Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

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