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For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions — our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations — we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
In Blueprint, Nicholas A. Christakis introduces the compelling idea that our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviors, but also the ways in which we make societies, ones that are surprisingly similar worldwide.
With many vivid examples — including diverse historical and contemporary cultures, communities formed in the wake of shipwrecks, commune dwellers seeking utopia, online groups thrown together by design or involving artificially intelligent bots, and even the tender and complex social arrangements of elephants and dolphins that so resemble our own — Christakis shows that, despite a human history replete with violence, we cannot escape our social blueprint for goodness.
In a world of increasing political and economic polarization, it's tempting to ignore the positive role of our evolutionary past. But by exploring the ancient roots of goodness in civilization, Blueprint shows that our genes have shaped societies for our welfare and that, in a feedback loop stretching back many thousands of years, societies are still shaping our genes today.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 26, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780316230056
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780316230056
- File size: 36693 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 15, 2018
A social scientist looks at the good and bad sides of human character, arguing that we are evolutionarily inclined "to make a particular kind of society--a good one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning."How should one behave in the wake of a tragic shipwreck? Writes Christakis (co-author: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, 2009, etc.), director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, two 1864 incidents in the South Pacific offer "an almost perfect natural experiment." One crew, led by a captain who "seemed mostly interested in his own survival," splintered and finally resorted to cannibalism, while on the other ship, "the men stuck together and worked collaboratively from the very beginning," with no humans eaten. The men on the successful crew even organized an adult education program of sorts, playing chess and teaching each other mathematics, languages, and the like. By the author's fluent account, the fate of the Grafton speaks to the better angels of our nature, which in turn tends to the good. What he calls a "social suite" of positive features that incline us to love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, and other such desiderata has an evolutionary nature and may even carry an adaptive advantage, certainly as compared to the dysfunctional characteristics that so often emerge in times of stress. Christakis examines the positive traits of communal societies such as the Shakers (a group that has disappeared, of course, thanks to a curious view of human reproduction), which exhibit altruism, compassion, and, interestingly, "an acceptance of individual differences" that can manifest in many ways. On the nature/nurture front, Christakis notes that kindness and altruism, or alternately nastiness and avarice, "may depend heavily on how our social world is organized." The shipwreck experiment would seem to speak to that, as does the roiling social division of today. As he explores human nature and its possibilities, the author touches on all sorts of fascinating anthropological matters, such as the evolution of monogamy and the relative friendliness of affluent vs. working-class people.A refreshingly optimistic view of our kind.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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