorities and ancient sages. So what are the other? What are the psychological features that are distinct or that make them outliers? When you look at them in a kind of global sense psychologically, could you mention some of the key features notice? Yeah,

Joe Henrich 10:24 so I mean, one is the individualism complex. So this tendency to focus on the self, and to distinguish the self in sharp ways from others, this tends to be associated with overconfidence, and self enhancement, the experience of the emotion, guilt or shame. And kind of what psychologists call an individualized self concept, which is just thinking about the self in terms of dispositional characteristics, trying to cultivate those characteristics. And then another areas in personal psychology, so trust and cooperation with strangers, which you can measure a bunch of different ways. But it basically comes out to how you engage with strangers versus your own more social intergroup. So that be your family, or ethnic group, country, something like that. And another one is analytic thinking. So psychologists have long distinguished people who focus more on problems and break, break problems down into component objects, and view those components of the problem with with characteristics and then try to explain systems that they have that basis, versus a more holistic way of thinking, where you focus on the relationships between objects, or people, and try to explain things based on the relationships or the background context or whatnot. So just to give you a simple example of analytic thinking, you know, and physicists have traditionally approached a problem, they assign properties to objects, it could be gravity to planets, it could be charged to particles, it could be spin to particle, something like that. And then everything else follows from that psychologists assigned personalities. And then once you've assigned people, these dispositional personality traits, then you're going to explain behavior, instead of focusing on the relationship or the context or things like that. There's even something called the fundamental attribution error, which is something that's really strong in western subjects, which is this tendency to focus on imputed attributes to the person. So if they fall down, they're, they're clumsy, or if they're, if they show up late to work, they're lazy or something like that, rather than like, you know, got a flat tire or there was water on the floor would be non dispositional ways of explaining that. So that's been something that's been recognized in western subjects, but it doesn't, it appears weaker or not at all and other populations. But you can see that kind of imbuing the science to a degree.

Rufus Pollock 12:45 So there are this cluster of psychological factors that shard a lot more strongly in western weird populations. And the question was what caused this? You know, as you say, it also was even novel to see this for a primate, which is deeds work. This was psychology, fundamental attribution error was a feature of all humans. In fact, it turns out it's not. So that's, that's breakthrough one, I get that. But what's really then we're going to say is that, I think is, I just want to pause myself, and also remind myself is, what's dramatic here is that cultural evolution, now we all kind of get oh, yeah, you know, like the iPhone, iterated, or the the steam engine, or some have x, you know, we've gone to the museum and seemed like there was an axe like this, and then it was chipped in a different way and different kinds of stone axe, but we're talking really about, like, deep psychological predispositions, like to see the world analytically, or more holistically, or to conform, or not conform, or to, you know, in other significant, quite profound psychological ways actually, aren't universal, and are also you're gonna, you're suggesting, or a product of cultural evolution, or the influence of cultural evolution on our psyche, like any kind of, I guess, there's just a dance here, there's an underlying genetic set up, but there's also kind of on kind of being individually but culture is the kind of network in which we swim of, of artifacts. And part

Joe Henrich 14:20 of the key idea that we talked about last time is that because we're a cultural species, a lot of our evolution has taken place in a world with cultural norms and institutions and locally evolved technologies, and particular ways of communication, different languages. And, I mean, part of the plasticity of our minds is that we need to adapt to be able to navigate those different cultural worlds. So, you know, we're adapting psychologically, to be able to better navigate these different worlds and they're composed of, you know, roughly technologies and institutions and languages. And so, the key idea that, that I focused on at the beginning of the trying to explain this, these patterns of psychology is to focus on the most fundamental of human institutions, which is the organization of the family. Now, that doesn't mean that other institutions aren't also important. And I think they're part of the story. But in the account that I lay out, and I still think this is the case, the family is kind of the first thing to shift, which then leads to a lot of downstream consequences, all the way, eventually leading to things like representative democracy and whatnot. But that's downstream from the shifts in the family size.

Rufus Pollock 15:28 structure. So, let's, now we've established that there are these No, I'm sorry, there are these major psychological potentially changes as a result of culture that will, that's what we're going to come to what are what is that story of cultural evolution, and kind of psychological change? Georgia set that out to us, you know, where does it begin? Yeah, well, so.

Joe Henrich 16:01 If you're thinking if you're if you're, if the question is where does the kind of process leading to weird psychology begin started at is this particular set of taboos and rules about family structures that one branch of Christianity adopted beginning in late antiquity, and you can see the first signs of this by taboos placed by the church on Leverett marriage. So in lots of societies, when you're when when your wife's if your wife dies, you might marry the sister. And so that's a common practice. You know, if the sister is unmarried, you would marry the sister. And so the church taboos that and then they said they taboo marriage to first cousins, and eventually that becomes second cousins. And, of course, the church taboos, polygyny. So you can only have one spouse at a time. So there are all these rules about marriage in the family that gradually accrete and actually get pretty strong by 910 century and the church backs off some of the cousin marriage stuff after the year 1000. But, you know, that's kind of a lot of the stuff has already been done, and it doesn't back off of it too much. You don't get the disappearance of explicit religious taboos until the Protestant Reformation. So you have this, this push that the church does to break people down into monogamous nucular families, and then trying to navigate a world where you don't have these extended clans and big kinship networks is the world that I'm thinking about adapting to where you have to cultivate individual attributes. And you need to find people who to be you know, business partners, and engage in self insurance and mates and friends, and all that kind of stuff, based on these internalize attributes. So people need to begin cultivating things that will be of interest to other people. And then of course, they're looking for people with those traits, because they can't rely on this extensive set of kin ties, which is another way of guaranteeing trust and honesty and things like that. So that that's the shift that I see occurring.

Rufus Pollock 18:01 So one question arises, so how do you keep saying King, like, the alternative is kinship networks? To Serbian mountain? So what how are most societies other than weird organized? Yeah,

Joe Henrich 18:15 that's an important point is that if you look at the anthropological record, across human societies, you know, there's lots of interesting variation in kinship and the structure of families. But compared to the west, the they'll look pretty intensive in the sense that people rely heavily. So the unit of production is some set of family members, and family member guides distribution, they're often in the residence of the core of any kind of legal structure. So rather than being having individual rights, which is that's why individual rights, so it's a unique thing in the West, you know, you'd be represented by some kind of kin network, and you'd be dependent on usually some kind of, you know, patriarchal male would be in charge of everybody in some sort of plan like structure. This is how it was in Rome. It's how it wasn't China. Lots of other places. So you see it in the politics and the law and economic production. The family is really the core, not the individual. And then there are various ways of tying kinship together, there are matrilineal societies and patrilineal societies, most societies had polygyny, most societies had cousin marriage, most societies have rules about where couples would live after they get married, they wouldn't set up their own residence they live either with the bride's family or the groom's family things like that. So all this help to make the family the core of political, economic and social life.

Rufus Pollock 19:37 Right the family or the extended family in the clan. So just walk it through just one example like why does polygyny or cousin marriage important to maintaining clan structure or family structure to

Joe Henrich 19:51 just way to think about it is about net. I think the way to think about is about kin net or about networks Right? And, you know everybody's born and they inherit some set of relatives. And what cousin marriage does is it? Is it rebonds families together. So if you have a marriage between two kin groups, say to client,

Rufus Pollock 20:09 Well, imagine you imagine where somehow we're in some extended network. Now there's Joe and Rufus and I don't know your marriage, I don't know, what would cause the marriage be like, Yeah, I don't know. But like, how would it work? Like we were somehow part of, we were like distant cousins? What would happen? Now? Why is cousin marriage important if you can marry? You know, I don't know, my sister, who's your distant cousin? Right? Well, because

Joe Henrich 20:33 what that does is it creates a bond between the two families. And it means that both members of those two families now have relatives in the other family. Right. And those relatives are suddenly closer, right, the products of that union are going to be more closely related than than anybody else's. So you sort of pull the families closer together. And this is the, you know, it's baked, taking advantage of our genetic inclination to help close relatives. But then there's also a bunch of social rules and requirements laid on top of that, in terms of its monetary exchanges that go on rules about having to defend each other. Things like that. So you know, lots of societies if someone in your clan was murdered, and we were related through this cousin marriage, then we've got to all step up and support you guys. That problem,

Rufus Pollock 21:19 this is the thing get through basically, imagine where you know, I'm not even I don't know, I guess it's my wife is somehow distantly related to you. I'm just lazy, I'm dead. I'm definitely relate to you. But you marry my, my sister, who's your somehow distant cousin, suddenly, you're my brother in law, basically. Right? If I'm just thinking this through concretely, to suddenly is someone, I've got a lot greater commitment to do something, you know, your children or give me my nieces and nephews. And so just to think through so if I if someone gets murdered in my family, my my brother gets murdered, suddenly, it's your brother in law? Not some person? Three?

Joe Henrich 21:57 I don't know, because I have the responsibility to avenge that death, for example. That's right. And also

Rufus Pollock 22:03 in terms of business, if we're going to go into farming together or something, I can trust you basically, in a way that I possibly couldn't trust you. Or vice versa before is that is that right? Yeah,

Joe Henrich 22:12 exactly. Trust sharing, you know that I'm gonna I'm not going to screw you over on some contract, all those kinds of things. And so we're being brought closer, and then we can we can do business more easily. Because we have that trust. And so the marriage bond helps do that. And then you have that for a while, right. But a couple generations later, now we're further apart than we were used to used to be another cousin marriage, and we're pulled back together. Good.

Rufus Pollock 22:38 Now I just want to fly thing. No, I'm obviously well, you will send me an economics back from it. These are public goods, problems, classic like collective defense, trading, these are things where there's positive some outcomes if we can all bond together to fight. And people know that this is the point and people know that they want to come and kill us. You know, we won't even have to avenge a murder because we don't know we're powerful or if it does happen, we'll be able to do something about it. And similarly, trade or other mutual enterprise is a classic positive sum game, but which is vulnerable to the prisoner's dilemma or defection, which is vulnerable to we work together on the field. I don't know. I shirk and don't do my part or a we go off to trade at a market, I come back and tell you that actually, I didn't. I sold it for half what actually sold it for all the other ways that we can mess each other around in life, but the quarry obviously defense, I mean, and you know, warfare, so just what you're telling me if I put it in a nutshell, is that one way to solve public goods, problems of a kind or collective action problem is through kinship networks, which build these relationships of trust and basically solve the defection problem. I mean, in the crudest public, if I'm, if I'm your brother, and we're both arrested by the DEA for that heist, at the local bank, it's much less likely that either of us are going to rat on the other one in the in the prisoner's dilemma. And clearly put, if you're my cousin, even it becomes less likely or if you've married my wife, sister, or whatever. And so this is one way that human societies scale in the face of these public goods problems. And you also said is that culturally, and historically, we've also put a lot it's not just that we do kinship, there's a whole bunch of norms, religion, other things that reinforce and support these systems of behavior and why I should treat my extended family a certain way.

Joe Henrich 24:32 A couple of important things about that, that one is, as best we can tell, this is the first way that people tried to solve collective action problems. Like the advantage of these family ties. We have a little bit of it because of genetic altruism to close relatives. The culture basically said, Let's really take advantage of that and figure out all ways to bolster that up and create cross cutting ties, multiple ties, shared incentives, putting people together so they grow up together through these residents rules are different ways of taking advantage of that, too. Make that unit, you know, cooperative and trustworthy to solve all those public goods problems. But then the thing is when you want to go to a higher level, and you need to go super family to get big groups and stuff like that, all those super family structures, the institutions have to deal with the fact that they're evolving in a world that already is built around kinship. So like a typical legal system might take advantage of the bond between father and son, if the Son commits a crime, they put the father in jail. Now, that sounds really weird to us. But it made perfect sense in in former times and in other places, and the father would have to stay in jail until the sun showed back up to pay for his crime, right? It didn't seem like a big problem to lots of people in lots of societies.

Rufus Pollock 25:43 Right. And the thing just to flag is, though, there's some limit to the scaling of that model. In a particularly in a more horizontal way, maybe we could put him in one way to scale it, which you we mentioned in the last episode is you kind of, you have an elite stacked on top of a basically, enslaved or peasant population. And inside of the peasant population, you have these kinship networks, and the elites kind of sit on top with a kind of military or something like that. And they kind of run an empire, and that sort of kind of vertical model that you can scale to some to some extent, that just to emphasize the same historically to have been a bunch of inefficiencies of those models. Even back in like ancient Greek times, you know, the famous story that, you know, the free, the free Greeks, I mean, obviously, there were Lotus days, but free Greeks defeated, you know, Xerxes and the Persians, or whatever it was, you know, you don't fight in the same way in a, you know, Imperial Army as you do in a Free Army, or whatever the story would be. But just to say, so let's now calm. But the point is, there's some limit to that, that kind of scaling of a kind. Now, the, what we're saying is that the weird route, the Catholic Church, started out some different alternative, because you eliminate this whole way that humans have evolved to build tries to have extended allies to navigate the world, you said, to self insure, you know, who's gonna look after me my old age, or if I get disabled or these things. And I also want to start out with this program of banning cousin marriage, but bear in banning marrying my you know, my wife, sister, polygyny, which I haven't mentioned, we should come to that in a moment as he what, just to say, this wasn't the intention of the church to start anyone down a different cultural evolutionary pathway. I just wanna emphasize that, right? It's just the church is the almost like church, the Catholic Church has kind of came on this almost by accident because of ritual or other rules within that, you know, they decided this was a good idea. Is that right?

Joe Henrich 27:51 Yeah, I mean, as best we can tell, I think that's right. There could be there's interesting historical debates to have have about this, because, like St. Augustine of Hippo has a famous quote, where he seems to recognize that some of these cousin roles have some positive social effects. But as far as we know, that wasn't like a key agenda item in all the subsequent centuries, where they were making these rules. People seem to believe that God wanted that God had a problem with cousin marriage. And that was that if the people didn't obey these taboos, that bad stuff would happen, like plagues would show up, and whatnot. So they saw it as very much a way of satisfying God, whether there were some church leaders who might have recognized this is a possibility. But I think that the important picture here and this is something that's easy to miss from the way we think about things is you want to zoom out and recognize that lots of different religions have rules about family structure. Right? Some of them have disappeared into history, and like Zoroastrianism, and others have proliferated and become very successful. So I think that different religions will just try different stuff. And people often believe that's how God wants it. And depending on what the downstream effects of those rules are, they could have no effect if they're, you know, if they're minor, but they could like this set of rules have a big effect on the trajectory of that society.

Rufus Pollock 29:09 One last way to check in is polygyny. We haven't talked about that just what is polygyny, just for people listening I had to read when I read your book to learn clearly what it was. And why is that again, important in maintaining kinship or clan structures just

Joe Henrich 29:24 very, so quick, typological background so polygamy contains two different kinds of things. One is polygyny, which sounds like polygamy but isn't, is you know, a subset. That's when males have multiple wives. So more than one wife at the same time. There's also polyandry, where a woman can have multiple husbands, that turns out to be very rare in the anthropological record. So I mean, estimates vary, but something like less than point 1% of societies have that although it may, it does appear at quite low levels in some societies. And so but lots of societies men have multiple wives, typically high status males will have multiple wives 85% of societies in the anthropological record have this. And that just means that you can have these really large family networks, where, you know, if your father has multiple wives, you have all these half siblings, and you know, those, you have responsibilities to those half siblings. You're not as close as you are to the tearful sips, which, you know, as many stories about succession and conflict within royal families and stuff have to do along those cleavages. But nevertheless, it does mean you have a big family and your bigger clan and it would be otherwise.

Rufus Pollock 30:36 So again, just the key point, is that polygyny, when when a man has moldable wives, it allows us to kind of knit much larger family clan networks together. And I just also want to remind you just said that 85% of societies in the historical anthropological record, we have half that soldiers ballistas that's like tells us because I obviously in in weird societies, that is not allowed. I think just to mention example, I think it's a Charlotte, in your book, you mentioned like Charlemagne getting in trouble or something like someone made like the church, it's having some major fights with like powerful men. Can you are there any examples from the early medieval period? You want to mention that were

Joe Henrich 31:18 Charlemagne, I think he had 10 wives. You know, it took a long time for the church to kind of keep pushing back against concubinage. So there's, there's a couple different systems. One is you have wives who are roughly equal social status. And then in Europe, they also had like a secondary wife situation where you'd have a primary wife who has the same social status as you. And then you would take the secondary wives and call them concubines is the historical term for it. But it would effectively I mean, those children would often have inheritance rights is a socially recognized relationship. But it was someone from a lower socioeconomic status. So you know, the church was totally against that. And finally, one of the tools they used was this concept of the bastard. So they made the children of the secondary wives have no inheritance, rights, and nothing, no rights within the church and whatnot. So that made those marriages a lot less interesting to women, and also to men, but especially to women. And then that began to push push back on that and began to reduce the frequency of those. But this was this was very common throughout Europe.

Rufus Pollock 32:23 Yeah, I mean, people should check in on my Game of Thrones here for some of some of these kinds of things showing up. So What's crucial is that you're saying, a there's a lot of demand for polygyny among high status males and others for a variety variety of years, perhaps genetic reasons, but basically charged really pushed on this is an example of saying, and it's really, really rare and historical anthropological record. That's okay. Now, let's pass what's what happens. So if we think of this, I just want to like, for myself share, like, now you can think of a genetics, we've got some new strain, you think of some new strain of the virus, and everyone's familiar with COVID. Now, but this, you know, I don't know, over convert strain, we've got some new cultural strain here, which is really unusual and historical record. And basically eliminating many of the tools used to create large clan, or family networks, you've removed all of the support, you've snipped, if you like, stripped away all the supports that a human being would have in the world. And so what's gonna start happening? And what what can we document? Or maybe you want to? Yeah, like, what, what started, we think starts happening?

Joe Henrich 33:28 Yeah, so my picture of this is that, because you're losing this family as a core structure, people are looking for ways to create this, I mean, one of the first problems you have to solve is this kind of mutual aid problem. So what happens when you get sick or old who's going to take care of your children if you if you break your leg or something like that, so people use religion, and so they become even more enthusiastic about being members of the church, and they use these religious, the religious connections that build religious communities, in which they basically self insure each other. So we're all gonna get together in this small town or in this community. And we all swear to god that if anything happens to the others that will be there will support them and help them and whatnot. So they form these self help societies, which are really the beginnings of guilds. Now eventually, those become occupational and the occupational guilds perform the same function. So all the Baker's will take care of the other bakers. But at least in the beginning, they were just they just started as pure self help societies. And you get the spread of monasteries, which start doing the same thing and become self governing. And eventually some of the monasteries try elected leaders. And so the beginning of use of voting and elections, universities are a kind of voluntary association that pops up. And then the small charter towns where people will get together to start a town or a Duke might want to start a town because of the profits. But then they have this kind of self insuring defense thing. So they will all agree that every every able bodied man must show up in defense of the town. They'll help on community projects, we need to build a wall or something, and they'll have to donate your labor as a member of that community, the notion of citizenship at the town level starts out. But these are things where you volunteer to become a member. So you're not a member by birth, which is the the old model kinship model.

Rufus Pollock 35:14 I mean, so this just, I want to kind of keep having you share just how like, radical Lee different from historical record because we live in it, like, it's like, we kind of bathe in it, it's like the water, we are, at least you and I, because we're both from Western societies walk in. It's just like, how different in historic record. And just to emphasize here that the point here is that these are often horizontal connections in the church. I'm basically with Baker's, I'm a kind of relative pier, of course, there's differentiations. And there's hierarchy, somebody's in the church, but in the congregation, in the charter town, in many other ways, these are horizontal associations, whereas there have been support, but many the other associated was some horizontality, often vertical, father to son, you know, whatever the structures were, they were much more vertical. And so this is really like, novel, I think there's one point in your book where you really strike me where, because of this kind of story, I will also tend to come to which is, you know, what your answer also in this book is why the west right, the first book is like, why sapiens? Why did Sapiens make it versus the enthralls this great historical question. Second book, which is a big chestnut. It's like, why did the West why why? You know, and there's the classic story, which is like an 1000 ad, you know, your level 180, you survey around the world, you look at, you know, the Chinese China, you look at the Islamic empires, you look, you look at Western Europe, and like the Western world, it's like, backward and, you know, poor and, you know, warring and tiny and underpopulated, how on earth would it succeed, and I want to bring it out here wants to see, I think I remember the birbee. And you know, you'll have it tomorrow, but it's like, even by like 1100, or something like the number of charter towns, a number of towns with autonomous kind of governance in Western Europe, like outstripped anywhere else in the world. Is that right? I can't remember the exact figures. I

Joe Henrich 37:04 mean, yes. Like that. I mean, in the Islamic world, there were zero. So it didn't take much by 1100, there were certainly more of these kinds of autonomous governing towns.

Rufus Pollock 37:15 And it's the only choice what I'm trying to say is that, what like an exponential curve? Well, things were kind of hidden, there was already this kind of source by like 1000 ad, or Lebanon A, D, have a completely different model. That, you know, in this story, then has this potential, even if it seems backward at the time. So what? So in a way, like the church charts on this, we've got this different like, you know, threat like different strain of the virus, the different cultural evolution tree where we've illuminated the normal things that will support you people that will form these horizontal networks. What impact and then sorry, then we're going to come What about, I mean, you started what you told us about Protestantism, and about reading and other things. So what else? What else happens in the West? They're like, even built on this or even accelerates this further, what other cultural evolutionary changes happen?

Joe Henrich 38:08 Yeah, so you have the dissolving of the complex kinship structures in the monogamous nucular families, and then the beginnings of these voluntary institutions. And then you have getting these charter towns setting up. And then the question is, how do you govern these places, they're full of people who have joined as voluntary members. And that includes the charter towns and the monasteries, and the guilds and stuff. So there's kind of competition among these groups to attract the best, the best of whatever they can attract, maybe it's the best merchants could be the best bet blacksmith whatever. And part of this has to do with giving people citizens rights, what we now think of as individual rights, but of course, these would have been confined to the town. And it could have been like, a freedom from impressment, or freedom from certain taxes, or, you know, some kind of voting opportunity in some legislative body that elects elected leaders. And so, you know, some towns adopted this, and then those towns were often copied if they were successful. And so you get this gradual flow and movement of different ways of governing an organization. And so you begin to get the emergence of representative governments where citizens get rights and you know, this is affecting who, who joins what town and you also this along with this is the emergence of Western law. So a law where the individual is the primary holder of of well, I guess, holder of rights essentially, but although the notion of rights is kind of a new idea, and a lot of the features of Western law begin to get developed like the importance of mental states did did you kill them on purpose or did you kill them by accident didn't always matter in lots of societies and in the West is became very fine grained, where there were lots of different elements to the mental state. Did you know that what you were doing was gonna hurt the person did you want to hurt the person? All of these different features which you don't see and lots of other legal systems. And then eventually you get to Protestantism, which I think has, like flare ups long before Martin Luther appears, yes. But this this kind of very individualistic religion that is very mental state based is just a continuation of the trajectory that was occurring in lots of domains of life.

Rufus Pollock 40:22 So can we just say a bit more just for a moment, again, about how unusual or weird is you just said that we have Western law where there's the individual, so just to put us in the shoes of many other societies, maybe even today, or in the past? You don't have this concept of individual having rights or responsibilities, it would be you talking about like the family like I put the father in jail, can you just describe those two different worlds a little bit like what would what would be a classic, traditional legal system, you know, and treatment, or?

Joe Henrich 40:54 Right, the legal unit is not the person at some sort of kin group, it might be the clan. A lot of the law has to do with negotiations among the clan. So in China, you know, you have these courts that would adjudicate problems, but they're not trying to figure they're not trying to engage in justice, they're trying to mitigate conflict between kin groups. So they get the leaders of each clan there, and they have an adjudication negotiation process. And it's an effort to make both clans happy enough so that they stop with whatever the conflict is, as opposed to, you know, trying to establish some set of facts and, you know, protect the rights of the individual and follow the law, it's very much not that kind of thing. And it's also taking into account the relationships between people. So a simple example would be, you know, if a son does punches his father, it's a much worse crime than if a father punches his son, say, two adults. So relationships matters and how you're judging things, the same thing would matter, the relationships between the clients, if they're connected, the nature of how bad a crime is, depends on how they're connected. And if they're close enough, then they're supposed to deal with it internally. So the legal system often did even deal with internal internal disputes. So those are some of the differences. And then the mental states is, is a big one that you see in lots of places where if you burn someone's house down, it doesn't matter whether you did on purpose, or by accident, it just matters that their house was destroyed, and the damage to them is the same. So a lot of times, the legal penalties and whatnot are the same.

Rufus Pollock 42:22 So just to emphasize that last point, which is, I think, very interesting about our conception, both of individuals, but also justice, or how we is that the intention matters. So in most systems, just the damage happened, or the person got killed, it didn't matter what you intended to kill them, whatever. Whereas you're saying, in the Western system, it starts to become very important, what your intention is. And I guess just that would show up in religion as well, a lot, right? You say the process is the kind of like, you know, the extreme. In many systems, it's doesn't matter whether I, what I intended towards God, if I've gotten done the observances I've gotten done, the rights or the rituals, it doesn't matter. Whereas, you know, what Martin Luther is saying is like, it doesn't matter whether you're going and going to church to do all the right stuff, if you if you don't have the right faith, and you don't have the right thing in your heart. It doesn't matter. Right. Yeah. So this

Joe Henrich 43:15 is the notion that it's very intuitive to lots of weird people. But the notion that it's about faith, that it's about this internal mental state, that you really believe in God, in a sense, in lots of traditions, it's just about whether you do the rituals, and you go along with the practices, and you follow the food, taboos and whatnot. And this, this notion of what everybody's internal individual mental state is, isn't a big issue that's widely discussed. And Martin Luther went so far as to say the only thing that matters is faith. Right? This is the big debate about good works and faith or just faith. And a lot of Protestant sects had, you know, it's faith alone, that matters. Whereas the church was less inclined towards mental states because they thought your actions actually matter.

Rufus Pollock 43:58 And this is very unusual. Okay. And so I wanted then, I mean, then just a one last example and you bring up the be in the book is of ways that cultural evolution then leads to actual major changes psychology, with Protestantism, reading the Bible becomes really important, is that right? That's right. So you want to say a little bit about that. And its impact on on our on our cognition or on our societies? You know?

Joe Henrich 44:26 Yeah, yeah, this is one of those interesting cultural mutations that had a big effects, but nobody knew at the time or didn't anticipate all the effects that would have. So because of the importance of mental states and the importance of the individual, many Protestant groups came to believe that each person, men and women should read the Bible for themselves in order to develop their own personal relationship with God. And this is very strange, like, you know, oftentimes an entire group will have a relationship with a deity and that kind of rank and file members don't think of themselves as having an individual relationship with a deity. That's a personal relationship that A lots of Protestants think about the relationship with God. So in order to get this, it was thought that all children should learn to read so they could read the Bible. So they could have their own views about this and then develop their personal relationship with God. So their educational programs and family practices and all began to teach all children how to read. But then, of course, once you know how to read the Bible, you can read lots of other stuff. And so this creates this whole market for books and learning to read actually changes your brain, you get a thicker corpus callosum, you process information differently, you get a little worse, a little worse at face processing, potentially. And so there are these interesting downstream effects. And it may be that this created, you know, some have argued this led to the insect Second Industrial Revolution, because in Germany, for example, there were high rates of literacy when everybody was just farmers. But as soon as there was an opportunity where that literacy can be put to work, it was put to work. And you know, this, this allowed the economy to grow faster than otherwise would have, because there was this latent reservoir of of literate

Rufus Pollock 46:03 people. I mean, just to emphasize this, again, I think what's very interesting about this, to go back to a story we had last time is you have sometimes chicken and egg problems. Or we could say it's like, you know, in genetic fitness, or even cultural evolutionary fitness, there's this problem of getting through a valley to get to another peak. So you know, you're at peak here, there's another peak higher up, but between there's a valley, there's no way to get to that higher Valley. And just the example there. Yeah, like, it's really obvious to us that literacy is really valuable. But as people realize, in western US today, it's very costly to learn to eat, it takes a lot of time and effort. That certainly, if you notice, the children, they're not always actually default, enthusiastic about my wife, also, my partner is Taiwanese, you know, learning to read Chinese is like a really intensive effort over many years of rote instruction on the characters and so on sometimes, or whatever it is, you know, this, what you just said, there is like, there's suddenly this moment when it's going to be useful. And particularly, I think it's an example where it's kind of being literal on your own isn't gonna be, you know, biomes definition isn't useful, because you need books, it's something like language where you need to change. So you just get this point that somehow to get to this other Valley, where we had like a large literate pool of population or a large, more educated pool, there was no motivation at the beginning, it wouldn't have been that there was like an economic motivation, because there wouldn't have been a lot of books, etc. But there was this incredible drive culturally, I mean, I, this was an area I was interested in, you know, these descriptions of the plow boy is going to teach himself, you know, he's tired, but he's going to learn to read because he needs to read God's word. There's this incredible motivation to do something that will then turn out to have this huge public good effect that you're describing with collective effect later on.

Joe Henrich 47:54 It's a nice example of the power of religion that kind of create these unexpected conditions are one of the things I don't spend much time on. It's it's explained in a footnote in my where I discussed this price and literacy, but that the other time we know that this happened was after the destruction of this, the Second Temple and seven years II, Judaism becomes goes from a religion of the temple, there's no temple now to a religion of the book where all Jewish men need to learn to read the Torah. Their holy stripped of their holy book, in, in Hebrew, and so they Jewish men start becoming literate. And then this has downstream, it opens up opportunities for them in urban occupations, because you have this whole group of literate men who can then go on to become accountants and do all kinds of urban populations. And they've already done the hard work of learning to read at least one language, so it's easier to learn to read the next language. Right?

Rufus Pollock 48:53 So I think one thing I just want to touch on, and it's difficult to do in a podcast, but I just want to emphasize to readers or maybe we could share a little bit is the array of statistical inner, like, I think, really, this kind of clever, I will tell you that the most positive sense, statistical work that you do to back this up, this isn't just a hypothesis. What's incredible in the book, in the work is that you're able to kind of correlate exposure to this marriage or family program of the church to kind of cultural, particularly psychological effects, but ultimately, if will culture 1000 years later, I mean, today, basically, I mean, you want to briefly summarize, you know, one or two examples of that, what that means, like, you know, what, we can statistically correlate, you know, like, to give a sense of people, but this is not just like a hypothesis dealing with really some really strong statistical basis behind it as well.

Joe Henrich 49:48 Yeah, yeah. And this is this is work I did with Jonathan Schultz, and some co authors and economists, co authors. And what we did is we got the database of the spread of bishoprics Throughout Europe, and what we have with each of the basic bishoprics is a date when it was founded, and then a GPS location. And this allows us to take for, you know, each plot of land in Europe to say how long the people who lived there have been under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, as captured by the diffusion of these administrative centers called bishoprics. And, you know, there's this, you know, you can, you can plot a map, and you can show how the bishopbriggs spread, sometimes areas, say, Spain, or Southern Italy are conquered by powers hostile to the bishop and Rome, the Pope. So we don't count those years when you're when you're not connected to the, to the papal church to the center of Catholicism. And then we can use the number of years that each plot of population has been under the church to then say things about contemporary psychology. So we have these vast surveys of hundreds of 1000s of Europeans in the modern world. And we can get measures of trust and fairness and individualism and conformity from those surveys. And then what we can show is that there's a strong relationship between the number of years under the church and being less conformist, or more individualistic, or more trusting in strangers. We can also get measures of cousin marriage in the 20th century, and show that the more years under the church, the less cousin marriage you have. So that's consistent with with the basic idea of the mechanism, which is this family stuff. And we can also link the cousin marriage to the psychological traits. So we can try to connect all these different thoughts. And surprisingly, I mean, given the depth of this historical data, the results are quite

Rufus Pollock 51:31 strong. Right, and I mean, this, I think, is incredible evidence. I mean, then something only possible really, in the last, funnily enough, the last 2030 years, because we just didn't have the databases, the riches, the psychology bases, we probably didn't have the bitchery database digitized, available to do these regressions. In of what you I think you use this term I've used I think maybe I even borrowed if you had a colleague of mine a few years ago, and it was coming from but the dark, would you call the dark matter of history, I think this is a fantastic time. Which is that, as in physics, we have this dark matter problem. And just for people, not for me, this idea that, hey, our galaxy, without there being a load of matter, we can't see something's not right about our cosmological models, our galaxy should be moving apart fast, and it is or the universe. So this is invisible matter. That explains a lot of stuff in physics. And similarly, I think what you this work, this incredible work you and colleagues have been doing is pointing to this dark matter of history, the culture that we've we kind of feel is important, but we haven't be able to document. So I want to say a little bit about them. You have a chat at the end of your book, I think this is a subtitle. What What do you mean by that? The vision of that and like what we could start to see or what we're seeing and what we LCC is out there. Yeah, so

Joe Henrich 52:59 the the dark matter is meant to capture these culturally influenced features of psychology, like an emphasis on the individual, or this dispositional ism thinking of individuals as imbued with these internal traits, or the trust in strangers. And the idea was that you know, that this may have been created by these family structures, and you know, if these institutions, but this then affects the things that historians See, like law. So Western law, as we talked about is unusual and being individual focused. And you might think, well, people just finally got sensible or something like have some kind of rational explanation that this is the best way to do things. I think the reason they do that laws, because they think they think in a particular way, but we can't see them thinking, right? Because that's that's why it's dark matter. But they're that they're individualist and they have strong individualism, psychology, and they think about dispositions. So they want to assign rights to people. That's this hidden thing inside of people from which we explain why we should do this law or this law or do that. So you can it's manifesting in what historians can see. But the psychology in the background is why one population does one set of things and why another population does another set.

Rufus Pollock 54:10 So I think there are two parts, it's a drug, I think, a really interesting. One is that often it's hidden from our view, but it's hidden from people's view themselves. We have this, I think your part of your work is also this kind of there's been a kind of view that somehow we were the smart monkey optimizing that we've designed things because they were a good idea. And part of the story of this is almost we just hit on things by accident that worked. Often we don't even realize that they're working or why they work. We don't understand why we're processing this particular, you know, type of yam in a particular way, but actually, it's getting rid of the cyanide or whatever it is it's doing. Similarly, we don't lose this just saying you've got to read the Bible or people decide that it's not that like, oh, well then this will lead to a literate population that one day will allow us thing to do X or Y. But then there are these. So what's visible is then law, but even other things, number of patterns, how innovative, the form of capitalism, whatever, all these things, but behind that, are these these psychological mechanisms. But also you just said, that's the kind of dark matter. But there's also even the level behind that, which is the culture, which has often been visible. I mean, we don't we have a lot of difficulty tracking, what are the views and values of people 1000 years ago, let alone compared to today. So traditionally, culture has been extremely difficult to, to study in, it's in, it's in that sense of what exactly are people, you know, we, if we go and interview them, we can find out. But you know, people's books, I mean, that's what people wrote their notebook 100 years ago, is a tiny sample of the population, blah, blah, blah. So there's this double level of it. And I think the big story here is that like the story of physics, that Oh, that is actually way more important, possibly, than the things that we focused on. That's what I'm hearing you say, like, we've often focused on, you know, the great man or the great women of history, you know, this or that invention. But in fact, there's this huge subterranean Kern, or flow, or whatever metaphor of culture and psychology that is driving these other things, or enabling labeling them to happen.

Joe Henrich 56:22 Yeah, and I mean, one of the ways I try to make that point is a lot of scholars like to trace things to the enlightenment. So this is when, you know, the European intellectuals finally start to crystallize some of these ideas. But something like human rights, as I mentioned, you can you can follow the trail of human rights back into the High Middle Ages, as towns began to establish these rules they use to attract citizens to their town, you know, so then they're thinking of them as rights. And there's a couple there that you eventually see later in the Bill of Rights and things like that. So there's this long, centuries long process of developing these ideas. And then, you know, some guys in the Enlightenment kind of crystallized and write it down. But as part of this train of things that's been discussed for centuries prior to that, so they're very much just the people on the spot when you know, you know, national government started to change and become democratic, for example.

Rufus Pollock 57:17 And I just want to read from saying there may be as a slight irony, which is one of the points also in your and others work is that humans have a tendency to agency agent ism, if you like, right, we tend to, like, you know, we want that, you know, it's raining, because the God is making it rain, we have this tendency to anthropomorphize or to agent eyes, the world, I think, is a way and just as you're saying, in history, we have a tendency to want, you know, we want to we know about Voltaire, or will focus on Hitler or some other great, you know, good or bad figure, rather than the underlying currents and changes because that is easier for our brain somehow to cognize about. Yeah.

Joe Henrich 57:55 And one of the points I try to make with people like Voltaire is they're, you know, they're thinking with weird psychology, right? So they have their analytic thinkers, they're breaking things down into parts, and they're, they're assigning properties. And they're thinking about individuals as an important low side, you know, but there are some, but this is this piece of psychology that has been evolving for centuries.

Rufus Pollock 58:20 Okay, so I want to like, wrap up a little bit, this part two, let's just say so what we've seen in part one, where the cultural species, in part two, we've seen a concrete example of cultural evolution acting, there was a variant of the virus, if you like, in, in this moment, very unusual variant in the early church, Catholic Church for marriage and family program. And that operated over centuries to break down traditional clan and family networks, the way that traditionally most societies have operated to scale. And instead, these horizontal connections came up. And with that came a whole different ways of seeing the world, more individualistic, more actual trusting of strangers, etc. And that further accelerated with Protestantism and other things and in the western world led to some very being very unusual psychological traits. And those traits which perhaps, underlie and explain some of the dramatic economic you might say success of the West, maybe now problematic success or runaway capitalism or runaway, a society of at least repaired extremely, you know, led to democracy, innovations in technology and all these kinds of things.