Joseph Henrich: evaluation

Transcript context

…There’s some breakthrough in the past that’s quite remarkable. What are now human beings start doing something that the other great apes don’t. This is all speculative, of course, but what in your opinion is that confluence of events that leads to this great filter: What are now human beings pass through it, but the other great apes basically do not? That’s the start-up problem. The key thing to understand the start-up problem is how humans went down the special trajectory. The way I think about it is you want to think about natural selection as investing either in bigger brains that make you better at figuring stuff out by yourself — better at individual learning — or better at cultural learning, at learning from others. When there’s not very much interesting things, interesting tools, techniques, ideas in the minds and behaviors of other members in your social group, individual learning is better because learning from others doesn’t get you anything because nobody else in the group has anything. What you need is a situation where you’re able to have useful ideas in the minds of other members of your social group. In the book, I make the case that when humans are on the savanna as bipedal apes, the predator guild was probably much larger. Humans have a chimpanzee-like brain, except they lived in larger groups and they would’ve had to be more social with each other so there’s a chance they could’ve crossed this threshold and started down this road. There’s a few other factors like the climate was changing in a way that would’ve favored cultural evolution, so a few other things play into it. But that’s the basic idea. But it’s odd in a way there are not intermediate species, or maybe there were and we killed them off, but like Neanderthals, Denisovans, might they have been smarter than humans?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.