In this episode of the Life Itself Podcast, Rufus Pollock sits down with Professor Joseph Henrich to discuss the study of cultural evolution.
This conversation forms part of the Cultural Evolution: A New Discipline is Born Series.
You can learn more here: lifeitself.org/learn/culturology
To view the full transcript please visit our dedicated podcast page: lifeitself.org/podcast/joseph-henrich-and-the-emergence-of-culturology
0:00 Introduction
5:25 The “explosion” of the field of cultural evolution
7:27 What led to this “empirical revolution”
11:32 What do we mean by culture?
13:40 Culture across disciplines
16:45 Endogenous preferences
22:48 Economics and culture
26:42 Where is the “science of culture” going?
38:40 What is being studied in the field now?
44:30 An example of an area of research: understanding innovation
54:57 What can we do with learnings from cultural evolution studies?
57:40 Cooperation, institutional evolution and scaling
1:06:09 Where are we on the cultural evolutionary tree today?
Joe Henrich is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is author of several books, most recently 'The Weirdest People in the World' and 'The Secret of Our Success'. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. Methodologically, he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics. His area interests include Amazonia, Chile and Fiji.
Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Find out more about his work on his website: rufuspollock.com.
If you found this video insightful please give it a like and consider subscribing to our channel. By doing so you will be helping us bring this necessary knowledge to a bigger audience.
www.lifeitself.us
Follow Us On:
Instagram - forlifeitself
Twitter - forlifeitself
Facebook - forlifeitself
Life Itself is a a community of people seeking a wiser world.
Looking around us we can see that neither our society nor our planet are as well as they should be. Greater wisdom is needed both in diagnosis and in finding cures.
We emphasize wisdom because we believe this is about more than finding a quick-fix in technology or politics - it is about finding something deeper within ourselves and our societies.
25 ноя 2022
