What Did the World Look Like Before?

Before the modern era, or before the church began tinkering. In mediaeval times, a most people lived in intensive, complex kinship systems. You're born into a world where you have lts of a rich kinship ties. Most of your friends and business partners an stuff will be people who to already exists somewhere in this kinship network. The family is the unit of production. It's the unit of distribution.

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Joe Henrich is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and is the author of the book "The WEIRDest People in the World."

During our conversation, Joe talks about his interest in human nature, how cultures change people biologically, how the mating laws of the Roman Catholic Church and the literacy imperatives of Protestantism changed Western civilization, cultural limitations on the Big 5 Personality traits, monogamy and polygyny, modern dating, objective truth, right and wrong, and what UN parking ticket data tells us about different countries in the world.

WEIRD stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic," and if you're listening to this episode, you likely fall in that category. Joe is an encyclopedia of information about human beings, who we are, how we're different, and how we got this way. He offers advice for struggling young men, political leaders contemplating foreign intervention, and on how to think clearly about ethics and moral relativism.

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(00:00) Introduction

(03:04) Interest in evolutionary biology and human culture