Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…Let me give you a super-simple take I hear from a lot of people on how genetic and cultural evolution interact, and tell me if you agree with it. The standard story is we have genes that were optimized to some earlier environment, maybe being hunter-gatherers. Now we eat too much sugar, we become too fat, we have diabetes too often. We give our leaders too much respect because we used to need them to stop ourselves from being killed, whereas now we’re too loyal to the president. We think in terms of anecdote and narrative rather than statistics, and thus there’s this quite radical mismatch between how we’ve evolved and the society we live in. Is that an accurate picture in your account of things, or not? Certainly, part of that is an accurate account. The importance of, say, our taste for sugar, our taste for fat seems to be a misfiring from our ancestral environments. But I think in the case of human cooperation that doesn’t fit the story. If we look at the smallest-scale human societies, hunter-gatherers, they still rely on all kinds of social norms and beliefs to cooperate even when they’re cooperating in relatively small bands. For example, food sharing in lots of hunter-gatherer societies relies on food taboos in which certain classes of people can only eat certain parts of the animal. If you eat a part of the animal that’s not assigned to your class, say older married men or something, then the whole group has poor hunting. If people believe that, they’re going to enforce that taboo on other people. You create a self-interested incentive to share the meat. Hunter-gatherers also have rituals. Psychologists have now shown when you cooperate, when you participate in communal rituals, you become more cooperative and you have greater social solidarity with other members of your group. Even the smallest-scale human societies are already using all these tricks of cultural evolution to make them more social. Now, another feature of your model, if I understand it correctly, is that you get more rapid or more complex or more interesting cultural evolution when you have a larger number of moving parts: more people, or more wealth, or more complexity. Is it kind of increasing returns to scale to cultural evolution? Is that fair to say?…

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