In this episode of the Life Itself Podcast, Rufus Pollock sit down with Professor Joseph Henrich to continue the discussion on the study of cultural evolution.

Discussing the innate human inclination to develop and learn from culture and to transmit this knowledge across generations. This conversation emphasizes that our success as a species is attributed not only to individual intelligence but also our capacity to expand upon ancestral wisdom.

Join us in the conversation as Joseph shares insights around the pivotal role culture and social bonds have in the development and continuation of vital skills and ideas. Wider factors such as group dynamics, environments, and competition are further discussed along with the impact of cognitive processes on cultural transformation.

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.

Transcript

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS people, group, humans, cultural, learn, species, cultural evolution, societies, language, point, bit, brain, patenting, social norms, knowledge, clans, phonemes, process, work, sharing, kinship, transcending, individualism

SPEAKERS Rufus Pollock, Joe Henrich

Rufus Pollock 00:03 So welcome to this special episode of the life itself podcast. I am joined today by Joseph Henrich, the Ruth Moore professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, most recently, two widely read popular books, the weirdest people in the world, and the secret of our success. And he has had a unique career trajectory. And having been a professor across multiple disciplines. Anthropology, economics, psychology and human evolutionary biology. Really welcome Joe back on the podcast again for this special session. And I thought today, we're going to maybe start by looking through the kind of arc of your and your colleagues work, and what this kind of new field of human cultural evolution or culturalology we, what we're what we're learning, and then how that might apply to some, as we come to the later part of the show, how they want applied some of the big questions that we're looking at as a species, you know, how do we learn to cooperate a new scales in the face of things like climate crisis, and so on? So I wanted to start by just maybe tell us a little bit about the how you first kind of the first part of this this kind of secret of our success? And, yeah, us as a cultural species?

Joe Henrich 01:24 Yeah, I mean, how that's how I really got into thinking about all this is asking the question, what makes us human? And what why are our species become so successful and so ecologically dominant? So the answer that I came to is very different from the standard answer, which I take to be that our big brains are good at solving problems. Basically, we're the intelligent species in our brains for their ability to solve problems individually, or what's responsible for that. But I see this the secret of our species success, and what makes us different, is the fact that we can learn from each other. And we're so good at learning from each other. And we live in large social groups, that that can give rise to this process of cumulative cultural evolution. So each generation, the elders pass down some information to the next generation, they add a little bit to it. And over several generations, you can have behavioral retro repertoires, recipes, tools, ways of doing things that are more complex and better adapted to the environment than any individual could could figure out in their lifetime. And this creates two inheritance systems, one's a cultural inheritance system, where knowledge about a toolmaking is getting passed down, and the other is a genetic inheritance system. And then the idea is these have been intertwined and influence each other for hundreds of 1000s of years.

Rufus Pollock 02:42 And so for listeners, we're going to be if you ever want to read on this as obviously, Joe's book, that this, the secret of our success, really will set out some of this even more detail, but just to kind of pick up on things. So first of all, we're not making a judgment here, we're another but just for us, people should be at least you should to be aware of, like when you say we've just become, you know, you know, the apex kind of predator or the dominant species in the ecosystem, like humans have just bred into every, you know, ecological niche and been highly successful there. And then if I just hearing you as the second part is to say, well, there were two, the kind of traditional argument, which just was so smart, is that right? So with just the we have bigger brains or

Joe Henrich 03:29 right, so I mean, I take this standard view of what makes humans special is that we can, you know, apply our brains to solve problems. But, I mean, I use a variety of different lines of evidence to try to persuade readers but one way I try to persuade readers is by going into what I call the Lost European explorer tails. And these are historical cases in which some group usually American or European explorers get stranded in some environment, it might be the Arctic, it might be the islands off of Texas, it could be the Australian Outback, it could be the forests of Panama, the Darien Gap in which they need to survive as hunter gatherers. And you would think if we have these large brains, and we've evolved for 2 million years to be hunter gatherers, we ought to just be able to figure out how to do all the things we need to survive. And yet we flounder, even in places where other you know, groups of humans that have this large body of cumulative knowledge, do find any adolescent can find food, find water, do what they need to, in comparison to other species, where if you drop a group of monkeys into islands off the coast of South Carolina from Africa, they seem to do fine in the you know, there's populated islands off the coast of South Carolina that have lots of African monkeys. So there's this, you know, big difference between humans with our big brains compared to our smaller brain, primate cousins and lots of other animals who have the ability to survive innately. We're just reliant on culture. So we're a species addicted to learning from others essential.

Rufus Pollock 04:58 And so that's the in a, in a nutshell, the secret of our success, why homosapiens kind of made it? Why were the dominant species was because of culture ality, if you like our ability to learn from others, and to, to kind of, to be to be good at that, to develop structures for that, and so on. So what can you say a bit more about that? What, what is it that makes us so good at learning?

Joe Henrich 05:27 Well, there's two different factors. And I think it's important to think about both of them. And one is that we, we have a tremendous capacity to watch others behaviors, and infer underlying strategies, preferences, mental states, all the kinds of things that go into reconstructing behavior, as well as behavioral mimicry. So it can copy body motions and the way other other species can. So there have been lots of experiments with apes and monkeys, you know, there's this expression, monkey see monkey do, we have that expression, because just doing what others do is so easy for us. But it's actually pretty hard. And a lot of other species don't do it very well. It's unclear sometimes whether it's that they can't do it, or they're just not motivated to do it. But the bottom line is they they don't do it. Even when we incentivize them to exactly mimic and stuff, we often can't get them to mimic. Whereas we put children in school in a classroom and you give them a hard problem, their instinct is to look at what the other guy is writing down on his test paper. And the tricky part is getting them not to copy each other and just do their own work. So we're actually inhibiting our natural inclination, which is just to kind of recombine ideas from from your neighbors to figure out how to best answer or solve the problem you want to solve. And then, but there's lots more to the story, of course, which is that, in the secret of our success, I point to a lot of different lines of evidence to suggest that there's been coevolution, between genes and culture. So this may have kicked things off. But this led to institutions and social norms, where there were incentives to cooperate. And then there's a process that myself and others called self domestication, where individuals who didn't go along with the group didn't conform sufficiently broke social norms would get ostracized or kicked out or punished, or, you know, everybody would refuse to marry them or whatever. They had a lower fitness and then this self domesticated our species and meaning it made us more group ish.

Rufus Pollock 07:20 So let's just give a couple of columns that show when you go back, can you tell one story about like, just to give people a sense of these exploits? And it's very vivid in your book of just, I mean, there's, there's, there's the one obviously, the expedition, I think, you turn the story in the book in the kind of North finding the Northwest Passage or whatever, when you just give an example of people being dropped, and just really not surviving. You know, this reduce would be true to you know, today, but can you just give one example of that? And how, like, you know, yeah, just mentioned that briefly.

Joe Henrich 07:52 Well, like I mean, one case that I like is that Birkin wills expedition. So in the town of Melbourne in 1860, it was decided that there would be an expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north. And then the plan was to come back, there was a variety of reasons for this to explore and to get a telegraph cable. But to cut to the chase, these explorers led by Robert Burke, end up stranded along this river in Central Australia, and they need to make a go of it. And you know, they had already been in the outback, they had food and stuff. So it wasn't an emergency situation. It gradually crept upon them. And they imported these camels, and some of the camels had escaped. And when their last camel died, they ended up stranded along Cooper's Creek. And they had to somehow survive, at least until rescues, rescue teams arrive. And they couldn't make the tools to fish. They couldn't find any food to eat, until they happened into one of the Aboriginal villages. And they saw some women processing a sporrow carp, which they thought of as a seed. And they saw this in that. So this is actually social learning, they managed to find some of it, and they ate it. And it seemed like they were getting enough calories from that. And they were getting a little bit of fish from the native. So it looked like maybe they could survive, they had the river, they couldn't leave the river because they didn't know how to find water in the desert, which is something any Aboriginal adolescent could have done. But so they're stranded there, and they seem to be surviving. But it turned out that they lacked the cultural knowledge of how to process the seeds. And so they ended up poisoning themselves, Burke and Will's die. And then their third member kind of is delirious and kind of wanders off into the bush, and he's rescued by the Aboriginal communities. And eventually, a team from Melbourne comes and finds them and they also find the diaries of the two explorer of William wills. And that's how we know the story from those two sources. But this is just a case where there was lots of opportunities to survive. Humans have been hunter gatherers in Australia for 60,000 years, but yet they couldn't do the basic things necessary to survive. Some of their camels escaped and if you know Central Australia, no, it's got lots of feral camels. So the camels survived the last European explorer test.

Rufus Pollock 10:02 So I mean, it's also an citing from the book just to really pull out from the story was they saw people processing this this use of spider cop, I think it was the what? And they saw an eating it, but it actually poison them. Because there are steps in the processing that they didn't see. Is that right? If I remember,

Joe Henrich 10:23 exactly. So they didn't copy well enough, because you have to leech out an enzyme called thyamines. And if you if you get that enzyme, and you get a horrible disease called Berry Berry, and so they didn't properly process it. I mean, lots of natural foods are toxic. People don't realize that. I mean, all of our domesticated foods have had the toxins kicked out. But hunter gatherers often have to process the toxins out of foods, right?

Rufus Pollock 10:45 So just to be really specific, it's a great example. There are others in your book, we might come to where they're really detailed, non obvious steps of what are not obvious why you do those steps, probably maybe not even obvious to the people doing the steps. The Gatherer hunters don't they couldn't explain in a scientific way. Oh, it's because we leech out this enzyme, but they just, they've learned to do this. And if you skip those steps, and I want to bring that because you said this other example of just evidence for us being cultural learners. I think in your book, you also mentioned these experiments done at the Max Planck Institute, for example, looking at child imitation versus, for example, monkey imitation. And if you can, maybe you could summarize, I remember writing stuff about how you can you can do these examples where even you have non unnecessary steps, steps that you can skip, the children will still do those steps, but the monkeys will kind of skip in a way of being smarter. But not, could you can you say a bit about it, because it really helped convey to people what we mean by the level of capacity for cultural learning that humans seem to have developed compared to other very proximate species in our evolutionary tree.

Joe Henrich 11:52 So just to give the big picture, the argument that this evidence all points to is that humans are kind of innate social learners like we come into the world. And very quickly, we begin trying to learn everything we can from the environment, we're selective about who we learn from, and we're really good at it. So automatic, unconscious, etc. So developmental comparative psychologists have done experiments where they compare a chimpanzees orangutangs to humans, and human children. So they use young children like two and a half year olds, the idea being this is before schooling, and before they learn too much cultural knowledge. And what they find is they do a battery of 18 different cognitive tests. And they find that the chimps in particular are as good as the human children, or even better and like the tool using tasks. But the place where the children kind of blow the roof off the test is when it comes to copying a demonstrator to solve a problem. And the chimps are and gorillas are all at a pretty low level. And I think to actually find a good task where they could even be on the same scale was difficult because the human children are just so automatic, and unconscious, and really good at imitation. And then what they do is they do experiments where they have a multi step process, and humans will copy all the steps, but chimps will drop them when they seem unnecessary. So this is interesting a degree of over imitation. And this fits in with a picture in which humans had to learn lots of things where they didn't understand the causality of each step. And this is true, even if you're making a tool, whether your fire hardening arrows or making poison for your arrows, or detoxifying, you know, Plant Resources, there's going to be lots of steps, you don't know exactly what's going on, you just know that the you know, the outcome is one that's been passed down over many generations. So you can do this and get to be older and successful. So kids do it. And so this seems to be a feature of our species.

Rufus Pollock 13:42 I mean, just for for people listening, I was thinking the Karate Kid example, you know, just do what they say, you know, paint the fence, scrub the floor, don't understand why. And then, of course, in a very American way, he wants to know why. Rather than just imitate, but I think just to just to really emphasize what is extraordinary is that humans will do that. And you said, even this morning step test, which he describes a detour, which I think is getting food out of some bottle or some other thing with a with a dog. There's a lot of things. And the other thing that you mentioned from that, so that the chimps what you actually just imagine that what chimps will actually do is they'll skip steps, in a way they're being smarter than an unnecessary but children will, you aren't, you're actually keeping every step even when it was on necessary or unnecessary. They're very good imitators. The other point, I think you mentioned from some of those studies in your book, which you just mentioned, which is also quite exceptional or interesting is that even young children show preferences in life, like they are able to distinguish good people to learn from bad people to learn from, is that right?

Joe Henrich 14:45 Yeah. And that really impressed the developmental psychologists because, you know, initially they were pitting strangers against mom and they figured the kid would always want to copy mom because you know, the figure mom's gonna want to give you good information. But if it was clear that the stranger was more competent in the environment, that intent was in, then the infant will learn from

Rufus Pollock 15:04 people who aren't mom. Right? Which again, so just to go back, there are also a couple of things that we're trying to say here is that what's interesting is species have other species have the to some degree. I mean, you mentioned because I think a really great example of a elephant and you know, memories of where water was when there was drought, I think you have some examples of this. There is clearly learning in other species, we know that we know now, no, but it's somehow there's this kind of step change. And this goes back, you talk a little bit in the book, maybe we could come to that briefly here of like how that happened. There was some kind of gene culture co evolution as the benefits of cultural learning that's turned on, as you mentioned, or, or encouraged these kinds of factors of of being even better imitators. You want to say a little bit about that about how we how we think that kind of take off happened, because then there seems to be this huge difference between a homosapiens as it were, and the next closest in this area.

Joe Henrich 16:00 Yeah. So I mean, just to emphasize what you said is, you know, chimpanzees, orcas, whales, and other species seem to have, you know, rely on cultural learning. There's traditions between different populations, they learn valuable skills. So there's definitely culture in other species. But the other species don't seem to have the degree of this complex cumulative cultural evolution, which we have in humans, which seems to have driven so many features of our biology. And then so in trying to figure out why that might have happened, the key trade off to think about is, you know, if you've got to solve a problem, you can either do it individually by a prompt plying brainpower, so you can think of natural selection is am I going to invest in bigger brains to do more individual learning? Or am I going to invest in bigger brains to be better at learning from others. Now, initially, when the population is not very cultural, most of the time, there's not going to be anybody in the population that has useful stuff to learn. So there's always going to be a bias to make a bigger brain for learning the individual stuff, because there's the resources isn't out there, it's only once you've been culture for a while, so that there's this valuable information out in the minds of others that, you know, it really pushes you to say, always rely on social learning, because you can tap into this rich array. And of course, that depends on the group size, and how much interaction you have with them, and how good you are at those kinds of things. So there was a bunch of conditions that occur sometime after about 3 million years ago. What is that? You know, that would have been mammals in general will live in larger social groups, if they're under threat of predators. So if you look at the predator guild, say, 2 million years ago, there were a lot more dangerous animals and, you know, African savannas and whatnot. And so our ancestors would have been a primate that lives in larger groups. And especially if we spend time in savannas and stuff that would have, so big groups are good, that's going to give you more chances to have someone useful in the group to learn from, as opposed to chimps who live in the forest, usually, not always, but usually, and tend to hang around with mom a lot. So there's less opportunities for for learning from people other than mom, individuals, although there was also a change in weather. So climate was changing, and there was environmental variation. And there's kind of a sweet spot, lots of theoretical models, going back to the 1980s suggest that if you have an intermediate amount of environmental change, that can really favor social learning. If it's too slow, you just coated in the genes, like lots of species have behaviors coded in their genes. And then if it's too fast, within one lifetime, then you should do it by individual learning. So it's this intermediate. And so that seems to be you know, in the right place, roughly speaking around the right time. And of course, you know, having hands help. So you want to a primate that has, you know, groundswell and so there's a whole bunch of factors you can look at, but that's how we make the case on when and why this was humans that went through this takeoff process.

Rufus Pollock 18:55 I really wanted to take a moment to reflect on this. I mean, this is what kind of an amazing I mean, a breakthrough in a kind of think about like, why, why kind of us. And the kind of the elegance of the explanation and the richness, the explanation. And also just to understand the different streams of evidence, you're just summarizing, have had to come together for us to see that. And I just want to pull out a couple of things. So one thing you said at the beginning, if you can say a bit more about the chicken and egg aspect of this, why it's not going to be common, if I understood you, and you maybe could say a bit more is that basically, there's kind of a problem, which is for cultural learning to be useful, there needs to be culture for me to learn from and otherwise, I should just kind of basically go from a genetic point of view, I should just be optimizing for being smarter, rather than being a good learner or adapting in some other way to my environment. And so the problem is I kind of need culture to become a cultural learner for it to be worth doing. So this is kind of like this is kind I need the chicken and egg problem is, that's one of the things you were alluding to there's going to make this a hard, hard Rubicon to the metaphor, but a hard jump to make.

Joe Henrich 20:09 Yeah. And also the the way to set up the puzzle is that, you know, humans, obviously, culture is great. We have all this fancy technology that's a consequence of this cumulative cultural evolution process. Why don't we see it in lots of species? And the the explanation for that is there's a kind of fitness valley, in the sense that you have that problem of, you know, your selection is always going to prefer to invest in what's going to get you the right answer now, not what might eventually generate some cultural knowledge and allow for your hands, you know, your descendants to take advantage of this cultural knowledge. That's not typically what natural selection does. So, you know, this, this creates this valley that you have to go through in order to get it out there. And the question is, what makes that most possible. And I was pointing to the climatic change rates, and the being in a large group, having hands being a ground dwelling primate, all these things that are going to help you get across that primates also have a neuron advantage, we, we pack more neurons per per square inch of brains than other species. So you know, there's going to be a primary,

Rufus Pollock 21:10 there's gonna be a primate, so exactly, but it also what I'm trying to say is, it's like, you know, people don't say, Oh, look at whales, or, you know, look at elephants, you say, we do have a lot of evidence now, which I think is, you know, is a big thing of having more humility, that there are many other species that do do cultural learning. But at this level, and this kind of takeoff, why it's hard to get this takeoff, and I think it's a story, it's going to come back in the software story. So just in a moment about cultural evolution itself, is that there's kind of valleys when you talk about valleys just for listeners we're talking about here is, if you think of a landscape, I know for people and evolution is very common listeners, you can imagine a three dimensional valley, you know, valleys, and hills representing fitness, or some kind of, you know, evolutionary kind of optima. And the point you're getting at just to spell out to people is that the problem here is you, it wouldn't need to be optimal for any given individual to kind of basically become a cultural learner at the beginning, why, why would being a better cultural learner would almost be, you'd have dedicated brain space that rather than like being smarter, and that would be basically less advantageous. And because at the beginning, there's no culture to learn very much. So this is this problem. And you explain these factors that would have led to there being enough kind of cultural value being being a primate being ground dwelling, being in the savanna with lots of predators being in large groups, that would make it kind of somehow able to get through that valley. And the point is that there's a huge payoff, you're coming back to the beginning is where this we then become apex predator, because cultural learning is just awesome. Once you get it working once there's enough cultural learning, but just to mention a common point about that there's of scale points, I think another point we could just touch on from your book is examples of cultural die out. So you have some really great examples in your book as well, of when it goes wrong. In a way, I think you mentioned one, which is certain groups of Eskimos who lose certain skills. So just to manage this, the problem of culture is you are dependent on a certain degree of scale, for that to be the expertise around to learn from so maybe you could tell us a little bit about those companies?

Joe Henrich 23:14 Yeah, so one of the really pretty direct implications of this idea is that the ability of a group to have this cumulative cultural evolution to generate innovation depends on the size of the group and the number of interconnected minds, because you're really dependent on the flow of information among individuals to generate this process. So if anything causes your group to suddenly be constrained, or reduces your population size, it'll actually mean you can support less cultural knowledge, because the cultural knowledge is contained at the community or at the population level. So you know, there are famous cases in Tasmania, when Tasmania gets isolated from the rest of Australia, where there seems to be a loss of tool complexity. And then ethnographically, the polar Inuit get essentially marooned in Northern Ireland, because they, they get an infectious disease from European explorers, probably, that takes out some of the oldest people, which took away knowledge about how to make kayaks. And then if you don't have kayaks, you're marooned in northern Greenland. And then they start to lose other kinds of cultural knowledge. Now, they eventually reconnected with the rest of the sort of extended Inuit brain, and a whole bunch of new knowledge poured into the polar anyway, then they got all this stuff back, you know, 50 years after this started. But you can kind of see the process and action. So we really think as a group, and we innovate as a group, and so the collective brain

Rufus Pollock 24:36 right, and it shows you in reverse that it's so important. If you lose a cultural knowledge, it's not worth you wouldn't, you'd be in trouble brand.

Joe Henrich 24:44 Yeah, you'd have we depend on all these other minds to maintain complexity. So if, especially if it hits the most knowledgeable members of the group, which might be the oldest members, as you know, in a world without writing, you know, you're going to store all this knowledge in other people's heads, and then you can lose

Rufus Pollock 24:59 it all. Okay, so point one is where the cultural species what and point two was, you know what that means were highly cultural were designed for cultural learning. And we talked a bit about that how that might have come across how he crossed the Rubicon to become a code specie. Well, that's not easy. So what? What is this what you want to say a bit more about? Like, how did cultural ality evolve? You talked about the kind of this genetic level as invitation and as intergroup competition, just say a bit more about that, then how how did it get sped up? Like how did it? Yeah, well,

Joe Henrich 25:32 I mean, one of the key elements is this larger group thing, right? Because the larger the group, the more people you can learn from, the more valuable can be at the individual level. So that's the sort of sociality piece so you want to think of cultural as learning from others, right? Lots of animals are cultural, but they may or may not be social. So songbirds are cultural, they learn songs from other birds, but they don't hang out in Big Bird groups. I mean, some birds do. But songbirds can be solo, and they can hear songs from nearby. So you can be cultural without being social, and you can be social like cows, without being cultural. So social media like to hang out in groups. Humans are social and cultural, in the sense that we became more social. Probably a partially as a consequence of the value of culture. But sculpture also gives rise to social norms. So once we start learning from other people, we can learn rules for social behavior, like don't exploit people don't steal from them. And then we get, we also learn that reputational standards for which we judge others, so if you get both the behavior and the standards for judging others, you can create social norms. So these are situations where you have a behavior like, cooperate in house building, when someone's house gets knocked down. And if anybody doesn't do that, then people think badly of them, their social consequences, material consequences. And so they don't want to do that. So everybody does this thing, this cooperative thing, say house building. Now that same thing can apply to taboos, which might not have any cooperative input. So you get the evolution of social norms with once you have culture. And I see that as the basis of institutions. So first, you get some social norms, and then they get packaged. So marriage, for example, is an institution because there's a bunch of social norms that regulate who you can marry, what the responsibilities are of the individuals, what the roles of the families are. And so then you have an institutional package, and just a set of social norms. So I think this gives us a ground up way of understanding where institutions come from.

Rufus Pollock 27:32 And what we're saying or to go back is that, so I'm already a cultural species as, as humans, and I want in a way, I'm also a social species. But also the more social I bet, the larger groups I get, the more I can be cultural, the more benefit there is of being cultural. And in addition, cultural get coaching, this cultural skills and irritation allow me to create these kind of rich norms that support larger social groups. So there's this kind of like other feedback loop that's driving larger groups and like more cultural learning. And even you'd say this shows up genetic that you talked about earlier about domestication. So what kind of changes in our in our, in our kind of deep beings started happening out of this process?

Joe Henrich 28:21 Once you have social norms, there's going to be all this pressure to go along with social norms. And so things like conformity, concerns about reputation. I mean, even little kids will assume that a behavior that's frequently done is a social norm. Now, it might turn out not to be a social norm, but the kids tend to assume it coming in, they readily want to enforce it. There's lots of cool experiments where you give kids a rule, and you show them how to do something, and they'll start enforcing it on a puppet or something like that. Yeah, so

Rufus Pollock 28:50 can you say a bit about an experiment like that, just to describe it a little detail, sorry, to come in?

Joe Henrich 28:54 Just for sure. Yeah, so the classic experiments, a lot of young children. So you know, two, three year olds are brought into the laboratory, and they're introduced to a puppet, the puppet then goes to sleep. And then they see the experimenter do a complicated task in some particular way. And then the kid is given a chance to do it. And they measure how much the kid imitates and how good and imitator the kid is, and then Max wakes up the puppet, and then Max is given a chance to do it. And what Max does is he tries to do something totally different because of course, he was asleep during the demonstration. And you know, the measurement is, what does the kid do, and Max starts doing this thing in a in a non standard way. Or at least in this case, from the kids point of view. It's just the way that the demonstrator, the adult didn't do it. And you know, very frequently, the kid will start correcting Max will be like, don't do it that way. You know, Max will keep going with his non normative way of doing it. And they basically measure how upset the kid gets.

Rufus Pollock 29:54 And does the kid get quite often get quite upset, basically. Yeah.

Joe Henrich 29:57 And they'll be saying, No, you're doing it wrong. wrong and they've tried to interfere and correct the puppet. And the experimenters use a puppet like, you know, the sometimes the use of puppets bothers me but the kid feels very comfortable with the puppet. If you've used another person, then the kid might not want to interfere with an adult or interfere with this other person, but with the puppet that kid sort of feels comfortable to, to express their concerns.

Rufus Pollock 30:22 And so what would say is in very young children, and this might even suggest that it almost kind of or, you know, it's not culturally learned, there's this willingness to impose, or to set to instruct, and even kind of sank tail off other people for doing things in a non standard way for a really early point. Yeah. Which is you're saying it's almost at this like, this is now this cultural learning of norms almost got inbuilt and the enforcement of it into our into our nature in a way.

Joe Henrich 30:52 Right, right. So every human society that we've studied has some kind of social norms, kids reliably develop it. So it looks like we have enormous psychology. So that's one feature of this self domestication process. Another one is just we're relatively docile. So my colleague Richard Wrangham likes to emphasize that we're relative to other apes, we're low on reactive aggression. When someone slights us or much, we get much less upset than, than our chimpanzee cousins, for example. So that's another way in which we seem to be self domesticated. Something that I like to emphasize is that another piece of this kind of social puzzle might be that we've evolved to use symbolic markers, or what people call ethnic markers, to figure out how others are going to behave. So this folk sociology, so if you have a world of social norms, you're gonna have different groups, different groups have different social norms, so they're behaviorally different. You know, one group might build their houses in circles, and one group might build their houses in squares, or one group might require to paying a bride price. So husbands pay the woman's family for marriage, and it might go the other way, dowry and a different group. So just different social norms. And if your one piece of psychology that seems to pop up all over the world is to see these and once and these are associated with, say, different markers like dialect or language or something. So people readily infer behavior, once they know someone's ethnic group membership, see, or their dialect or whatnot. So this seems to be something that would readily evolve by this gene culture co evolutionary process, because cultural evolution goes first and creates different norms and different groups. And these are marked by different visual markers like dress or dialect or something like that. And then a psychology that associates those is going to be able to navigate that world more readily. And so even same kind of thing, you can do experiments with little kids. And you'll see that they'll preferentially learn from and befriend people who speak language the way mom does. So they seem to be using dialect cues, for example, to figure out who to interact with.

Rufus Pollock 33:05 So very early on, again, this aspect, we talked about identifying people like me, or people who are expert in very young children, which again, is another aspect of being a cultural species. Right. Right. And, which is basically trying to, in this case, trying to find proxies for basically good learning. People to learn from

Joe Henrich 33:28 Yeah, so kids, we said, there's lots of evidence that kids use this competence and prestige and like me, and but one of the likely signals is speaks my dialect, right? Exactly, is there you learn the norms that are going to be relevant for you, and later in life, because you're going to tend to interact with people who speak with your own dialect. And this helps us understand things like the basis of racism and whatnot, because these are phenotypic markers that people automatically and unconsciously assume go along with underlying norms underlying lives. So it's the foundation of stereotyping.

Rufus Pollock 33:59 Right? Right. And which, which is basically, statistically, in at least in the human past is statistically reliable and useful. And then something that you notice a lot of, okay, and I think, I mean, just to make one other point. And the other thing that I think, in your work that you talk a lot and is relevant here is the cultural genetic evolution. So we're just to mention again, here, you know, cultures are starting to be culture I can learn from, I've already got a little bit of a cultural learning species, for whatever reason, I've got better. There's no more culture, I can learn from that my I'm gonna get ever better at being a cultural learner genetically, like you might call nature. But there are other also examples you detail a whole list in your book. But I mean, I just want I always remember standing out you could say a bit about with like, long distance running and water containers, which is something I know we always think, oh, yeah, you know, humans are good at long distance running. I kind of knew that fact. But this point you made in the book where you could tell a bit about that, that would make no sense without cultural artefacts. Can you say a little bit about that example? Other examples?

Joe Henrich 34:58 Yeah. So this is a great example actually spearheaded by my colleague, Dan Lieberman, in which he noticed that we have a whole bunch of anatomical changes that make it clear that we've evolved anatomically to be good long distance runners. And one of the cool things that's part of that system, this would be a physiological component, is we're really good sweaters. So we're the sweatiest A, we have all these sweat glands all over our bodies, that, you know, when it dumps out the sweat, it actually provides a cooling, assuming your, your kit doesn't help much when you're walking. But if you're running, it creates this breeze, which, which helps cool you down. That's a fascinating system. But if you analyze it from an engineering point of view, it has a flaw in that it doesn't have we don't have a water container. Like you know, horses, for example, can drink huge amounts of water and they sweat too. But they're they're much more able to hold huge amounts of water in their bellies. And then and then use it for cooling where were we don't have big bellies. In fact, our bellies have shrunk in compared to our A cousins. So the question is, how do we do that, and when you study hunter gatherers who actually engage in long distance running for persistence hunting, so that's the origin of this, we think, is that humans in different populations can actually chase game down until it collapses from heat exhaustion. So we have this tremendous ability to run and process our heat. But then yes, well, how are they able to do that, and one of the ways they do it is they rely on exterior water containers. So you know, you can use long tubes, you can use skins, you can know where to find water, you get water from greed reeds, or underground tubers, that kind of thing. So this is a thing where the package is actually a culturally evolved way of carrying water or finding water. And then these genetic adaptations that allow us to run it's only when those things are together, that persistence hunting can actually work. And Lodge is put in what I really liked the example. So the one other piece of the puzzle is that, how do we because we don't run as fast as analog, for example. So how do we do it? Well, we have a large body of culturally transmitted tracking knowledge. So we can track the animal but like, I don't know how to track an animal. But well, hunters in the Kalahari can track animals because they've acquired all this knowledge about how to track.

Rufus Pollock 37:16 So this is just absolutely this kind of like, the fact that we're great at running, which is clearly a genetic, you know, physiological changes in our bodies. I think another point you mentioned is just not normally about our sweating, but that we can run at different speeds. I think there's another point you mentioned the book that, which I found fascinating, which is that animals kind of have only a few different speeds, they can run out like a horse and kind of gallop, they can can, and it can walk, whereas humans can run to the exact speed to kind of drive animal into heat exhaustion. But all of these factors don't make any sense without this cultural knowledge, like how to carry water long distances, or find water. So this is a really great example of like our genetic evolution, and cultural evolution happening the same time. And I guess this wants to bring up a metaphor, I don't know. It's a bit dubious in the cognitive sciences. But you know, the kind of like, hardware software metaphor of kind of, we've got this kind of hardware, the brain or the default, our body and so on, and we've got the software and we've got evolution at both levels, and that they're in to kind of enter playing, I guess, what's the metaphor you would use for this, that you, you're communicating this kind of this interplay of these two dynamics? Yeah,

Joe Henrich 38:26 I mean, I just think about it as genetic and cultural evolution having an interplay. The only thing that bothers me about the hardware software analogy is that cultural actually gets in and shapes are brain connections. So there's a sense in which people sometimes think it's, if it's cultural, it's non biological, but cultural shapes our brains and such that people who learn to read, for example, have different wiring in their heads than than non readers. So that's the only time I think the software hardware can go because the culture actually shapes the hardware to in a sense, and maybe the

Rufus Pollock 38:56 hardware does change. Would you just at this moment, want to say a little bit more about that and reading I mean, that brings a 14 I know, into the weirdest people in the world, but want to say a bit about that this moment. Now you've mentioned it. Yeah.

Joe Henrich 39:07 So I mean, one of the things and that anchors is also in secret of our success, which is the idea that, you know, our brains expanded, so as to provide space to acquire, store organize all this large body of cultural knowledge, including things like heuristics and attention, biases, and features of psychology that allow us to better better navigate the world. You know, so depending on where you grew up, you'll be sensitive to different smells, you can hear different phonemes. So it actually affects aspects of perception. And so while we're growing up ontogeny, again, in an environment, our brains are actually adapting so as to better process information for navigating those social worlds. So it physically changes our brain. We have this kind of dualistic way of thinking where people think, well, genes shaped our brains, and then we sort of pour in the culture stuff and it doesn't really do and actually the culture is rewiring things to allow the information To be processed in an adaptive ways.

Rufus Pollock 40:04 And can you say that a bit in that example of reading and literacy and how that changes our brain?

Joe Henrich 40:11 Yeah. So, when you learn to read, especially as a kid, you get specialized circuitry in your left hemisphere. And it's, you know, it creates this thing the neuroscientists call a letterbox, where in every language where you learn to read, you seem to get it in roughly the same place and moves around a little bit. Some, there's some thinking that it actually impinges on the facial recognition part of our left hemisphere, which is why literate people are very right hemisphere biased, for facial recognition. So it's actually changing the neuro geography and exactly where things get processed. Object Recognition is around the same area. So you're learning to recognize these very specific letters. But you can see big differences because when you when you have people look at letters that in the language and the script that they've learned to read, then you get activation like crazy in this letterbox area. But if you have the look at some, you know, Egyptian hieroglyphics or cuneiform or, you know, if they don't read Chinese and Chinese, then you don't get activation, it just looks like regular objects.

Rufus Pollock 41:10 So just the point here is saying this cultural artifact, which is reading, which is a cultural invention, when you learn that as a child, it alters your, your, your neurology, you get a whole area, and you also you actually diminishes potentially your capacity in other ways, like facial recognition, or it certainly moves it out of left hemisphere, the right hemisphere.

Joe Henrich 41:33 It also like for example, it thickens your corpus callosum. So that has all kinds of effects on things that don't have to do with reading. But just through the practice of doing this, you get this, this information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres gets thicker.

Rufus Pollock 41:50 So to go back, and I know we're abusing, and she was saying, like, it's imagine the software and hardware, but where the software that what we run, the kind of hardware gets optimized, which is to some extent true. I mean, the example I have at the moment is we're now running in computers, at least we're running a lot of stuff that, you know, neural nets and people like GPUs, for those RAM CPUs, these general posting units, which come from, you know, actually graphics software, and now like hugely in demand versus traditional CPUs, and we kind of, there's at least I know, it's like an intention replacement. But there's sort of this analogy, what we're doing. And I guess, what, what are the limits of that? I just guess what I ask ourselves is like, at, we've obviously, you just said, you change the corpus callosum. This, I mean, this has a lot of implications for like, who we can become as a species in a way like, this is a kind of cultural genetic coevolution. I think you're even asking there's three layers, we might say there's genetic, which almost what gets transmitted, there's your brain as it gets structured during a lifetime. And as a software, it's almost like we need something in between, it's like, I don't know, I'm gonna get very like geeky now, but it's, you know, software, there's what's called the programmable ROM, like rewritable memory. And then there's like, the four core hardware. In this kind of analogy, we're how we put it, you know, how much plasticity Do you think there is, in what we can create in terms of a way of being?

Joe Henrich 43:16 Yeah, that's a that's a great question. And I mean, the only way that I know to answer that is just to look at what people are capable of learning. I tend to like to look across societies because at least if something is the regular practice, in a society, you know, that most people there can learn it. But, you know, there seem to be differences at the level of perception. So I mean, visual acuity varies across societies, on populations that were you grow up to be large and underwater, have much clearer vision underwater than societies that don't grow up foraging underwater. Societies that make hunter gatherers that you sent a lot can pick up more different they have rich vocabularies for describing scents and they can pick up smells that that non foragers agriculturalists, who live nearby can pick up. And then there are these famous like, the mental abacus, which I discussed in the secret of our success, where you learn how to make complex calculations using an abacus, but then you can put the abacus down and manipulate the abacus in your head. And then you can make these amazing seems like miraculous calculations, using the mental abacus that you never could have done if you hadn't done the training. So I mean, that, you know, things way outside of my intuitions about what humans are capable of certainly seems to be possible. I just don't we just don't know how far it goes. I don't think I mean, the effects of meditation, for example, seem to be profound in some societies, almost everybody learns to meditate so that kind of thing.

Rufus Pollock 44:47 That is one really close I should just say, you know, life itself heart you know, we're very interested in meditation, other kinds of practices like that. And maybe it just take us off. guard a little bit of a direction to the weirdest people in the world. Because one of the things that we we come out to is that these practices, and our evolution tended towards more sociality. That's that's one thing, because on the one side, it's a bigger collective brain. And, and on, and that what that means is we'd self domesticated. So I want to and then say a little bit what would you say on that side? What kind of things allowed us to scale? Maybe we could talk a little bit about religion or other parts? What allows us to scale that collective as a species? Because obviously, just to talk about animals, most animals don't exist in that large groups is that, you know, I mean, there's Dunbar's number famously, which was just about the size of the brain or something. But what? Yeah, can we talk a bit about that and the work there?

Joe Henrich 45:53 Well, there's a, there's a whole bunch of different techniques that humans have used. I think one of the most fundamental techniques is to begin with the sort of instincts we share with other primates to be kinder and more cooperative with close relatives. And then what humans seem to have done is to use norms to say, well, we're going to call a set up your cousins, your brothers and sisters, and then you're supposed to behave towards them, like brothers and sisters. So your kin, your innate kin instincts give you the intuitions, and then the social norms help to enforce it to make sure you actually do treat them more cooperative. And this expands the family and makes, you know, can groups more cooperative and more corporate in the sense of having a large group that's very cooperative. And another trick is ritual. So a growing body of evidence from psychology shows that sort of moving in rhythm, to music and song, ecstatic dancing, going through terrifying rites, these are all things you find in rituals around the world. And a wide range of evidence suggests that they help build bonds amongst people who are co experiencing them. So it looks like societies have figured out ways to use religious ritual to build tighter bonds amongst community. So now you have family units, and you're building bonds amongst these larger sets of families. So you're beginning to get communities and villages and clans and things like that. And then religion also begins to use supernatural agents. So in some societies, like the one one of my students, mon Vir Singh studied, he showed that there was a crocodile spirit in mentality, which is an island in Indonesia, where people believe if you don't share properly with the clan, that the crocodile Spirit will come and inflict sickness on you. And then he has lots of cases where people got sick, and they just figured it was the crocodile spirit. And so all these efforts, expensive rituals are conducted to try to appease the crocodile spirit. But this is seen as punishment, for not sharing well with the clan. So that's a case where there's supernatural agent enforcing sharing with the clan. But then over time, that God seems to get bigger and more powerful, and enforce cooperation and pro sociality in larger and larger groups. So religion seems to be one of the ways in which human societies have scaled up pro sociality.

Rufus Pollock 48:14 And I want to flag that as just a major theme, I think both your work but the interest that people could come to that work and certainly icon, like how do we scale pro sociality? How do we get more cooperative as a species? And you say, I mean, it just to reemphasize, you humans are kind of exceptional in many ways, on the level the scales that they've got to. And just to say, like, again, there's this, there's this vat, I think there's a chicken and egg problem again, or like in economics, we see kind of the prisoner's dilemma, like, there's always this problem of like, there's a benefit of us cooperating, there's always like, if, you know, we can solve climate change, it's going to benefit everyone on the planet, if we can do better at addressing climate crisis. However, any one of us wants to go, I don't know, to Barbados on holiday on our fly, or we want to do whatever, you know, whatever it is, that isn't the proper social action. So to go back, you know, even you had this issue earlier of like, why would even become a cultural species? Why would you invest in like cultural learning? Like they can kinetic level? Why would your brain like focus on that versus just getting smaller? Similarly, there's always this aspect, any group of this group dynamic and you're saying we kind of use these, these kind of the basic level of genetic which is okay, I'd have some altruism towards my, my brother or my daughter or my, you know, or my sister because they're generally related to me, but we somehow kind of like hijack it in a way or like reuse it by turning my my set my kind of kin into my brothers and sisters and so on. And I think But there's some limit though, traditionally in human history to that, I mean, it's been there'd been these breakthroughs don't talk a little bit more precisely, human history. Well, that's like for long periods, or maybe the example you have the Ela heater, would give a common example of what this looks like, in maybe you kind of gather Hunter on an earlier stage of human cultural evolution.

Joe Henrich 50:23 Yeah, I mean, so. So big background would be that over most of human history, as best we can tell humans lived in relatively small scale groups. So think about, you know, foraging bands or whatnot, those populations might have gotten larger in some kinds of environments, they were probably interconnected through marriage with other groups. So there seems to be archaeological evidence of something like a tribal identity or something like that, you know, contemporary tribal populations that have seen been seen in lots of places. But then sometime after the origins of agriculture, societies,

Rufus Pollock 50:53 what size would those be sorry, just to give people a sense?

Joe Henrich 50:57 Well, I mean, we're not really sure. But probably, communities would be 300 or so maybe, maybe up to 500? It depends where you are. I mean, famously, in New Guinea, there was seem to be this 300 limit to the to the size of communities. I mean, some people say it's basically 75 adult men, and then you start getting problems if you get beyond that. In other places, you know, number in Australia seems to be 500. But these are very widespread groups. There's lots of norms about marriage that helped integrate these groups. So sort of, you know, you have your local community. And then the question is how interwoven is that community with other communities. The case you mentioned, Arapesh, we're lucky to Arapesh is a great case. Because, you know, there's this group that has adopted this, they have this ritual cult, and they're very aggressively expanding and driving out other groups, they seem to have powerful rituals that help bond them together. And in preparing to defend themselves, there were sort of refugees being driven out of this population, who were able to report to the community. This this relatively was a smaller community. What about this cult, and about the gods and the way they did the rituals and whatnot. So this community of Elohim, begins adopting these in about 1870. And it causes them to reorganize their society in a way that allowed them to grow much larger, because it was interlocking was creating all this interdependence between the clans, what it turned out to be just clan Gods got misinterpreted by the folks in Ila heater to be these, these the gods of this cult. And so they essentially, by mistake created a bigger God, a God that was the god of the entire community, and not just the clan, because they had their own clan gods, so they weren't going to replace those. So this became a bigger job. And they would do these elaborate rituals, which forced different members of different clans to work together to satisfy this stuff, to satisfy the God. And this created all these bonds between the folks in the Ila Heater. And then it allowed them to be extremely successful, because then they had able to maintain a large territory, lots of groups wanted to come and join to protect themselves from this aggressively expanding group. So they became this very unusual society that anthropologists encountered in the 1960s. That had, and it's sort of larger environments, about 2500 people. And that might sound small by modern standards, but it was huge compared the standards were all the other communities were just about 300. So it was much safer, because they could put, you know, these lots of lots of guys on the battlefield, whereas the other groups couldn't. And so, so this was a huge, successful and then it was a puzzle, because, you know, in usual fashion, the anthropologists were saying, well, the 300 limit is set by ecology, you know, clearly it wasn't set by ecology because this other group managed to scale up to 2500. But it's just an example of, of how human societies scale up through transmission and ritual and adding a couple of mistakes which improve the institution a bit.

Rufus Pollock 53:56 So just to recap this, there's a group there's one group the Arapesh who are aggressively expanding

Joe Henrich 54:03 the Arapesh weren't expanding it was the Abelan,

Rufus Pollock 54:06 so the who,

Joe Henrich 54:07
it's A B, E, L A N.

Rufus Pollock 54:11 So they're expanding there's refugees from this group who are being driven out by the expanding group they go to the Illa heater is that right? And And the point was that most groups were only 300 and they imported a bunch you know that the illegal mic oh my god, this is other group coming. What can we learn about their you know, their gods or their practices that we should adopt to protect ourselves? So can you give some examples you said it kind of led to this group click to bow a clans? You mean, like kinship groups within the larger community? Yeah. So the fact about Yeah, how did this work?

Joe Henrich 54:46 So all these groups are basically clans and so the so the size of your community hinges on your ability to keep these distinct family groups which are bonded by all this stuff I mentioned, you know, this beliefs to who's your brothers and sisters and You're related to an ancestor and you cooperate on that basis, then the key is to get the clans to cooperate. And so the rituals that they imported and so this other group, which was aggressively expanding was a really successful group, the background belief in the society was while the gods must be on their side, so in order to communicate and get the gods on your side, you have to do rituals. And so they copy these guys rituals thinking, you know, they're getting the secret of their expansion, what's what's making them successful in their expansion. And they start, you know, they get their own interpretation of the rituals, because it's a little bit garbled in translation, they want to copy exactly what these guys are doing, right, because it's a ritual, it's, it's opaque, you don't know why it works. So you just have to do it exactly. But they inject some mistakes. And some of the things require members of the different clans to do things. There's a bunch of different contexts in which this comes up and basically supply food or other kinds of things to members of the other group, as part of a ritual. And they also are in these groups that cross cut the clans. So they're put into these ritual groups that mean you're cooperating with other members from other clans to accomplish these tasks. So it's kind of re cutting up the groups in a way, and then having them work together to do these ritual things, which the people think this is for the benefit of a god. But it's actually what the argument I make is that the activities actually bond the men together from these different clans. And so it's creating cross clan bonds.

Rufus Pollock 56:35 So it's kind of like we've got the Montagues and the Capulets. Well, in this case, they're not enemies, but they're kind of the kind of friends or the clans in the same community, but they're not really they're still different clans. And we're doing a bunch of stuff where we have to kind of do things with the other group. The other aspect, I think you mentioned, I just want to bring it out. And the word is they also do more kind of initiation rituals, I remember they like ended up with like, expansion, a number of initiation rituals, is that right?

Joe Henrich 56:59 That's one of the one of the key things that this group had is it was a really complicated set of rituals that men have to go through, as they hit a various age milestones, they move up in seniority and power within the group. But in order to go through those rituals, they had to rely on people from the other clans. And so this creates a sense of interdependence among the men as they rely on each other to move them up through these different ritual categories.

Rufus Pollock 57:27 I mean, I know this sounds we just to, again, to take some insights for our modern predicaments. I mean, I was always in Europe, there's a kind of Erasmus program, and you may never have heard of it, but it was kind of EU I think, started and the idea was, you know, you go, you're funded to go from like, a university in France to University in England, and vice versa. And, you know, I always thought this is like, kind of heavy handed cultural engineering a bit. Now, what was the point? What you're telling me actually, is this kind of stuff where I have to go and do things like in this case, go to university, learn things, collaborate, make friends, in with other groups who are distinct from it's actually a really powerful, effective method. And in fact, if there are complicated rituals and involves some danger, like we all go, I don't know, yacht racing or some other dangerous activity, it's even better.

Joe Henrich 58:14 Yeah, no, that's absolutely correct you I mean, that's one of the ritual tricks that so we know from warfare and stuff that if people do dangerous, they go through dangerous death defying experiences together, they tend to bonds so what these rituals did is they created death defying experiences every generation so as to bond the men across these different clans. So they artificially created very scary things for these boys to go through. And then you have these deep bonds with guys in the other clan. And what we then know from from studies of lots of communities in this region is that when villages communities split, it's a long clan lines and it's usually because of while often it gets to witchcraft related concerns, but basically there's disputes and their disagreements over resources which ends up resulting in some witchcraft accusations when somebody dies, and then the two groups fight and move apart. So these bonds are kind of meant to mitigate that and you know, keep the channels of communication open and make people not always make the you know, they're trying to kill us assumption from what the other guys are up to.

Rufus Pollock 59:14 And this is again just to go through the valley problem we there's some higher hill over here that we can get to from where we are in terms of this case high here would be a like more cooperative if you're gonna put really like more loving but also more collectively intelligent society with more people in it. But the issue is is understanding the law suspicion you know, maybe you know, the Montagues are trying to kill the Capulets you know, there's there's their reasons we don't cooperate with others and why we can't get betrayed you know, there's plenty of movies and other stories and real life evidence of people take advantage and so we've got this great problem and in this case, what's so fascinating just I saw it when I read your book was like, wow, he was like a case study and selling it was unprecedented for Papa Guinea, for the, for this environment, which was going from 300, which was kind of this limit of the of the size of a society to like 2500, like, basically a 10 times multiplier in that, which is kind of it was incredible in the context. So I think that there's, this is an ongoing aspect of, you know, human evolution, I guess what cultural evolution is, is this scaling, and I guess, is anything I just want to want, you know, this is classic metaphor, like, you know, our cells started cooperating, like, you know, at some point, you know, your body is made up of these organs that are all specialized, but working together to be kind of your body. Some point where these kind of molecule world cells started cooperating, or famously, the mitochondria, and the cell came together. And this is kind of aspect, you know, people use this crude metaphor of like us scaling in some way, you know, the kind of honey bee or whatever.

Joe Henrich 1:00:54 It actually works nicely. In this case, just because the kinship stuff that I talked about before means that the clan or the Kindred or some kind of kin unit becomes like the cell, right. And then the clan units, which are reinforced by all this kinship, powerful kinship, psychology, got to figure out a way to work together to get to the next level. And in this case, it was the Elahi to community, which was this, these bunch of different clans that were all able to work together. Now you have to weaken this clans a little bit, which is what these cross cutting groups do, and then build relationships between people in the groups and whatnot. And then that relates to the weirdest people in the world story, which we'll get to. But you know, one of the things that happens there is that kin groups get really weak.

Rufus Pollock 1:01:35 So I want to come back then just for a moment, because we're trailering what we're about to come to maybe a few few minutes, we'll come back to one thing just to really emphasize to people in the story. So how, okay, what make what the secret was, says what makes human beings special is culture reality. So let you take a couple other things. Because, you know, there's, I don't know, Steven Pinker, others, like the language instinct. So because he also talked about that in the book that, you know, the other arguments have been why they're so small, are we going to get language to say a bit about like language and cultural learning, like what the evidence now about actually, you know, language and cultureality and things like that?

Joe Henrich 1:02:09 Well, so I mean, the thing with language is, you always have to figure out why you humans got language in the first place. And you know, it's language is a cooperative dilemma, right? Because you can lie to people. And so anytime you're talking, there's this question about whether the truth is being expressed, humans tend to assume that, you know, more or less what others are saying is true, it's actually takes another bit of processing to, you know, consider the false possibility. But the key with the way I think of this is language itself is a product of cultural evolution. So it's, you know, it's easy to show that languages vary in their complexity and the numbers of words and the complexities of certain categories of words, whether it's kinship, or color terms, or animal names, or things like that. So the case that I lay out with a variety of lines of evidence is that you can think of language as our tools and rules for communication. And, you know, words are kind of the tools syntax, or the rules for putting together those words. And, you know, at some former time, there might have been, you know, 10 words, or 12 words. And then the size of the vocabulary kept expanding the complexity of the syntactical tools for putting the words together. And this actually may have co evolved with things like tool using where the tools get more parts, and the parts are put together in more complex ways. In the same way, sentences are formed in more complex ways. And so it has a bunch of those properties, like larger groups have more phonemes more words, you know, all these tenses that you think of like the flu, perfect subjunctive. Lots of languages don't have the flu, perfect subjunctive. So anyway, so there's this kind of accumulation of, of communication tools.

Rufus Pollock 1:03:50 So just to also say that, again, rather than being again, the special thing about humans is we're the linguistic species, or you know, where the language once again, other animals have language. But even I think the big point here is that language is another thing like tool use. It's another cultural artifact that we could develop. It could scale, I think, just you measure everything. You know, you could say a little bit more about when you say, complexity, people, this is one or the other, what you're saying is, we have evidence of what that the size of vocabulary or the complexity of language is a function of this population of speakers was just to spell it out a bit more detail

Joe Henrich 1:04:25 than that. So I mean, these are just correlations, right? But if you look at the number of phonemes in languages, Now, it turns out number of phonemes also correlates with distance from Africa, because it looks like like lots of things, there was kind of losses as people expanded out of Africa, and some of the phonemes were lost, you know, they kind of move together and become a single phoneme. But what if you take if you control for that, you can show a relationship between the size of the speaker population and the number of different phonemes in the language and of course if you have fewer phonemes you have to make longer words, one simple example of this sort of African case is that African languages, some of them have these click sounds, which you don't see anywhere else. And so the click sounds get lost when when people migrate out of Africa. So that's, that's just a phoneme case, you know, something like number of words, you know, English has 400,000 words in it, if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, educated speakers probably have 60 70,000 words in their vocabulary. But some languages of small scale societies have 5000 words total. So just big differences in the size of the vocabulary. And then there's lots of interesting ways like body parts and colors, like I said, vary a lot across different languages, number words, lots of languages will count 123, many, instead of counting without them. So just complexity in terms of number and efficiency.

Rufus Pollock 1:05:56 So in summary, very little is hardwired, in humans, like much, you know, not the real blank slate at all. But we can we, much of our stuff is culturally learned. And it's also not figured out, it's we depend on others. That's what I'm saying. It's like, again, while there might be some, I guess, called genetic evolution, for language, we have a debate about that, we don't need to get into that maybe today. But the point would be that just like, many other things, language is culturally learned. And you can see that in the sense of, or culturally developed, and scaled and, and even maybe our ability to learn it, or to take it up, it's that way. So

Joe Henrich 1:06:33 let me just let me just make one connection with the previous stuff, which is that you can think of language as a, as a as a product of cumulative cultural evolution, for communication. So in the same way, we have projectile weapons that have gotten increasingly more complicated languages have evolved through this cumulative process, to better to better allow people to communicate. And one of the things I point out in the secret of our successes and different ecologies, and for different reasons, some societies have an entire system of communication through hand gestures, you know, because we have that for for Deaf communities in the modern world. But you know, Australian aborigines had often entire languages that went in parallel with their spoken language system that were hand gesture systems, varied across populations, it's, you know, it's common, and then there are also whistled languages. So for various reasons, societies will have an entire language that is done by whistling. So that just shows the power of cumulative culture to do all this. Now, I do think that innate structure, innate cognition plays a big role in shaping all this, the debate is really whether there are specific features of our brains that genetically evolved for learning language. I mean, we also have the whites of our eyes and details of our vocal tract, seem to clearly evolved to make us better speakers. But then the debate is about whether there's actually brain machinery for grammar, for example.

Rufus Pollock 1:08:00 Right, but in a way, even if that was, so it'd be like the running, the thing is stuff may have evolved to then support it. But the beginning of this is a cultural basis. And it's like another tool, it isn't the thing that all humans made it because we had language humans are special in this way. We made it as the the ecosystem, the dominant thing in the ecosystem, because of culturality, this ability to learn, create code off artifacts and share them. Now one of them bring out one last major point that I in the book you talk about is that if that's so, so it's not that we're so smart, it's that we're such great learners, roughly, then then what matters is the size of our collective brain. And, in a way, another point. So I want to talk about that there's both that point. So what that means about kind of scale of society, collective intelligence, the other point you made, which is, we often kind of imagine, we're so smart. But actually, it's just like, we do a lot of experiments and some of the work out and then we learn from it. I think at this point in the book, like it's kind of almost better to be in a larger group of kind of Dharma people than to be in a small group of geniuses, crudely that join, say a bit more about those two points. Yeah,

Joe Henrich 1:09:11 I mean, because we can learn from each other, if you I mean, the, this, the sort of stylized example that I use in the book is if you have a bunch of really smart guys, but they're totally asocial and never talk to each other and say, they can figure out some tough problem, you know, 10% of the time, you know, that means that they're dead, only 10% of them are going to have the solution because they don't, they don't ever talk to each other. But if you have a bunch of dumber people who are highly social, and they only figure it out 1% of the time, but you just if you have a big enough population, you have 1000 of them, somebody figures it out, and then it spreads to everybody. And so 100% of the people have this solution 100% versus 10% In this case, so just the sociality can really magnify you know, in the example I just gave the smart guys were 10 times smarter right? Then dumb and dumb guys, but the dumb guys all have the solution. So it's Easy to show the effects of this sociality is really powerful.

Rufus Pollock 1:10:02 So that's that there's one point, I just want to make an insight there, which is about maybe a next stage of our knowledge evolution, it relates to another, I'd be very interested, which is about digital policy and about Open Knowledge and open source and things of my life, is just to make a call out that it's okay. Okay, we learned we shared information in groups. But obviously, there's always this trade off everywhere between secrecy and sharing knowledge. And obviously, then sharing technological knowledge. So one huge breakthrough was starting to share science openly, like this practice of sharing knowledge. 500 years ago, open and obvious stay, there's kind of a breakthrough, which is your mobile, your web, you know, in software, this idea of open source software, or so on and so forth. I mean, in a way, again, I would say we face this dilemma, which is that the valley is if I share all my knowledge, I don't somehow appropriate value from it, I may not get the respect, or I might not get the money, you know, I end up as Linus Torvalds rather than Bill Gates, Bill Gates is a master billionaire, and understood what's right Linux, but you know, he makes a good living as a software engineer, but he is not a billionaire. There's this kind of trade off. But if it what it suggested that in an open environment where you're sharing, even in that example of software, I'm just kind of riffing a little bit here. But it would suggest that that can be incredibly more productive, in that you people are just, they're not, they may even be kind of dumber, but if they're able to share their work very fast, you can get a much faster rate of kind of cultural evolution.

Joe Henrich 1:11:29 Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And it's shows why this, this thinking about the world this way can be really important. Because if you think that the world is full of geniuses that just need to be motivated, then you think patents are a great idea, right? Given all this patent protection. But when you actually look at the literature on the effects of patents on innovation, it's far from clear that patents are doing very much work. There's lots of areas where there's been tons of innovation, and there's no patents and areas where patents seem to shut everything down, because the flow of information is slowed down by the patenting. And you know, there were massive, you know, the industrial revolution occurred with pretty weak patenting, yes, often comes later, when you know, the the inventors get to, you know, get a foothold in the legislature or whatever. So anyway, that's an interesting case.

Rufus Pollock 1:12:14 It's an exactly an interesting case. And it relates to point I just want to go back to the scheme if you could find a way as a society to remunerate or reward people satisfactorily. So there isn't this kind of, you overcome the kind of self interest point. And you can have sharing, which is to some extent, for example, what traditional academia hope to do, right? People have tenure, they have these things, and then they're supposed to share, you will outcompete a system based on the geniuses where their proprietary stuff massively. If you can find a way to do that, in this exam example, you might need to go through the valley. But if you come out the other side, or by chance, haven't come out the other side, you know, the example I was, I mean, this is an area I spent, this will actually worked on when I was an economist and so on. But I always love I've got a wonderful decision. One aside was this this incredible letter in like 1870, or something from the Swiss Pharmaceutical Association, which at that point, did not have patents. And they basically were imitating everywhere else. They want this long lesson, say, please do not. We do not want patents in Switzerland for basically pharmaceuticals. It's absolutely, it's terrible for innovation. It will be really disasters, we weren't. And of course, you know, Switzerland now is home to major pharmaceutical companies. But it just this example, that, as you say, it may actually be bad. But there's this kind of insight about maybe a next stage of our economic evolution, or societal evolution, we could cross that barrier to have that kind of sharing of knowledge. And a way to remunerate that would kind of be a breakthrough, because you say it would be What if what is sharing is basically the crucial point. I think the other point for me that just to really emphasize that when I read that, in your piece was just a lot of humbleness, that often we think we're smart, whether it's as a species, or personally, and this point that you're making, which is a group of kind of relatively people who are just experimenting, particularly in areas where we don't really know the answer, but who then share the insights, it's just going to massively out compete a bunch of geniuses, even if they're 10, or 100 times better than the dumb guy is. And I think that's something that I just feel also the social implications of, and just to kind of bring it back, you're saying, like the size of our collective brains, or the size of groups that we're sharing in, and it goes back again, to those polar Inuit who less access, I think it's worth me that the scale of our societies makes a huge impact the size of our collective brain. Just a little bit more about that from the book or what your take on that is.

Joe Henrich 1:14:37 Yeah, I mean, my take on one of the, I mean, just to kind of re articulate what you said, if you look at individual inventions, they're often recombinations of ideas that are already circulating in cultural milieu. So the more you can get the ideas out there and circulating, the more chance for these novel recombinations. You have. So I mean, some of the one of my favorite examples in this book I'm working on Innovation is the effects of prohibition on patenting. So there's an economist named Mike Andrews. And it turns out to the US enforces bans on alcohol at the state level, beginning in like 1910. And of course, it goes national at the end of 1919. And what Andrews is able to show is that when states impose the alcohol ban counties within the state that had lots of saloons, closed their saloons, and then their patenting drops. And so the argument that Mike makes is that, you know, people were getting together at the bars and swapping ideas, and when you shut down the saloons, they didn't have anywhere to meet. So you starting to get less invention and whatnot. And he's able to show this this particular to saloon going ethnic groups. So using the last names and the patterns, you can figure out it's mostly Irish and German, we started patenting less, and the non saloon going ethnic groups, which at the time where Jews and Italians and Greeks, they kept, they continue patenting because they weren't dependent on this saloon recombination. You can, there's another, here's another study where he looks at diffusion of Starbucks. And so you get increases in patenting, in when Starbucks sets up, sets up shop in a place, he's able to try to identify causality by using diffusion from Seattle. And it's the idea is that Starbucks, people from different companies got together and swapped ideas and and then did more panels.

Rufus Pollock 1:16:23 This is this is obviously the old story of the coffee shops of England in the 80s. This is kind of the story, that we don't have good evidence, but the folk story of kind of like coffee shops playing this role in, in diffusion of science, innovation, yeah, wow. So this point of the kind of size of our collective brains. And maybe your last point that relates to is to bring it back this kind of science of culturaleology, or cultural evolution, I don't know what this this discipline is gonna be called i, we talked last time a bit about the fact that cognitive science became a discipline that didn't really exist out of the integration of psychology and neuroscience, kind of computer science in the 70s and 80s, roughly, I could say, 60s, I feel there's some new discipline arising out of the anthropology, economics, sociology, one of the reasons that is you know, the famous, I think it's the Fisher law in genetics, right, you know, the rate of, of kind of genetic advance or fitness advance as a function of variance and like the fitness landscape, and so on, do you think there's something that we're going to be able to kind of start pinning down like these kinds of studies where we're going to start to be able to say, like, oh, the rate of kind of cultural evolution, in this case, like, marked by let's say, innovation, or the rate of culture or knowledge accumulation, we can actually tie it to the level of variance level of social connectedness, you know, or deeper, even the level of cultural evolution, I always say innovation has may not be for good or ill is this kind of function of like the level of variance compared to like the level of intergroup competition, which is something that we haven't touched on, which you say, is a very big driver of cultural evolution that was in the background of the elite, for example, there was intergroup competition. So yeah, it's a kind of some big fear, the big theories or big theorems of, of like cultural evolution that we'll be able to kind of? Well, I mean, come up with soon.

Joe Henrich 1:18:11 Yeah, I mean, there's, there's already ideas, models, mathematical models out there that look at things like variance and social connectedness, and how that affects rates of innovation. And so in my lab, we're looking at how that influences patenting. And lots of other people like Mike Andrews are looking at that as well. Like, so we've been looking at, so we have the US Census, going back to 18, Mark goes back to 1800 or so 1790. And same thing with patent database. And so we can look at the we've been looking at the effects of diversity at the county level over time. And we can show that, you know, this, for example, the more diverse county gets, the more patents they have. Controlling for lots of other things in the coming decade, then the idea is this is a collective brain idea that you got to get diverse minds with different kinds of knowledge together. In this together in the same county, in this case, it's the same place, and that's going to have an effect. So there's that kind of stuff going on. And to to get this at kind of less kind of a lot without relying on the patent database, I guess that's how I think of it is we have a database of US newspapers, that for you know, hundreds of years in the US. And we can look at when new words or new two sets of terminology get used the first time and you know, first time in the country gets used, we look at where it gets used. And then we look at where it subsequently gets used. And you can track it through space and time that way. So with new digital datasets, we're able to kind of test some of these ideas about you know, maybe it occurs first and and prestigous place and then subsequently spreads or maybe it occurs first in a non prestigous place and doesn't go anywhere until a couple decades later it gets used somewhere and then it goes you know that kind of thing.

Rufus Pollock 1:19:54 Right so at this point is the point that these new the new datasets particularly for cultural evolution, these fine grained datasets that we now have over long periods are allowing us to see cultural evolution in happening in this kind of way, rigorously for the first time, and that we'd be able to kind of see these kinds of ways. And I think that brings me just to one thing before maybe we have a pause, we come to the second session we might take a moment is one of the things I was I was interesting, like knowledge mapping, but I was like, looking at that databases back in the day, the MDR database. And so it was like, Where, what were the gaps? could you predict? Okay, there's this field, there's this field, like, we can do principal component analysis, if you like, I mean, that there should be this field evolving, or, you know, the example always had is, you know, at some point open source did not have a JEL Code. In the Journal of Economics, it didn't have a code at some point, people said, okay, there should be a code for like open source studies in economics, because become a big enough area. So can we kind of see that happening, I suppose in like cultural evolutionary sense, coming back to the example of Illa Heat or others? Or can we couldn't be like, oh, you know, we'd be able to say, Oh, this is like, kind of this mean, this, these ideas, or this constellation of norms that come up. I mean, you know, another, another example, I just threw out that I found very intriguing. I read across, and I'm sure you know, it's like, oh, the destruction of the temple with the Jews. And that, therefore, there was this kind of, in about 70 ad, they kind of went away from being more ritualized to like having to read the Bible, and therefore, literacy and like reading the Bible became reading the Old Testament, Hebrew became kind of important, which, similar to the Protestant story. And then there's kind of a story that's less well documented than your Protestant story, but roughly like, oh, a people left Judaism, because they had to be honest investment in reading that was expensive. And therefore, there's a section for people who kind of found reading easier in the beginning people of the book, and that this obviously had all these long term kind of consequences. But this example of like, oh, there's a norm, or some kind of set of behaviors that we haven't explored, that would really do stuff. And you mentioned meditation earlier, like, Oh, right. Now, one of the things that seems kind of hard for us to species, you might say is we've got to individuality, which is one of the successes you're gonna talk about in the weirdest people in the world, you know, being in a certain way more individualistic. But there's also kind of cost that which we see, which is you become too individualistic, there are obviously problems. And if you think everything's solved, by markets, or, you know, whatever. So there's some kind of idea to transcend that to be connected, again, to the fact that we somehow share this planet together or whatever. I'm just kind of pointing to do you think that there are these interesting things that we'll be able to see whether it's like, oh, there's a set of cultural norms we haven't explored, or here's a gap in the cultural landscape.

Joe Henrich 1:22:45 Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think people like Darren Asemoglue have followed up on the kind of patent stuff you were talking about, and does seem like there are recurrent domains of patenting that are drawing on each other technology codes and whatnot. And then you can kind of anticipate what the next one is going to be by knowing what the previous combinations have been. Now, I don't know how that's going to work. It'd be interesting to see if you could do that in literature, or in culinary recipes, or in the creation of new beers. I mean, this is the kind of thing you can kind of do it now with with protein synthesis, right? Because you can look at all the possible ways of doing it and then begin to run through Well, what if we combine this and this what if we combine this and this so I don't think that's very far away, actually.

Rufus Pollock 1:23:34 I have a couple of questions so often. So one is, do you know like Ian McGilchrist book the master and his Emissary?

Joe Henrich 1:23:40 I know of that book? I haven't read it in detail.

Rufus Pollock 1:23:42 No. So the interesting, I guess, all this kind of crossing with like the, I call it the ontgonetists or the answer ontologists, I would never, I don't know what the term is, like the psychology right, the theory of mind, but like the, what the being, you know, the broader sense of us as human beings. Anyway, the question I have is so, Chris Wright has this kind of thesis, that it is, it's a little bit, it's a very interesting one I'm gonna have a little time for is that, hey, there's there's differences left and right hemisphere processing. And that, that, that in the way that we kind of are in the world. So finally, we see crudely, you know, like, very crudely, like, this is all sort of left and right, you know, left is kind of left brain analytical, right brain is kind of creative, but he's like, I actually produce a lot of evidence. And there's like, really, these differences. And those differences show up in how we kind of like really see the world how we are in the world, in a broad sense. And the second part of the book, which I think is even more like not, I would say, that part is not so controversial. But the second part is to say, like almost that there's been these kind of shift in time between societies being more left and right, kind of brain oriented, and that we're in a very period of great left brainers basically. And the geschehen, I guess, is that this point, the way that we kind of are in the world, who we see ourselves as profoundly then influences our behavior. I mean, the Crude Story, obviously, at the moment is if everyone goes to economics class, they're taught they're self interested, rationalist, utility maximizing, etc. This affects how they act in the world I mean, that's the Croods or in the other way around. So I guess, and this is where it also connects with the sermon, you talked about meditation you talked about, I'm very interested in like, you know, developmental psychology and like, kind of Neo-Piagetian groups, like, I don't know if you know, the group that was at Harvard, kind of the sort of, sadly died out in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, like Kurt Fisher, passed away last year, right? I mean, that that guys have like skill complexity, right? And the more interesting, right is the moral complexity, or the ego complexity, like Robert Keegan, I don't know if you know, so these ideas that they had, like Keegan is writing the 70s and 80s. And he's a professor at the Harvard School of Graduate School education stuff, is, you know, humans can have different levels of ego development. So like, one level, you know, the Creed, like as a kid, it's all about me. And then some point I see the other and then there's like, you know, a point of view been transcending that in some way. Now, why I mentioned that, like so, so, so much is that A, the data they have for that is like, okay, but not great. Like for variety of reasons. So for example, there's this work by guy in his 50s Like Piaget student on like moral evolution, where he's got this theory of like, you know, the beginning children are like, it's about my is right, then it's kind of like what the what the rules say. And then at some point, you're like, No, there's these universal principles, right? A Kohlberg. Yeah, it's Kohlberg. Now, the point the point I'm saying and then like Keegan expands that to even be like almost how I see myself in the world doesn't eat like being but how does this one is? What are the cultural context in which you come into being like, I mean, one of the critiques of Kohlberg right which a bit it's like Jonathan Hite. And so it's like this was a crude version of morality, but was very oriented to the west and like rationalism. But the very point is, let's take at the end is if one of the things we need to do as a human species now is somehow enlarge our zone of concern one more time. So we went from my care, my direct brother and sister to the kin. And then I somehow mad when using religion and other rituals and other stuff, I expand it to a larger group. And if somehow the West write that story in a weird, a little part of the weirdness, where there's people that well, it's like, somehow, by going was backwards, like just blowing up kin relations, we built like this interpersonal trust network, where I see a whole nother of people as kind of related in some way as I treat decently and I'm related to in some profound way or mad, you know, the famous phrase in history of, you know, the imagined communities of nation states and things like that. And at this moment, we're at a point where we somehow need to make another leap as a human,

Joe Henrich 1:28:07 common Expanding Circle idea where, you know, I mean, some people have expanded the circle beyond humans, right. So they're trying to species in the ecology and things like that.

Rufus Pollock 1:28:15 Exactly, exactly. Right. The thing that's so fascinating culture is that has to be rarefied. It's easy to say that abstractly. But how many people actually equalize to income with India, or actually treat other species, like really, when it comes to it as like, on their level, you know, like, I won't kill them. So I'm just trying to an appointment Illa Heate is that these things have to be most of human beings is not nearly as rational as we think it gets embodies you say in the dark. And so one of the things I guess is so I guess what I mentioned about McGilchrist and others is these ways of seeing the world that get, that show up are like really important, like, if we saw ourselves in some really real way, as part of this larger system, that would be very important. And I mentioned this, because, you know, like, take another example, you know, the weirdest people in the world, there's been a huge success, but there's also like, you become a victim of your success. So at some point, the danger of that kind of model, which is we kind of end up with like, free market capitalism, and it makes certain kinds of beings. We don't want to go back to like, in a moment, as I'm sure you're aware, there's a lot of like tendency, like, I would say, idolize the indigenous, you know, there's things that we should really respect this thing we should really take from, like, the way that maybe gather certain other against other groups treat the natural environment, blah, blah, blah. But there's, we're not going to go back. But how we go forward, right? PCs? Well, I

Joe Henrich 1:29:43 mean, when you started talking about the left brain, right brain stuff, and some of these other the stages, I think that there's ways in which that work connects pretty clearly to the weirdest people in the world, in like analytic versus holistic thinking. So I tend to lean on the psychologists for that. And they have this way of thinking, either you solve problems by breaking them down into individual units, and assigning those units properties, things tend to move in straight lines. So that sort of analytic thinking, and then holistic thinking you attend more to the background, you look at context, and you focus on relationships between things. And I mean, when you study innovation in groups, one of the things you find out is that you need both analytic and holistic thinkers. And it's actually the integration of those two. And I think recognizing that can also be something we use individually by saying, you know, I'm thinking about this problem, like an analytic thinker, I catch myself doing that. And I've got to say, let's, let's try to shift and focus on relationships, think about the context, you know, kind of zoom out approach,

Rufus Pollock 1:30:40 right? And why and to finish this thing. So first, is that insight, and then how would that get reified? First, he said, into social norms, and then secondly, into institutions. Because in a way, I thought, if long term is credit institutions that has made us more atomized in a way in the way that we see ourselves in the world. And there's huge success in that there's huge victories in that that should not be denigrated. But like the analogy, I sometimes use them. And I know this is a bit, we're getting into kind of grand theories of history here. But you might say, like, there was a way the feudal, if you were living in Feudal times, or the end of the, like, 1300, there'd be a way of seeing the world. I mean, this is, you know, Foucault, others do, we might say, there's this way of seeing, and that came to an end like there was a limit to it, in its way of explaining or having power as a social contract to knit societies together, whatever way we'd like to maybe this moment, the things that were so successful in the weirdest people in the world is maybe it's coming to the end of its cycle. And there's something that that integrate, as you said, is the integration of the holistic and the analytical, when the analytical is away, become so victorious, right? What, what does that look like in kind of cultural institutions and cultural norms and ways of being in the world? Is it just the way one idea

Joe Henrich 1:32:00 that I've played with is so in the weirdest people in the world, there's this idea of impersonal social norms. So this is the idea that I mean, it's why I think people won't equalize India, you know, and the developed world is because there's a set of rules for how you treat strangers, and a lot of people have internalized those. But that doesn't, that doesn't extend to all these other things like evening out historical discrepancies and things like that. It's just that basically, you approach other people with this fair minded mindset in this transaction, you know, kind of try to treat this this person in a fair, honest way, which is different from this interdependence mindset, which I talked about, which is kind of this group that you're really dependent on your kind of coalitional, you're generally worried about how other members of that group are doing or concerned about their welfare. And the evolutionary logic here is that in humans, a lot of times individuals welfare actually then affected your welfare, right? Because at least within the small groups, if the best hunter got sick, then there'll be less meat for and your your you and your kids would have less meat because of the sharing institutions, the sharing norms. So we have this interdependent psychology and one of the things that I see happening, at least in American society is you still have pretty good, impersonal norms, but you having the breakdown of the small groups, these kinds of interdependent groups, voluntary associations, things where people new members of their neighborhood or a sense of local community So one direction that things could go would be the recreation of these local interdependent groups. Now, they couldn't be too strong, because then they start to interfere with the other stuff. But they could give people the sense of, they could deal with a dislocation that you get in the sort of excessive individualism. I mean, families, in some sense are continuing to break down, right, there's actually a few particular families, more people are living by themselves than ever before. So it's a, it's a continuing trend towards family breakdown, and individuals. And so if you can have these voluntary communities, that might be a way to address some of these issues, and it will be a new direction. I mean, I don't know how successful it will be. But that's one idea that's out there.

Rufus Pollock 1:34:04 Well exactly what I think the interesting point is, again, could take another point, we don't know maybe the answer, we need to have a lot of cultural experimentation. I think the point I suppose I'm getting at is just like last time, you might say, and I know you need to use that in to kind of to get the weirdest people in the world to get this kind of what turned out to be a very productive line of cultural evolution, you had to sort of go backwards, I think you actually say you had to double back on yourself. So you've gone down this route of kind of larger, larger kinship groups, there's kind of a limit to that kind of becomes empire where you basically have groups separated by kinship groups within segments, you then can dominate other groups in a way. Is there a doubling back now, so we went down this line of the individualism that's so powerful, at some point, though, it worked runs out just like the kinship model, there's some point where it kind of, it can't really scale or it can't do certain things. You know, he can't have horizontal sociality in the same way you want. And we have to kind of double back. And the point about doubling back is not we're going back, but you're gonna then go forward, but it's somehow an integration. So as you said, the delicate thing, again, this I feel in the meditation, I'm a Zen Buddhist and things. There's something about non duality, like the Western mind, I'm a very analytical person. And I would even say, I'm on the spectrum. You know, that I don't have that mindset thinks that there's one or the other. And so in a way, it's like this thing, as you just said, we have a story that we either will then have some individualism, or we go back to being kind of tribal or like it very kinship base. But is there something that when you went forward, just as I know, in previous periods, it was like, Oh, how on earth? No, how on earth? Would we you know, like, I think the example just to finish your in China was very intriguing where the Chinese didn't go out of that kinship model. But the way they did like trading system was to have this really extended clan that did trading, rather than having more horizontal trading. So but that, but there's a kind of like a limit to that. And so is there some place that I guess we can't know what it is, but we can feel towards where it's like, we can kind of transcend? And include, and double back on ourselves? I mean, I guess this is one of the things I'm very intrigued by, in that you're the work and that there's a feeling of, of where we're at. Yeah, that's, anyway, we can come back my next time. My one other question I've just saved for later on, you might know if the literature is the kind of rich a World Value Survey. So if you know this question about skating to where we're going, in a way the world value, so we had this idea of that, you know, there was this new universe? No, well, you know, there's the new groups who are, you know, they break down hierarchies secular rational on one axis and the kind of self expression on the other. But the question have been, if we had more fine grained data like that, we can identify new groups and the principal component analysis. And the point would be, there'll be small, why you need quite a lot of data. And you need it over time is new groups are small. So you'd see pockets evolving in I don't know, Sweden, or New Zealand, or somewhere that you'd be like, all these groups have some different set of norms that combined unexpected things we didn't expect to see before, like, you know, into, you know, into intergroup stuff much more and the impersonal norms, I'm just kind of flagging, if you know of any literature like that, which says, Hey, we want to take the European Social Survey, the World Value Survey, but we have like, more granular we have all in particular, that also connects and the other question that why the human develop, like, what I'd call the adult development work of like Keegan, and like, the Neo Piaget team kind of faltered a bit, since the eighth is, in my view on it is they couldn't get enough data. So to do good adult development, you need quite a large sample size. just shocked to find the small numbers, you do have some kind of big transformation. Because in that model, like what goes as you go from like, self expression at some point to self transcendence, it almost sounds a bit woowoo but you get into like, the kind of stuff that Maslow writes about the end of his life. And people write about, like, you know, I'm no longer about me, like I'm transcending my ego and stuff, you know, but it is a small sample size of that stuff. If it does happen.

Joe Henrich 1:38:05 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these days, you're, I think your best chance at that would be to try to figure out how to extract that from online behavior or

Rufus Pollock 1:38:14 Facebook or something like that. Yeah, cuz I know the papers. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, thank you so much. I look forward to next Wednesday. Well, I think in part two, just to summarize, I think we're going to come to we did a call to speech. Part two will be kind of Cultural evolution and part three will be this synthesis so thank you so much, I hope you've enjoyed it as well, I hope your daughters well today.

Joseph Henrich on Homo Sapiens: The Cultural Species

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