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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 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. Drawing on advances in social science, evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, and network science, Blueprint shows how and why evolution has placed us on a humane path--and how we are united by our common humanity."--Dust jacket.… (more)
User reviews
I have no particular issue with this as an argument. But I do question the idea that we are genetically blueprinted to bend towards the good in the way we form societies and interact. Good is relative; we don't know which more utopian paths we might have taken, but that we have selected against.
The book is full of interesting fragments, and well worth reading for those. But if you are expecting a universal theory of social behaviour, as some of the blurb seems to suggest, then you might be a little disappointed