BLUEPRINT: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society | Nicholas A. Christakis | Little Brown, 544 pages.
This fascinating collection of micro studies of human interaction strung together to suggest that human nature evolved for cooperation, love, and learning. The book is well-researched, accessibly written, and passionately argued, yet it fails at the level of evidence to demonstrate its central hypothesis. Granted, given that many consider humans to have no “nature,” it’s a courageous undertaking.
Christakis argues human nature evolved with “pre-wired” capacities to include eight qualities: (1) The ability to have an individual identity, (2) love for partners and offspring, (3) friendship, (4) social networks, (5) cooperation, (6) preference for one’s group, (7) mild hierarchy, (8) social learning and teaching.
The author notes, “In all the seemingly strikingly different human cultures worldwide, in all the repeated opportunities to make new societies, we see the same core patterns repeatedly.”
Indeed, that manifests what it means for humans to have a nature.
Christakis mistakes capacity for orientations and structures' vital role in nudging or leveraging our nature. For instance, the capacity for effective cooperation fails to surface, at scale, outside of the order of a free market; pair bonding or love fails, again at scale, to flourish outside the institution of marriage.
History, the reality of human experience, suggests our nature is hard-wired for something much more akin to our animalistic ancestors than angels. Furthermore, history nearly proves that structures and systems of norms we create as an environment drive or nudge - depending on the order - the expressions of our nature, creating our ability to nurture civilization.