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Name: Blueprint
Rating: 4.1 (88 reviews)
Author: Nicholas A. Christakis

Nicholas A. Christakis

The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

4.1 (88 ratings)

22 mins

Topics

Friendship Anthropology

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Blueprint
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What’s in it for me? The social ties that bind.

In a world of Trump, Brexit and populist politics, it’s easy to focus on what divides us. Every day, whether on social media or in our newspapers, commentators line up to explain how our identities are different and how incompatible we all are. But what if all this discourse is simply a vanity of small differences? What if we are actually genetically predestined to be universally similar, in our relationships, our friendships, and even in our cultures?

Let’s take a drive through our evolutionary road map, and learn about the common humanity that unites us all, regardless of nationality, gender, religion, or race. Drawing on cutting-edge insights from his social science laboratory, Professor Nicholas A. Christakis takes a look at how our evolutionary past has shaped our present, and examines the psychological cornerstones of every human society throughout history.

Read on to discover

what shipwrecks can teach us about evolution;
where romantic love comes from; and
how humans are genetically designed for culture.

Humans come ready-made with a blueprint for social behavior.

We don’t always need words to understand one another. As a young boy, Christakis was one of the only Greek children to arrive on the Turkish island of Büyükada. Nevertheless, the author and his younger brother quickly made friends, and spent a long summer rampaging around the island with the local boys. They even waged war on rival groups, using pinecones as weapons. In later years, the author reflected on this cross-cultural friendship group. How did it work so well, despite their linguistic and cultural differences?

As a researcher of social behavior, the author concluded that these childhood friendships were made possible by a mental manual of social skills, instincts and tendencies, which guide the behavior of every human being on the planet. In other words, there is a universal blueprint for social behavior encoded in our genes. These instincts help us form societies, which can be as small as a group of Turkish and Greek schoolboys united in their search for adventure, or as big as sovereign states composed of hundreds of millions of people. This collection of universal social tendencies, which the author calls the social suite, includes the capacity for love and friendship, as well as teaching and learning from others.

Unfortunately though, the social suite also includes a tendency to favor your own “group.”

A 2011 study, for instance, found that five-year-old children wearing a red T-shirt consequently liked and favored other children also in red T-shirts, and discriminated against those wearing different colors. This prejudice occurred even when the children were told that the colored shirts had been allocated at random. Studies like these demonstrate that humans have an affinity for “likeness” – no matter how small we perceive that likeness to be.

Of course, even if we identify with people similar to us, we don’t consider them all to be the same. Each of us are born with the ability to develop and recognize individual human identities. Just consider the almost universal human practice of using personal names. Although this might seem inconsequential, recognizing individuals is the bedrock of other human traits, such as love and friendship. After all, if we were unable to discriminate between two individuals, we’d have no way of preferring one person over the other, or repaying favors that our friends do for us.

The fortunes of shipwreck survivors show the social suite in action.

The nature versus nurture debate is almost as old as science itself. And for good reason – it is often fiendishly difficult to tell whether any given behavior is a result of our genes or our environment. Unfortunately, social behavior is no different. This begs the question: how can we be sure that the social suite of human behaviors are really inbuilt evolutionary adaptations, rather than spontaneous responses to the situation we find ourselves in?

To know for sure, we would have to conduct life-long experiments in which humans were raised in an environment without any pre-existing society or older people, and see how these unfortunate guinea pigs interacted with one another. Of course, ethical considerations make these sorts of studies impossible. Shipwrecks, however, may provide a close substitute for these experimental conditions. Those who survive shipwrecks, for instance, often find themselves washed up on deserted islands without any trace of established human society or infrastructure.

When it comes to relationships, love is universal – and monogamy is useful.

What aspects of sexual relationships are universal? Until recently, the author assumed kissing was universal. But it turns out he was wrong about that. The Tsonga people of Mozambique, for example, do not kiss. In fact, upon hearing of this strange practice, the Tsongas questioned why two people would want to share saliva and all its accompanying germs. This got the author thinking: which traits of human sexual relationships are present across all cultures?

The answer, quite simply, is love.

Friendships help people through rough times and are expressed in a variety of ways.

On December 17, 2015, 15-year-old Zavien Dobson was sitting on his porch with three friends in Tennessee, when a car pulled up and opened fire on them. Zavien didn’t hesitate. He threw himself on top of his female companions and died in a hail of bullets. Thanks to his actions that day, each of his friends survived this random and senseless attack. In light of Zavien’s moving sacrifice, the author began wondering: why do we feel such love for our friends?

Hearteningly, evidence suggests that friendship is a universal feature of nearly all human societies. Furthermore, it seems that the vast majority of cultures share the same core essentials of friendship ⁠⁠– namely, affection, trust and mutual aid. Another universal trait of friendship appears to be the acceptance of our vulnerability. You may not mind being teased by a friend, for instance, because you trust that they mean well.

Technological progress has opened up new ways of studying cooperative behavior.

In 2005, Amazon launched a software system that enabled them to hire tens of thousands of part-time workers to complete minor online tasks. This massive platform is known as Amazon Mechanical Turk, and its creation allowed the company to recruit workers, record their contribution and pay them accordingly. Before long, social scientists realized they could use the Turk system to set up artificial “communities” of users and see how they responded, individually and as a group, to tasks set by the researchers.

For the author and his laboratory, this vast online apparatus represented an exciting opportunity to explore the social suite of behaviors. He and his team set out to learn whether Turk users would still display these supposedly universal social behaviors online, or whether this brand new environment would prompt them to behave in brand new ways.

Many other species show the same social tendencies and behaviors that we do.

Humans and animals share many similarities. Up until 1964, scientists were stumped as to how to repair damage caused to heart valves by cardiovascular disease. That was until a French surgeon called Alain Carpentier tried replacing them altogether, with valves transplanted from pigs. Incredibly, his technique worked, and is still used today. Clearly then, our organs have a lot in common with those of pigs. But what if animals are similar to us in even more subtle ways?

As science progresses, we are increasingly faced with an uncomfortable truth: that the very same animals we eat and experiment on might share many features of our social suite. Evidence suggests, for example, that elephants have friends, gorillas have their own language, and rats feel empathy. Not convinced? Then just consider the parallels between capuchin monkeys’ social behaviour, and our own. These South American primates put their fingers into other monkeys’ mouths and allow them to gently bite down on them, thus exhibiting the apparently human trait of accepting vulnerability in front of one’s friends.

Humans conquered a hostile planet through a combination of culture and genetics.

The human race is scattered across the world. As a species, we’ve made our homes almost everywhere, from the freezing temperatures of the Arctic to the humid Amazonian rainforests. But how exactly have our genetics helped us survive these hugely variable environments? As it turns out, our genes have enabled us to prosper by endowing us with the ability to develop culture.

In an evolutionary sense, culture refers to knowledge that’s transmitted from person-to-person within a group, which then influences individuals’ behavior. Furthermore, culture is an evolutionary adaptation in itself, in that natural selection has equipped us with genes that can create culture. Our genetics give us relatively long lives, for instance, providing plenty of chances for information to be passed on between generations. Humans also have several psychological features that seem tailor-made for culture, like our desire for conformity between individuals and our tendency to mimic the behavior of older individuals. Extremely young children, for example, have been found to regularly copy every action they see an adult performing, no matter how trivial the behavior might be.

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What is Blueprint about?

Blueprint (2019) explores the psychological traits that all humans share. Examining the evolutionary underpinnings of our social behavior, these blinks shine a light on our ancestral past and investigate how love, cooperation and friendship came to be indispensable items in our social tool kit.

Best quote from Blueprint

The presence of our fellow humans – people we must interact with, cooperate with or avoid – has been as powerful as any predator in shaping our genes.

—Nicholas A. Christakis

Who should read Blueprint?

Budding social scientists
Evolutionary psychology buffs
History junkies looking for a fresh perspective

About the Author

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. In 2009, Time magazine named him as one of the world’s most influential people. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015, Christakis also runs the Human Nature Lab, where his team researches a wide variety of social behavior.

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