Joseph Henrich: observation

Transcript context

…That connection between size and speed of cultural evolution, that’s true at most margins? Say, India evolves culturally more rapidly than Denmark because it’s larger? There’s lots of pieces to this puzzle. The key is to create interconnectedness. To explain the difference between Denmark and India: of course, Denmark is interconnected with many other populations, but the flow of information is much less constricted. What happened in the scaling up of human societies in many places is societies get built on complex kinship structures in which you don’t have very much relations between different families and between different tribes. That constrains the flow of social information among these groups. The trick the West pulled off is to manage to make individuals so that information could freely flow among individuals. Let’s say I’m a cultural pessimist, and try to talk me out of this. Here would be my worry. If your theory implies cultural evolution speeds up as you have more parts, more people, more interconnections, I worry that social evolution will bring us further from the point of what our genes can handle. Think of there being an increased variance of the match between society and our genes. Most things do, in fact, work better because cultural evolution carries a lot of useful knowledge. But just a few things stop working, like maybe electoral politics, believe it or not, or the diets we eat — or a few things in society go wrong. If you think of everything needing to work fairly well in society for it to sustain itself, should we then be cultural pessimists?…

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