Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

Nicholas A. Christakis, “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society”, Little, Brown Spark, 2019, 419 pp.

Author Nicholas A. Christakis (born May 7, 1962) is a Greek-American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of behavior, health, and longevity.

In “Blueprint,” Christakis presents a heavily researched argument for something that makes a forceful case for our capacity for friendship and cooperation — a conclusion grounded in evidence from his own and others’ research into real and virtual environments, including studies of social networks and massive multiplayer online games.  His view is summarized in his description of a “social suite” for human society — eight common features (including “love for partners and offspring” and “preference for one’s own group”) identified through his and others’ observations of world cultures. “When you put a group of people together,” he writes, “if they are able to form a society at all, they make one that is, at its core, quite predictable. … Humans are free to make only one kind of society, and it comes from a specific plan. Evolution has provided a blueprint.” The unavoidable presence of others — people we might interact with, cooperate with or avoid — he insists, has been as powerful as any predator in shaping our genes.

“Blueprint” considers the power of crowds not just as a force that can instill fear, but one that can bring about great good; and, with that, the question of whether we can broaden our perspective away from tribalism and toward an appreciation of a more universal heritage.   He does recognize that just as carbon atoms can fall into the structure of a diamond or coal, depending on how they are connected, the evidence shows that good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things simply as a result of the network they find themselves embedded in, and regardless of their own convictions.

My Notes:

Pg. xviif:  As the author writes this (2019) the US seems riven by polarities—right and left; urban and rural; religious and non-religious; insiders and outsiders; haves and have-nots.  Yet, the author advances the view and presents studies that confirm that there is more that unites us than divides us and that society is basically good.  Human nature contains much that is admirable, including the capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning; all of which allows us to form good societies and fosters understanding among people everywhere.

Pg. 13:  The capacity to band together to make societies is a biological feature of our species, just like our ability to walk upright.  The human ability to construct societies has become an instinct.  It is not just something we can do—it is something we must do. At the core of all societies is the social suite that is at least partially encoded in our genes:

1.      The capacity to have and recognize individual identity

2.      Love for partners and offspring

3.      Friendship

4.      Social networks

5.      Cooperation

6.      Preference for one’s own group (that is, ‘in-group bias’)

7.      Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)

8.      Social learning and teaching

Pg. 58:  “When you put a group of people together, if they are able to form a society at all, they make one that is at its core, quite predictable. They cannot successfully create any old sort of society they want.  Humans are free to make only one kind of society, and it comes from a specific plan.  Evolution has provided a blueprint.”

 

Pg. 98f:  Utopian communities adopted paradoxical approaches to sex.  Generally, the strategies shared the common aim of subverting the institution of marriage and eroding any deep personal connections between pairs of individuals; the objective of these strategies was to foster a sense of connection to the group as a whole.  This is the reason that many of these communities also attempted to break down the nuclear family through communal child care, as happened in the kibbutzim.  However, such efforts almost always fail because they subvert our species pre-wired instinct for love.  It is not easy, or feasible, to abandon the social suite.

Pg. 105f:  Personality traits such as kindness are not individually fixed.  The tendency to be altruistic or exploitative may depend heavily on how the social world you are in is organized.  So if we took the same population of people and assigned them to one social world, we could make them really generous to one another, and if we put them in another sort of world we could make them really mean or indifferent to one another.  This indicates that the tendency to cooperate is a property not only of individuals but also of groups.  This phenomenon, of wholes having properties not present in the separate parts, is known as emergence, and the properties are known as emergent properties.  Connect people in one way, and they are good to one another.  Connect them in another way, and they are not.

Pg. 123:  The Anna Karenina principle (that all happy families are the same but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way).

Pg. 134:  Our ancestors were polygynous until about three hundred thousand years ago, primarily monogamous from then until about ten thousand years ago, and primarily polygynous again until about two thousand years ago, and primarily monogamous since then.

Pg. 167:  Studies have documented that satisfaction in arranged marriages generally is not lower than it is in love matches. 

Pg. 171:  Social monogamy is extremely common in birds—90 percent of bird species are socially monogamous and mate roughly for life—but rare among mammals.  Only 29 percent of primate species are monogamous.    

The common ancestor of all mammals appears to be a rodent-like animal that lived at least ninety million years ago.  (He sat behind me in high school study hall.)

Pg. 181:  Eric Turhheimer formulated the first law of behavior genetics: “All human behavioral traits are heritable.”  Roughly speaking, genes and environment are equally important in determining the extent to which people manifest numerous traits, from religiosity to risk aversion. 

Pg. 239:  Most human virtues are social virtues.  To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people.  No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself.  People care about whether you show these qualities to others.  And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.

Pg. 284:  The last common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees lived about six million years ago, while the last common ancestor of both humans and whales lived about seventy-five million years ago and the last common ancestor of both humans and elephants lived about eighty-five million years ago (meaning that we are more closely related to whales than to elephants).  But since the common mammalian ancestor we shared with elephants or with whales did not live socially, all of these species must have independently arrived at these similar solutions to the challenge of living in groups.

Pg. 320ff:  Culture:  knowledge that is transmitted between individuals and across time, that can be taught and learned, and that is distinctive to groups.  It is a set of beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts that can be arbitrary or adaptive, that are shared by members of a group and are typical of it, and are socially transmitted. 

Pg. 358:  While as much as a third of humans during the Paleolithic period (2.6 million to 12,000 yrs. ago) died from intentional violence, only about one out of a thousand people in even our most violent communities’ die from intentional violence today.

Pg. 362:  Americans now spend 9.5 percent of their income on food, down from 16 percent in 1962 and far down from 42 percent in 1900. 

Pg. 383:  Having religious beliefs (including the promise of heavenly rewards for the disadvantaged) and rules, traditions, and institutions that allow a large number of non-kin to work together makes it easier for a group to defeat other groups with more divisive or inconsistent ideologies.  Religions are a cultural feature that secondarily allow unrelated individuals to expand the circle of cooperation, exchange goods, and maintain a division of labor.  And success in competing with other groups (and reducing conflict within one’s own group) may ultimately come to be reflected in our genes, insofar as certain genetic variants fare better in environments made more cooperative in the first place.

Pg. 393f:  Although the ascendency of humans was built into early Christian thought, it was Saint 

Thomas Aquinas’s theological writing in the thirteenth century that helped to ingrain this separation between humans and the natural world in Christian doctrine.  For Aquinas, it was the soul that separated humans from other animals.  However, this separation (body from soul) is starting to turn around and humans are being integrated back into the natural world; we see this in the animal rights movement, in debates about climate change, even in the way that scientists increasingly discover human traits in other animals.

Pg. 405:  Whenever a new study finds that genes are relevant to some behavioral phenomenon (from personality to depression to resilience to violence), a hectoring little asterisk is often slapped onto the conclusions assuring us that Genes are not destiny.  There is a tremendous fear of abuse based on the vile eugenics of the past.  Misguided and poisonous biological arguments have been used to promote racism, misogyny, child abuse, etc., and other destructive ideas in many times and places.  But this creates a different kind of problem: one that forces people to ignore what is plainly in front of their eyes.  For instance: 93 percent of incarcerated criminals were men; and scientists have a lot of evidence regarding the role of testosterone in aggression in nonhuman primates.  For instance, among chimpanzees, 92 percent of attackers and 73 percent of victims are male.

Pg. 414:  To the extent that forager societies show certain behaviors in common with contemporary populations (and they do), it means there is something very deep and fundamental about our humanity.  However, there are two new technologies that could have a more substantial impact than anything we have created before.  The first is artificial intelligence (AI).  Prior technology was at our service but AI has the potential of specifying its own ends, of having its own ‘desires.’  The second radical technology that might affect the social suite is the gene-editing tool CRISPR.  Humans will be able to modify their genes and direct their evolution by using tools that involve nonrandom mutation and unnatural selection.