Curiosity ⇔ Entangled

chevron_right

Robin Hanson x Joe Henrich | Cultural Evolution: The Slow Burn Rewriting Human Nature

Nov 9, 2025

Join economist Robin Hanson and Harvard's Joe Henrich as they unravel the surprising ways cultural evolution shapes human nature. They argue that culture rewrites preferences and beliefs, demonstrating how social learning makes us uniquely human. The duo explores the impact of group norms on trust and innovation, along with the challenges posed by centralized conformity. They also discuss the balance between fostering creativity and the risk of cultural homogenization, all while envisioning experimental governance models for a resilient future.

01:29:17

forum

Ask episode

web_stories

AI Snips

view_agenda

Chapters

menu_book

Books

auto_awesome

Transcript

info_circle

Episode notes

insights

INSIGHT

Humans As Cultural Learners

Humans evolved as highly social learners who acquire beliefs, norms, and technologies largely by copying others.
Cultural evolution scales individual learning into population-level change, producing adaptive outcomes without conscious design.

insights

INSIGHT

Culture Rewrites Human Nature

Much of what we call human nature may be the result of cultural evolution, not fixed ancient genetics.
That implies human preferences and cognition have changed recently and can change rapidly in the future.

volunteer_activism

ADVICE

Reassess Values As Products Of Culture

Question whether your values were shaped by cultural selection and assess how much to trust them.
Use knowledge of cultural origins to re-evaluate policy preferences rather than assume values are fixed.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Humans as Cultural Learners

01:25 • 1min

chevron_right

Cultural Evolution Explains Preferences and Beliefs

02:54 • 7min

chevron_right

Why Culture Is Hard to See

09:31 • 4min

chevron_right

Norms, Institutions, and Coordination

13:19 • 3min

chevron_right

Multilevel Selection: Groups and Corporations

16:11 • 3min

chevron_right

Competition, Trust, and Institutional Effects

19:40 • 8min

chevron_right

Global Integration Reduces Cultural Variety

27:32 • 4min

chevron_right

Can Cultural Evolution Fail Us?

31:16 • 3min

chevron_right

Diagnosing Civilizational Decline and Policy Roles

34:32 • 6min

chevron_right

Insular Fertile Groups as Lifeboats

40:21 • 3min

chevron_right

Variation-Selection Systems and Charter Cities

43:11 • 2min

chevron_right

Local Experimentation vs. Centralized Conformity

45:40 • 4min

chevron_right

Superficial vs. Deep Multiculturalism

49:38 • 3min

chevron_right

Can Competent Governance Prevent Collapse?

52:36 • 5min

chevron_right

The Collective Brain and Innovation

57:36 • 5min

chevron_right

Invention vs. Diffusion and Recombination

01:02:29 • 7min

chevron_right

Diversity, Immigration, and Patent Evidence

01:09:08 • 1min

chevron_right

Global Homogenization and Limits to Further Gains

01:10:31 • 5min

chevron_right

Challenges of Social Science and Policy Relevance

01:15:23 • 4min

chevron_right

Integrating Social Sciences under Cultural Evolution

01:19:50 • 6min

chevron_right

Innovation's Importance and Institutional Bottlenecks

• Mentioned in 59 episodes

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Middlemarch, written by George Eliot, is a novel that delves into the complexities of provincial life in 19th-century England. The story revolves around the intersecting lives of its characters, particularly Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydgate, as they navigate marriage, vocation, and social class. Eliot critiques the conventional romance narratives of her time by portraying marriage as a complex and often problematic institution. The novel also explores themes of idealism, self-interest, hypocrisy, and the constraints on women's lives. Set in the fictional town of Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832, the novel incorporates historical events such as the Great Reform Act of 1832 and early developments in medicine. Eliot's realistic portrayal of ordinary human life, with its quiet tragedies and small triumphs, has made 'Middlemarch' a masterpiece of English literature.

#3593

• Mentioned in 10 episodes

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil

The Man Without Qualities is a sprawling, philosophical novel that delves into the lives of various characters in Vienna during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The protagonist, Ulrich, a 32-year-old mathematician and former military officer, is characterized by his indifference to life and his search for meaning. The novel explores a wide range of themes including truth vs. possibility, science vs. mysticism, and the ambiguity of human existence. It is known for its complex characters, such as the murderer Moosbrugger and the intellectual Arnheim, and its critique of societal values and the bureaucratic absurdities of the time. The book is notable for its lack of a dominant plot, instead focusing on the intellectual and philosophical musings of its characters.

#406

• Mentioned in 55 episodes

Foundation

Isaac Asimov

Foundation is the first book in Isaac Asimov's renowned Foundation series. It introduces Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian who predicts the imminent collapse of the Galactic Empire and the ensuing dark age. To mitigate this, Seldon establishes the Foundation, a group of scientists and scholars on the planet Terminus, aimed at preserving human knowledge and laying the groundwork for a new civilization. The book is a collection of interrelated short stories that follow the early history of the Foundation as it navigates various crises and challenges predicted by Seldon's psychohistory.

Cultural evolution has shaped human nature far more than we realize, and economist Robin Hanson and evolutionary biologist Joe Henrich reveal why ignoring this changes everything about policy, innovation, and our future. In this deep dive conversation, they explore how culture doesn't just influence behavior, it rewrites our preferences, beliefs, and even our cognitive machinery.

Joe Henrich, professor at Harvard and author of The WEIRDest People in the World, explains how humans evolved to be uniquely reliant on social learning, making us a cultural species first and foremost. Robin Hanson, economist at George Mason University and author of The Elephant in the Brain, challenges the implications: if cultural evolution can account for most of human nature, then far more has changed in the last hundred thousand years than conventional wisdom suggests—and far more could change in the near future.

Together, they tackle why economists bracket preferences instead of explaining them, how WEIRD psychology has dominated research while studying statistical outliers, why the collective brain hypothesis suggests innovation depends more on population size than individual genius, and why organizations systematically suppress innovation despite claiming to value it. They discuss marriage norms and kinship structures that literally reshape cognition across cultures, big gods and moral religions that enabled large-scale cooperation, and the uncomfortable selection pressures modern societies refuse to discuss openly.

This conversation bridges economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and policy—revealing why cultural evolution deserves far more attention than it receives in academia, government, and institutional design.⸻

TIMESTAMPS

00:00:04 – Introductions: Economics meets cultural evolution

00:01:26 – What is cultural evolution and why does it matter?

00:03:31 – The ambitious scope: explaining preferences, beliefs, and values

00:04:08 – Why economists bracket preferences—and why that's a problem

00:04:55 – Cultural evolution as a return to Darwinian thinking

00:06:26 – How genetic evolution shaped us to be cultural learners

00:07:45 – Why cultural evolution rarely enters policy discussions

00:12:00 – The WEIRD problem: most psychology research studies outliers

00:20:00 – Marriage norms, kinship, and cognitive differences across cultures

00:28:00 – The collective brain: why innovation depends on population size

00:38:00 – Can individuals or small groups out-innovate large populations?

00:48:00 – Religion, cooperation, and big gods that enforce moral norms

00:58:00 – Why societies struggle with explicit reasoning about cultural evolution

01:08:00 – Selection pressures we're not thinking about: fertility, values, migration

01:18:00 – The challenge of integrating cultural evolution into institutional design

01:24:30 – Cultural evolution's influence (or lack thereof) in economics

01:26:00 – Innovation: overwhelmingly important, surprisingly poorly understood

01:28:00 – Why organizations suppress innovation while claiming to promote it

⸻

GUESTS

Robin Hanson – Economist, George Mason University

Author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em

https://overcomingbias.com/

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson

Joe Henrich – Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Author of The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success

https://x.com/JoHenrich

https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu

⸻

FOLLOW ACCELERATOR MEDIA

Twitter/X: https://x.com/xceleratormediaI

nstagram: https://instagram.com/xcelerator.media

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/accelerator-media-org

Website: https://acceleratormedia.org

⸻

ABOUT CURIOSITY ENTANGLED

Curiosity Entangled pairs distinguished thinkers from different disciplines for unscripted conversations about consciousness, science, technology, and humanity's long-term future. Hosted by Accelerator Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to science storytelling and long-term thinking.

Home Top podcasts Popular guests Top books