Joe Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research uses evolutionary theory to explore how culture has shaped human psychology, cooperation, institutions, and even our genetic evolution. He is the author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World, influential works that show how cumulative culture and collective intelligence transformed humans into an extraordinarily successful social species.

Human intelligence is not simply the product of individual brains, but of cultural knowledge accumulated and shared across generations. David Sloan Wilson and Joe Henrich discuss how gene-culture coevolution, multilevel selection, and major evolutionary transitions have shaped human societies—and what these insights can teach us about AI. Their conversation explores AI as both a new tool for studying cultural evolution and a participant in an emerging evolutionary process, asking how we might foster AI systems built for cooperation and sociality rather than individual performance alone

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This episode is from the podcast, Evolving Alignment.

Evolving Alignment explores one of the central questions of our time: How can humanity and artificial intelligence coevolve in ways that enhance cooperation, creativity, and human flourishing?

Hosted by evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson, each episode features leading thinkers from fields including evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, psychology, philosophy, complexity science, and the social sciences. Rather than focusing on the narrow technical challenge of aligning AI systems with human interests, these conversations examine the broader evolutionary processes that have enabled living systems to solve problems of cooperation at ever higher levels of complexity, producing increasingly sophisticated forms of biological and cultural organization.

Can we learn from the deep history of evolution to shape a future in which humans and AI cooperate rather than compete, and develop new forms of collective intelligence we can only begin to imagine today? Evolving Alignment brings together many of the world’s leading researchers to explore these questions—and to consider how the choices we make today may influence the future evolution of intelligence itself.

Evolving Alignment is presented by Human Energy, a catalytic hub for evolving collective consciousness. ‍Learn more about Human Energy here, https://www.humanenergy.io/about