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Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

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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.

544 pages, Hardcover

First published March 26, 2019

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About the author

Nicholas A. Christakis

10 books429 followers
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, with appointments in the departments of Sociology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Medicine.

Previously, he conducted research and taught for many years at Harvard University and at the University of Chicago. He was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. He worked as a hospice physician in underserved communities in Chicago and Boston until 2011.

Nowadays, he spends most of his time in the Human Nature Lab, where his team explores a broad set of ideas, including: understanding the evolutionary, genetic, and physiological bases of friendship; encouraging villages in the developing world to adopt new public health practices (working in locations in Honduras, India, and Uganda); mapping social networks in settings around the world; arranging people into online groups so that they behave better (such as being more cooperative and more truthful); developing artificial intelligence that helps humans address challenges in collective action; exploring the effect of social interactions on the human microbiome; and more. When he is not in the lab, he teaches at Yale University.

Christakis was elected a Fellow to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

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Profile Image for Bill Gates.
Author 10 books524k followers
July 23, 2019
Why do I love my wife, Melinda?

The sociologist Nicholas Christakis would probably give way more practical answers than I would. He’d argue that our emotional connection gives us a greater incentive to work together to ensure the survival of our kids (and our bloodlines). If we’re ever attacked, our larger, combined family unit is more likely to successfully defend ourselves. We’re also more likely to share food and supplies with one another, upping our chances of living through a tough winter.

(My own reasons for loving Melinda are a lot less practical.)

In his terrific book Blueprint, Christakis explains that humans have evolved to work together and be social. Although this instinct originally developed because it made us more likely to live longer, our need to form groups has had a huge impact on human history.

Early in the book, Christakis says, “The human ability to construct societies has become an instinct. It is not just something we can do—it is something we must do.” He believes that this instinct has led to eight common traits that—with very few exceptions—you can find in every society on earth. These eight traits form what he calls the “social suite”:


1. Individual identity
2. Love for partners and children
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. Preference for your own group
7. Some form of hierarchy
8. Social learning and teaching

Most of the book is devoted to explaining how each of these traits is found in seemingly disparate peoples, from the Roman Empire to the Turkana people of Kenya. Our world has gone from being small groups of hunter-gatherers that were closely related to the modern world where you can live in a city with millions of other people. The fact that the social suite has remained constant despite those changes is amazing.

But the social suite alone is only part of the story. If you want to explain human behavior, there’s a lot going on. You’ve got the genetics you were born with. You’ve got hormones running through the body. You’ve got your childhood and how that shaped you. And you’ve got learned behaviors—the understanding of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed that is passed to you through societal norms.

Blueprint focuses mostly on the last part. If you want a more complete picture, I recommend the book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky. My older daughter suggested I read it (Sapolsky was one of her favorite professors in college), because it’s a super in-depth look at why humans act the way they do. He’s giving you a framework down to the biological and hormonal level, while Christakis focuses more on person-to-person interactions.

Behave is really long, though—nearly 700 pages!—and the incredible level of detail isn’t for everyone. It almost feels like a very well-written textbook. Blueprint is a lot more accessible for a general audience. I recommend starting with Christakis and then, if your interest in the subject is piqued, moving onto Sapolsky.

One of the things that makes Blueprint so readable is all of the fascinating examples and stories that Christakis uses. The book begins by looking at a bunch of different shipwrecks that resulted in people getting stranded on deserted islands. Each group had to develop their own form of society, and some were more successful than others. The ones that performed the best (“best” meaning that a high percentage of its people survived to be rescued) embodied some or most elements of the social suite. The societies that didn’t have these elements fell apart quickly, with several even devolving into cannibalism.

I was particularly fascinated by one section of the book where Christakis compares chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimps are super aggressive with each other and sometimes will kill members of their own group to assert dominance. Bonobos, on the other hand, are largely peaceful and playful creatures. They’re one of the only species other than humans who engage in sex for pleasure, not just for procreation purposes.

Christakis offers a couple theories for why the two types of apes are so different, even though they look so similar. Chimpanzees were more likely to share territory with gorillas and had less access to food than the bonobos, so aggressive chimps might have had a better chance to survive. Or maybe bonobo females—like humans—evolved to value cooperation over aggression when choosing a mate.

I was a little surprised to learn that the field of comparing the social behaviors of humans with other species isn’t more developed. Christakis appears to be at the frontier of this, and Blueprint only gives you a surface level understanding.

I also wish he had gone deeper on the main conclusion of his book: that every human being on earth has more in common than not. It raises big questions, like how we can leverage that commonality to get things done. Can we really get 7 billion people to work together and solve big problems like climate change? Are our similarities powerful enough to overcome the few differences we do have?

Christakis doesn’t answer these questions, but he does imply that the answer is yes by showing that we have an innate capability and need to cooperate. A lot of people are fascinated by the differences between us—but the differences are actually pretty minor compared to the similarities. In that regard, Blueprint is a fundamentally optimistic book.

I didn’t expect to finish a book about behavior feeling more hopeful, but Christakis surprised me. It’s easy to feel down reading news headlines every day about how polarized we’re becoming. Blueprint is a refreshing reminder that, when people say we’re all in this together, it’s not just a platitude—it’s evolution.
Profile Image for Rossdavidh.
535 reviews183 followers
June 10, 2019
There is a long tradition of writers attempting to say how human society could or should be structured, going back at least as long as Plato's "Republic". No doubt, in most or all of them, the author believes themself to be learning from the past, from what has worked and not worked. Rarely, however, do they have access to enough data to be able to say how human societies prosper, or fail to. Even if they had real knowledge of their own society's history (as opposed to royal propaganda and mythology) they rarely had access to the history of very many others. It is only in the 20th, and especially the 21st century, that we have access to enough different case studies to be able to say something about what works, or fails to, when you put a bunch of humans together and try to get them to cooperate.

Nicholas Christakis, is one of the first generation of researchers to have this much data available to him. In some cases, he had a hand in gathering it. Early on in this book, he devotes a chapter to a database which he and his graduate students compiled, of shipwrecks in which the survivors persisted for long periods of time without rescue (i.e. long enough that they had to make some manner of society). They are, in a sense, natural experiments, in which you throw a bunch of people together and see if they can cooperate well enough to survive. It's not a perfect experiment, of course, but it's not the only place Christakis goes looking for data. Utopian religious communities in the early U.S. (there were quite a few of them, btw), reports from researchers going to the remotest parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas to find other societies than ours, and even more recent temporary societies formed in laboratories, where subjects are given reasons to cooperate (and temptations not to). Christakis is casting his net wide, in what is recognizable to me as the early phase of any true science: stamp collecting.

Because prior to the "stamp collecting" phase, you don't have a science, you have a bunch of opinions. Before you can really say anything about any topic (physics, astronomy, biology, etc.) first you need to collect a lot of data. There was a time when biologists' primary task was to find and describe previously unknown species (they still do this, but now they can do a lot of other things as well). There was a time when every astronomer with a telescope could point it in almost any direction and see something new (and name it, sometimes after a patron). There was a time (in its last phases now) when every linguist needed to decamp to a remote corner of the world to note down everything known about a language, from the last living speaker of it. Theories can rise to a level better than opinion, only when enough data has been collected, often by an entire profession for a generation or more.

It is probably not to be expected, then, that Christakis should be able to state in plain terms what the "Blueprint", or as he normally calls it in this book, the "social suite", is for a functioning society. There are a few things that can be said, for example: humans want both to be able to have sex with whoever they want to, and to prevent their chosen mate from forming sexual attachments with others, and society needs to have a mechanism for dealing with the contradiction between these two. There are a number of different ways this can be done, but no society just lets everyone do whatever, because the result is a bloodbath. On the other hand, no matter what the rules are, even in the rare case of a society where long-term monogamous relations were taboo, some people break the rules (running off together to live in scandalous long-term monogamy).

But, there are not a lot of details more than a few broad outlines like this. It is not as well developed as, for example, Elinor Ostrom's rules on how long-term cooperative enterprises ("commons" such as fields for grazing, fisheries, or irrigation infrastructures) need to be structured, if they are to survive. But then, Christakis has not been trying to assemble the rules of successful societies, for as long as Ostrom did, and Ostrom's remit was narrower than his. What he does appear to have in common with Ostrom, however, is the ability to prioritize gathering real-world data over cherry-picking history to support his predetermined thesis. Looked at in this light, perhaps it is a positive thing, that Christakis gives no grand conclusions (yet?). The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some). But, it is apparent to me, that we will not figure out how to do this (where "this" means something like "get along together in large numbers") without studying what works and what doesn't in a systematic way. It is good to know that people like Christakis are laying the groundwork.
Profile Image for Bradley.
Author 4 books4,347 followers
December 21, 2019
I've had a lot of love and interest in the social sciences over the years. I thought I was really into psychology until I fell in love with sociology. This led me to be a huge lover of SF in general, but concurrently, I read all about utopias, planned communities, shipwrecked sailors building their own natural communities, and all the kinds of political, social, and even biological foundations that any of these could arise from.

And then I read this book.

Christakis, a man with titles galore, has done a very thorough and interesting job in breaking down the fundamental similarities between all societies, starting from the same place that I began my research and taking it further... like communities in online gaming. But he doesn't stop there. He goes into the inherently social nature of animals, focusing on the features that are similar across the board.

Anyone who has ever had a cat or a dog will recognize the intelligence, altruism, cooperative natures of other social creatures. The same is true for dolphins and whales, elephants and the whole simian hoard. Just watch Animal Planet!

It's easy to see we're all more alike than different. And that's the main point. We're all biologically, genetically set-up, to want certain things. Some of those things conflict with each other. Culture and social structures put a modifier on the worst aspects of those conflicts and reinforce cooperation... but cooperative structures can be gamed. Members within it can cheat and steal and reap the benefits of the cooperation without giving anything back. And then the reaction comes. Punishment, more self-modifiers, and a flip-flop between aggression and cooperation. Richard Dawkins explains this very well in the Selfish Gene, and in a lot more convincing detail, but Christakis is quite good for all that.

We create societies based on our biological "social suite". These are features that cross all boundaries of culture because they're hard-wired in us. I'll steal the list from Bill Gate's review on this book:

1. Individual identity
2. Love for partners and children
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. Preference for your own group
7. Some form of hierarchy
8. Social learning and teaching

The final takeaway from this book DOES give us hope, oddly enough. These are all positive features of not just humanity but of a lot of the animal kingdom.

But here's the trick: Any time a culture or a social structure tries to break this social suite by denying even a single aspect to it, things tend to fall apart. Social learning rather implies that. And some, like preference for your own group, can be conflated into a major us vs them that can lead to aggressive war parties our world wars.

BUT... when social divisions are crossed, or given aspect in an umbrella from that captures commonalities across the divides, cooperation CAN be reestablished. People have seen this countless times. Giving aid to enemy soldiers on the battlefield, or the Red Cross. Charitable organizations. Doctors Without Borders. Or perhaps we ought to remember that countless unrelated people flocked to the twin towers to help those in need. We DO have a lot of evidence of altruism in our social lives, but this is mitigated against our perception that there are thieves among us.

I personally see a failure of cooperation going on all around us. It seems more glaringly obvious to me every day. And for good reason. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The grand majority in the middle are getting pushed down to the poorer side. Mistrust is everywhere because of the thieves.

I suppose the big question is this: can we learn to cooperate once more to root out the real thieves and reestablish the fundamental social suite that we need to thrive?


Profile Image for Ryan Boissonneault.
201 reviews2,151 followers
April 3, 2019
Social scientists can approach the study of human culture, broadly, by either focusing on differences or similarities. All too often, they choose to accentuate the differences, elaborating on what divides us and on our more aggressive and sinister behaviors. Since cultural differences are so obvious, the countless cross-cultural variations in human behavior would seem to dispel the possibility of cultural universals.

In Blueprint, Nicholas Christakis makes the opposite case: that our genes code for universal traits—the social suite—that underlie all superficial variation in human behavior and provide the foundation by which we form social networks. Christakis uses the metaphor of viewing two mountains from a 10,000 foot plateau, noting that one mountain appears three times the size of the other, until you descend from the plateau. Then, you realize the two mountains are 10,300 and 10,900 feet tall, and are not so dissimilar from this enlarged perspective.

This enlarged perspective is the focus of the book. It extends the concept of genetic influence beyond its physical manifestations (without the strict determinism, as we’ll see). To begin with, it is a noncontroversial fact that genes code for proteins, which aggregate into cells. The cells, in turn, form bodies, brains, and ultimately the emergence of mind and behavior. But it is not clear where this genetic influence should stop, and Christakis is suggesting that genes also have an influence on the formation of societies, just as they have an influence on bodies.

The concept of the extended phenotype—popularized by Richard Dawkins—describes the effects of genes on the environment outside of the body. Whereas a phenotype is a physical manifestation of genetic information, as in the genes that code for blue eyes, an extended phenotype is an expression of the genotype that impacts the environment, such as a spider’s web, a bird’s nest, or a beaver’s dam. Experiments have been conducted that show, for example, that birds can build nests without the benefit of social learning, demonstrating that the behavior is innate.

Considering that we know that genes code for physical manifestations and environmental behaviors, there is no logical reason to terminate the point of influence at arbitrary levels; genes, in addition to coding for body shape and size and the instinct to build nests, can also encode for social network formation as an extended phenotype for social animals, including humans.

For a host of historical, philosophical, and religious reasons, we tend to view humans as somehow separate from and superior to nature and other animals, but the distinction breaks down after careful analysis. For example, years of research in animal behavior shows that chimpanzees, elephants, and whales form friendships, engage in pair-bonding, practice altruism, participate in social learning, mourn for the dead, develop a sense of self identity (dolphins, apes, and elephants can pass the mirror test), and develop culture. Since these animals share an evolutionary history with humans, it’s more than likely that these animal behaviors correlate with similar internal states and emotions found in humans, all coded by genetics. And, as Christakis explains, recognizing our similarities with animals makes it harder to deny our common humanity. If we share traits with other species, we must share certain universals among ourselves. As Christakis points out:

“The thing about genes is this: we all have them. And at least 99 percent of the DNA in all humans is exactly the same. A scientific understanding of human beings actually fosters the cause of justice by identifying the deep sources of our common humanity. The underpinnings of society that we have come to understand—the social suite that is our blueprint—have to do with our genetic similarities, not our differences.”


Our genes cannot account for differences; cultural variation accounts for that. What our genes can account for are all the similarities that are present underneath all of the cultural variation. Those similarities represent the social suite and the foundation for our societies. The social suite includes eight elements:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. In-group bias
7. Mild hierarchy (relative egalitarianism)
8. Social learning and teaching

These elements are found across cultures (including to some degree in apes, elephants, and whales), and within unintentional communities (shipwrecked communities), intentional communities (communes), and artificial communities (online communities). Further, successful communities embrace the elements of the social suite whereas failed communities try to repress certain elements (think communist suppression of individuality or totalitarian suppression of the importance of love and family).

It’s important to note that Christakis is not a hard determinist, in the sense that genes determine all behavior or that everything is predetermined and cannot be otherwise. Our genes greatly influence our thoughts and emotions, and therefore influence our beliefs and behaviors. But they are not rigidly determined as in the beaver’s encoded behavior to build specific types of dams. Our genes code for minds that are adaptable, that create societies and solve problems in response to environmental variation, but that the specific products of that activity are variable. But again, at the foundation of that variation is the social suite that is found in all cultures.

Despite cultural variation, you won’t find a culture of isolated humans fending for themselves, a culture devoid of love and friendship, a culture devoid of social learning and cooperation, or a culture composed of humans without individual identity. These are the universals upon which all else is built, and upon which we can continue to build.

And this is good news, because the social suite mostly enhances cooperation—the only real advantage humans have over other animals. We form bonds, friendships, and networks for the purpose of cooperation and social learning that gives us an advantage over our environment—whatever that environment happens to be. Cultural variation is an adaptation to environmental variation that humans have been exposed to throughout our evolutionary history.

A key point to remember is that these evolved traits of cooperation predate written history—and any religious texts—by hundreds of thousands of years. That means, if we didn’t have the innate capacity for cooperation and morality, we would have never survived for the hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of religion and moral philosophy. Our morality is a product of natural selection and is expressed in our best religious and philosophical texts, it is not caused by them. We weren't all killing and stealing from each other indiscriminately for 197,000 years before the Bible was written. The world’s religions and philosophies were written and embraced, and have ultimately survived in one form or another precisely because they harmonize with the social suite.

So if the deepest aspects of our humanity are mostly positive, why is history replete with violence and oppression? The answer is that humans also have parallel aggressive and violent tendencies, which were also necessary for survival (a species too cooperative sets itself up for exploitation). Additionally, cultural variation can be significant and at times at odds with our well-being, and in-group bias can accentuate small differences and obstruct the recognition of our common humanity. But our best chance of transcending these differences and building a better society is not by surrendering to any single belief system, but by recognizing and promoting the cultural universals—the social suite—that optimize human cooperation, expanding the circle of who we consider to be part of the human in-group.
Profile Image for Kelly.
387 reviews21 followers
April 12, 2019
This is a competent, user-friendly breakdown of how evolutionary biology works with evolutionary psychology to modify society (and culture). Christakis constructs his argument by stringing together anecdotes from psychology experiments, interspersing ethnographic data, and tossing in a dash of personal observation. The book bangs around through time, hopscotches across scientific disciplines, dabbles in philosophy, refutes anticipated objections, runs through cultural comparisons, and generally goes wherever it pleases to give credence to its author’s thesis: that human progress is real and people are hardwired to be decent to one another.

I remember my Psychology 101 professor in college saying that you could safely bet your life—your actual life—that if you asked a stranger to pass the salt at a diner, they would. Christakis has gone through a great deal of ink to say the same basic thing.

I’ve recently read a few books that make the same point as well, but they do it by adhering to a given discipline—or at least hewing a little more to hard science to make their points. Principally, I’m thinking of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal, but I’d also throw in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky, The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Plum, and The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman, all of which are highly accessible to the general reader and make complex scientific arguments seem comprehensible and persuasive. By comparison, Blueprint is akin to a CliffNotes version of what these books offer.

It’s a good book, and it’s well written, but it’s not bringing anything new to the table.
Profile Image for Mehrsa.
2,235 reviews3,634 followers
March 27, 2019
This book is among the better evolutionary theory books of late. It includes the author's own research, which is fascinating. I don't think the book is quite what it says it is--it's not a theory of why we are good--but it is a theory of society, friendship and marriage from an evolutionary perspective.
Profile Image for James Marriott.
10 reviews2 followers
May 14, 2019
Wow. He's already answered something that has always puzzled me: why do intelligent people believe obvious untruths? Because the very fact it is nonsense is a signal to the group of your loyalty. Anyone can believe something that is true, but to collude in believing a lie is costly and commits you to defending that lie against attack from outsiders binding you to the group.
Profile Image for Daniel.
653 reviews85 followers
June 21, 2019
Christakis is no stranger to mobs and had suffered as an American boy in Greece shown to the mob by his own mother. He was attacked by student activists for supporting his wife who said that students, and not Yale administrators, should determine what Halloween costumes were acceptable. Still, he believes in the good of humanity, which is similar across many cultures.

1. People likes their own groups, from childhood, even if randomly assigned at the start. However there are also universal social traits across all cultures: such as need for social interaction, innate sense of justice and equality, facial expressions, music, friends, helpfulness, kindness, and love. He calls it the social suite. All human societies are very similar and occupy a tiny part of all possible social structures.
2. When people are put together either in experiment (Castaway 2000) or involuntarily (shipwrecks), the new communities formed resemble those where they come from. Utopian sects with very different rules generally collapse. Shipwrecked societies prospered only with the development of the social suite. Without it, people started to kill each other and chaos ensued. Successful communes depend on good leadership, a sense of common purpose and belief. Unsuccessful ones try to break down natural social structures such as the family unit. External factors such as natural disasters and availability of alcohol also make them likely to fail.
3. Max Weber’s 2 social connections: Gemeinshaft (personal interaction) and Gesellschaft (impersonal ones).
4. With the mechanical Turk community, sociologists can now run actual controlled studies. People are asked to donate real money to their connections who receive double the amount, and those in turn can then donate to them next round. In fixed communities, cheaters cause cooperation to stop. In fluid communities, people make friends with cooperaters. However, too much fluidity destroys cooperation again (no need to invest in these relationships). Cooperation’s benefit to cost ratio must be larger for larger groups. Inequality does not hinder cooperation; rather, displays of wealth does.
5. Monogamy is good for society as almost men can marry. Love is good as it guaranteed that the children belongs to the husband so he can care for the whole family. Egalitarian societies favour monogamy; unequal ones favour polygyny. In society practising polygyny, the wives don’t get along, and fear of murder of a child by another wife causes lots of anxiety.
6. Animal evolution: most mammals are polygamous. Paternal care evolved after pair bonding (looking at which animal evolved from which). Pair-bonding animals evolved from solitary ones, when resources were unable to support many. So pair bonding became the optimal strategy. However, primates live in groups and humans evolved from them. Maybe weaker males offer females personal attention and treatment (courtship) from the alpha male, or they can mate while the alphas are challenged (sneaky fu**ker strategy). In unequal polygynous societies, males may have used violent behaviour (crazy bast*rd strategy, but more egalitarian ones will decrease this behaviour.
7. Friends are important and apes have friends. Leaders keep peace and their removal results in violence and less friendship in the tribe. Friends of friends are likely friends; friends of enemies and enemies of friends are likely enemies. However, enemies of enemies are actually more likely to be enemies too! Fortunately we have many more friends (2.6) than enemies (0.7).
8. Next comes the depressing part. People like their own groups and dislike others, even if groups are arbitrarily formed. Experiments showed that people who are put in charge of assigning rewards like to maximise the difference between the in-group and out-group, not to maximise the absolute gain of the in-group. This leads to better treatment by other members of the in-group. However, rival groups can become friends when there is a common enemy or problem. Altruism and xenophobia appeared to have evolved together.
9. Individual identity is thus clearly essential for us to identify kin, friends and others. Grief happens because we desperate us from our loved ones.
10. Punishment is the flip-side of altruism, even to the point of sacrificing one’s own welfare to make sure free riders get punished. Punishment helps cooperation.
11. Learning helps us survive. Even though birds have the genes for singing, they still need to learn from other birds.
12. Our genes can affect how other people react to us. Thus genes can affect culture, and thus the social suite. Deer mice’s genes encode their burrows. Parasites can control the host to further their own lifecycle; the behaviour of one host can in turn change the behaviour of other animals in the same tribe. Likewise, extroversion, friendliness, and all the other social suite phenotypes could have evolved because they conferred evolutionary advantage.
13. Culture is the accumulated knowledge, folklore and ways of doing things and interacting that gets passed down through generations. Our genes can thus co-evolve with it.
14. Christakis thinks that what is good is what is social, and since we had evolved to be social, we also evolve to be ‘good’. He thinks Maslow is misguided in his hierarchy of needs; the shipwrecked sailors who survived prioritised friendship, cooperation and learning first before their own survival.
15. He thinks the future will be affected by AI and genetic modification. AI is going to change our social suite, just like how driverless cars will change how we drive. What if humans are genetically modified to be less social?
16. We see evil across the world. However, Christakis pointed out that we generally form loving and cooperative societies. And society bends towards goodness.
Profile Image for Nelson Zagalo.
Author 9 books368 followers
April 2, 2021
No seu livro "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society" de 2019, Nicholas A. Christakis aborda a questão da formação das sociedades de uma perspectiva evolucionária. A abordagem seguida por Christakis é científica, mas não experimental de forma direta. Ou seja, usam-se múltiplos métodos de análise indireta do objeto, que permitem construir inferências que depois suportam a argumentação geral. Mas não existe uma forma de aceder empiricamente ao objeto da discussão, ou de o testar de forma completamente isolada. Para uma parte da academia, isto deita por terra o interesse deste trabalho, e considera-o mesmo uma afronta. Do meu ponto de vista, e de uma outra parte da academia, isso é miopia científica.
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67 reviews5 followers
July 4, 2019
I was hoping for more from this book. The thesis of the author is that we contain a "social suite" of four features: capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. He doesn't say it, but these for him are human nature.

As evidence there is an interesting discussion of unintentional communities shipwrecks), intentional communities (communes, Antarctic scientists), and artificial communities (in lab settings). He maps the social networks with people as nodes as friendships as connections. One interesting insight is that slight hierarchy is useful if you want the community to survive, and leadership quality matters a lot. The network maps with the nodes are interesting, but ultimately all they do is provide evidence that there IS such a thing as human nature. Not earth shattering.

For love, there is an interesting discussion if pair bonding in humans and how there are varieties in different cultures. Pair bonding is rare among animals and seems to have evolved when there is a large territory to forage and females spread out and then it makes sense for the Male to stick with one and then raise young together. Interesting discussion of pair bonding evolving after group living, and then monogamy evolved relatively recently. It actually went polygyny for hominids, then monogamy for foragers, then polygyny for unequal agricultural and nation state societies, then monogamy in the west, and then more recently everywhere else. Also really cool evidence presented that love mediated by oxytocin may have evolved originally from caring for young, and pleasure of breasts and vagina during sex comes originally from stimulation meant for baby.

On friendship, it mostly talks about how dolphins, elephants, and apes also have friends, and this is convergent evolution because our common ancestors did not have friends. In human societies, surprising variation about what it means to be a friend.

Some interesting facts about how our faces are truly unique to allow us to recognize each other and have friends. There is a little culture in animals, but only humans have cumulative culture.

The last 2 chapters are finally him trying to make an argument with all these facts, but he has to tread so carefully in the role of genes on behavior that the argument is watered down to "genes can play a role and accepting that doesn't automatically result in eugenics".

There were a lot of facts, some of them quite interesting, but it didn't lead anywhere. The only argument I found was that we do indeed HAVE a suite of social behaviors that are human nature and we cam see evidence of that because core features of societies across the world share them and some animals have them too.
Profile Image for Websterdavid3.
173 reviews3 followers
August 11, 2019
This book changed my view of the role of genes in our social life. Now I agree with Nicholas when he answers the question, "is it nature or nurture?" with an emphatic "yes!"

Reading this at the same time as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's "The Evolving Self" has tangled me in the web of knowing how much humans are "good" and able to survive this complex world and how much we are tying our own shoelaces together as we run forward.

I lean more towards Csiks' view that our human needs, and xenophobia are likely to bollox up our species, perhaps in the near future. And share the optimism of the will that both authors have-- we want to do well and are prosocial, etc. And maybe even can see people from Brunei and Macedonia as "our people" and worthy of collaboration, instead of war.

Christakas has great style and is reasonably readable; like Jerome Diamond he is 100-200 pages short of a tough editor. The book would be better shorter, even though I love reading at length about silver fox breeding and human social structure in the Antarctic.

Highly recommended. And maybe it has prescriptions for how we can own our genetic heritage and not tumble down the wormhole of our genetic heritage; more likely not.
Profile Image for Paula Lyle.
1,578 reviews12 followers
March 1, 2024
"How do people collaborate to protect shared meadows where their livestock roam? Classical models that assume all people are purely self-interested predict that lands will be overgrazed, seas overfished, and air polluted because individual incentives are contrary to what is best for the group." (page 310)

Isn't that exactly how we find our world today? Christakis lays out the problem clearly, but his answer that humans will innately turn away from that behavior doesn't seem to be supported by his evidence.

I really wanted to be convinced by this book, but I just wasn't. Certainly individuals can be inclined to react with generosity and kindness and even huge groups of people can do so. Christakis proves that you can find examples of some society that will act out pretty much any scenario that can be imagined, good or bad. I appreciate that he didn't just use scenarios that proved his case, but with so many different evolutionary tracks I found it hard to believe that it will all work out okay in the end.

And if we can't figure out an answer to the "common-resource" problem(explained above), we may not have an unlimited amount of time.
Profile Image for Simon Eskildsen.
215 reviews1,079 followers
August 3, 2019
The premise is: What is natural about society? What arises independently? What is more nature than nurture? When thinking about questions like this, I am always reminded of Herodutus' powerful example of 'social constructs':

> One might recall, for example, an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents' dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do.

First few chapters survey of shipwrecks and the temporary societies that arise as a result. Fun way to start it. When it gets into communes, etc., I lost momentum and decided to 🙅🏼‍♂️
Profile Image for Aaron.
544 reviews12 followers
May 2, 2019
A complementary volume to Yuval Harari’s explorations of behavioural/ideological evolution. It’s not 100% convincing of humanity’s genetic goodness, but it’s an interesting starting point.
Profile Image for Manu.
376 reviews51 followers
January 14, 2022
I had hoped to begin the year with a book that broadens my thinking, and Blueprint most definitely does. It is in different ways related to two books that I read recently - Behave, and The Dawn of Everything. The former was about why we behave the way we do, starting from neurotransmitters and hormones right back to evolution even before we became a species. The latter was about why our linear way of seeing the evolution of humanity is inherently flawed, and how that is increasingly being proved by archaeological evidence. Blueprint is about how our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviours, but also the ways in which we make societies. It also does a fantastic job of (granularly) showing how all this is evolution at play from a time far before we became a species.
There is another way in which Blueprint resembles Behave. The first hundred pages don't do justice to the rest of the book. While it was the complexity in the latter, in this it's the seeming simplicity. From the preface onwards, there is a focus on balancing a couple of diverse ideas - the universality of our shared inheritance and the uniqueness of the culture we have built and the individuals we are. The objective in the early part of the book is to illustrate the "social suite" inherent in all societies - having and recognising individual identity, love for partners and offspring, friendship, social networks, cooperation, preference for one's own group (in-group bias), (only) mild hierarchy, and social learning and teaching. So irrespective of the origins of any particular society, it follows a blueprint that evolution has provided. There are examples in intentional, unintentional (say, shipwrecks) and artificial (experiments). Having said that, one should also be conscious of context emergence - the collective having a set of properties that might be different from the components. (an excellent example is carbon atoms creating both graphite and diamonds). An interesting point on the environment humans face - the one thing that does not vary is the presence of other humans, and this has a big impact on how we have evolved.
With this base, he moves to how our species came to prefer pair-bonding (an internal state - loving one specific mate), after cycles of polygyny and monogamy (external state and behaviour) - either "ecologically imposed" or "culturally imposed". At a basic level, 'the evolutionary psychology of both men and women is to exchange love for support.' And genes 'affect an individual's attraction to, and choice of, particular partners.' Pair bonding formed the basis of attachment which then spread outwards from immediate family and kin to friends and groups. An interesting exception is the Na tribe in Tibet (10000+) in which permanent relationships between a couple are forbidden. Some of their arrangements reminded me of the Sambandhams in Kerala's matrilineal communities.
In uncertain environments, friendships work great for mutual aid and co-operation, and that's how it probably started - as a survival hedge. Kin after all, could be completion for family resources, and sometimes kin are not sufficient for large group activities like a hunt, either in terms of numbers or skills. Additionally, because of their attention to us, our friends also make us feel engaged and wanted, something relevant today as well. And this 'social shell' allows us to weather difficult circumstances.
A crucial factor in ensuring non-kin co-operation is recognising and remembering individuals is important. It's interesting to see this skill present in many primates, as well as elephants and Cetaceans. And it's not just this skill, but reflections of emotions, cognition, morality, and other attributes like friendship, cooperation, and transmission of knowledge by social learning. The many stories of elephants are a treat.
The next part is what I found most interesting. Organisms manipulating the inanimate material around them. Christakis calls it an 'exophenotype' (Richard Dawkins called it an 'extended phenotype' earlier). Similar to birds building nests, spiders spinning webs and snails making shells. There are some mind-blowing examples of parasites that do this - fungi creating zombie ants, and snail flukes. In our case, the social suite is an exophenotype - an expression of genes outside of our bodies. And thus, our genes could affect other people too. Like animals manipulate physical objects, we affect the social environment around us!
And that is how the last sections focus on culture, and how ideas and technologies are created, and then passed on to the next generation. Genes and culture now work together on evolution. A great example is of the discovery of fire, change in eating habits, and thus a shift in the kind of dental and gastric mechanisms we have. As we gain control of the environment through our 'culture' (includes technology), the impact of genes might start dipping. I thought of both language and money as exophenotypes because of (respectively) the unique ability to transfer knowledge and become a universal currency that is increasingly an end and not the means, but they weren't a part of the narrative. I was especially intrigued because he also mentions that it takes strong cultural forces to suppress the tendencies of our social suite. He does cover religion, technology and sees AI and CRISPR as phenomena that could have a massive impact.
The blurb tries to pitch the book as a solution to the current polarised environment, but I didn't see a lot of that. What it does is show how a blueprint to create a good society indeed exists. That's what made us the dominant species on the planet. What remains unanswered is whether we can still cooperate for our common good. It's a fascinating read, and the numerous fantastic examples make it scientifically robust and supremely insightful.
Profile Image for Jackie.
787 reviews35 followers
January 31, 2019
I won this in a goodreads giveaway. Well thought out! Very interesting I learned a lot
Profile Image for Jordan Fenske.
26 reviews4 followers
January 24, 2022
I really enjoyed this book. Christakis took such a different approach to analyze human and animal behaviours and connections. This book was slow but never difficult to pick up. Also, I find with non-fiction that they can be quite repetitive however this took so many different angles on similar issues. Def recommend if interested in sociology, anthropology, or even biology.
Profile Image for Athan Tolis.
313 reviews659 followers
July 12, 2019
Author Nicholas Christakis spells out the main claim of this book on page 397: “The social suite is founded on human evolutionary biology and is therefore a universal feature of our societies.” In other words, the way we behave versus one another, the structure of our society, is built-in and it’s gotten to where it is now through natural selection.

I read the whole thing, carefully, and my feeling is that “the jury’s out,” but I truly enjoyed this (epically discursive) exploration regardless.

The structure of the book is that the author does not get down to the business of laying out his argument straight away. You’re first taken on a number of “tours” where you get to observe behavioral traits of groups. The sundry tours include, among other things:

1. an enumeration of castaways from the nineteenth century: what binds these people is that they did not plan to form a “society”

2. a tour of utopian (American) experiments, who explicitly aimed to do so;

3. an attempt at describing a taxonomy of communities;

4. a full exploration of all the ways societies make their family arrangements (from Hazda foragers of Tanzania to the Na people in the Himalayas via the the Nuer of Sudan and the Tapirape people of Brazil)

5. a study of monogamy and polygamy in animals (including its relation to “key” genes that might potentially catalyze these behaviors)

6. an exploration of friendship in animals, including the examination of mathematical graphs of the links between animal “friends” which –amazingly, one must admit-- looks pretty much the same as they do for primitive humans


With one or two exceptions, what I took away from this tour (that takes you all the way to page 280 out of 420) is how immensely diverse all these arrangements are, which I think is pretty much the opposite of what I thought was the central tenet of the book. I mean, if the author is to believed when he says (p. 128) that “a global, cross-cultural survey found that kissing was present in only 46 percent of one hundred and sixty-eight cultures studied” I think we have conclusive proof that there ain’t no “Blueprint.” To say nothing of the castaways, some of whom looked after one another all the way to safety, when others went on to capture and subjugate women and form a child-exploitation colony that lasted generations.

So Nicholas Christakis has his work cut out to convince you there is a “Blueprint,” let alone to do so in only half as many pages as he takes you on his wacky tour. He does do a tremendous job of explaining where genes come in and he builds a nice little mini-body of circumstantial evidence, but I don’t think he quite gets to a QED, or even an “aha” moment. Not for me, at any rate.

Still, there are rewards to paying attention. It was interesting to read the argument regarding why the width and the length of a human nose --in contrast to the width and the length of one’s hand-- are uncorrelated: society rewards good people with progeny, but you need to identify those good people first and variety in facial characteristics is an aid in that quest. It was fascinating to follow the argument regarding teaching and how that can feed back into genes through the shaping of one’s environment, even if this was not the first time I heard the argument regarding fire, cooking, brain size etc. And it was intriguing to follow the argument that the pathogens make me sneeze so they can spread, much as I found it to otherwise be a non-sequitur.

But did I REALLY change my mind about the fundamental question here? Do I now think my genes have predestined me to check on Linked In to see if I have any more links? Not really, especially since I know it’s my investor Andreas who demanded I get to 500+
Profile Image for Robert Kortus.
106 reviews1 follower
July 18, 2019
Fascinating book that dives into the background of human societies and what drives them. This book differs from books like "Sapiens" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" in that it specifically looks at the way in which evolution and human genes shape how societies are created. A good summary of the book can be found at the end of chapter 3:

"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 create any old society they want. Humans are free to make only one kind of society, and t comes from a specific plan. Evolution has a blueprint."

My only critique of this book is that it was too long. Christakis could have shaved a good 50-75 pages off and still maintained the overall theme and important details. This made for a long and sometimes boring read.
Profile Image for Baal Of.
1,243 reviews61 followers
September 17, 2021
Read the review by my friend rossdavidh for an in depth opinion about this book, which is what prompted me to buy and read this book. It left me with a lot of thoughts swirling around, and weeks later I'm still assimilating. I've even got this book selected for one of my book clubs next month, so I'll be looking forward to hearing what they think.
217 reviews
February 3, 2020
Nicholas Christikas does an excellent work of presenting the state-of-the-art knowledge in social sciences regarding evolutionary foundations for social organization. His theory boils down to claiming that our genome encodes the so-called "social suite", the characteristics of stable human societies towards wich we are biologically inclined. These include allowance for individual identity, love for partners and children, friendship, social networks and cooperation, preference for your own group, hierarchy (by power, reputation, respect, etc.), and social learning and teaching.

It is unclear how these came to be, and the author's hypothesis is that they were helpful to survive for early Homo species in the past hundreds of thousands of years, and they were gradually encoded in our genomes, at least as major trait shared by most of us. One possibility was female selection - if females preferred males that provided stability and care to children, while at the same time preferring those with higher reputation (larger number of friends), people with genetic inclination towards these traits were selected through the generations. This does not mean that 100% of human have all these traits, nor that they cannot be overruled by societal constructs and upbringing.

There are plenty of examples of societies where one or several of these characteristics do not hold, for example, there is a society in which children are completely forbidden to play. While it is possible to have a society where children cannot play, it comes at the cost of very strong cultural pressure to overcome the natural tendency of children to explore the world and their place within it through play. Similarly, there have been societal experiments where children are not raised by parents but collectively, and most of these could survive for long.

The first part of the book is very interesting with many stories about shipwrecks and examples of how castaways organized. When the person in power (normally the ship captain) was able to create an organization geared towards cooperation, group identity and at the same time respect of everyone's individual identity, success and eventually rescue was much more likely than the examples that started with surviving in caste systems (e.g. sailors and travellers, or white and natives) or, in the extreme cases, through cannibalism. Another chapter is devoted to societal experiments (shakers, Los Horcones, etc.), with claims that the further these experiments deviate from the social suite, the less likely to survive over long periods of time.

It would have been nice to see more discussion about implications of these theories to today's mainstream societal changes. While the book is mostly optimistic about human's inclinations to create good societies, the idea of possible alterations of the social suite by genetically engineering humans brings uneasiness to me. In any case, I found it a very interesting book with enough food for thought.
Profile Image for Maris.
91 reviews2 followers
October 6, 2020
A wonderful, thorough, and compassionate overview of how societies develop from the perspective of genetics, culture, and adaptation to environment. The author is quite cool at network analysis and thus adds a perspective of an overview - instead of simply creating compartments of groups and ideas, he zooms out to look at the patterns between the compartments as much as seeing into them. He believes societies have more things in common than not, just like if you're comparing two giant mountains with their slight differing in height and the wildlife they thus contain - it's far more substantial that they are both mountains caused by similar geographical processes and the slight differences at the top are minuscule in comparison.
30 reviews5 followers
March 18, 2021
Voor Broekie, m'n grootste fan:
Leuk boek over de blauwdruk van de menselijke soort. Welke menselijke eigenschappen komen altijd terug, ook als je met 10 op een onbewoond eiland leeft, 2 maanden oud bent of lid bent van een Afrikaanse stam met schijven in de oren? Hier lees je het. Wist je dat blauwe ogen minder functioneel zijn dan bruine ogen? Ze zijn gevoeliger voor licht en vatbaarder voor oogkanker. Hoe kan het dat de evolutie ze er nog niet uitgefilterd heeft? Omdat ze de communicatieve vaardigheden verbeteren doordat gezichtsuitdrukkingen beter te accentueren. Daarnaast worden ze vaak mooi en interessant gevonden! Op sommige stukken wel zo academisch verwoord dat je erg je best moet doen om het leuk te blijven vinden.
Profile Image for Ana Pajkovska.
19 reviews8 followers
September 29, 2020
The more people from around the globe I meet the more I get the feeing humans are very much the same, no matter how different we might appear, and how distinctive our cultures are. This book rests the whole case for this, in a great research supported writing.
Profile Image for Roozbeh Daneshvar.
241 reviews14 followers
September 15, 2020
The title somehow explains well what this book is about. It is a fairly long book (it took me one year to finish it). The concepts were interesting for me and overall, I enjoyed it. I just had a feeling that the chapters were somehow disconnected (or the transition between the different chapters could have improved).

I am bringing some quotes I found interesting in this book (and they might tell you if you'll like to read this book or not).


People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others. This can come about partly because of a process known to psychologists as deindividuation: people begin to lose their self-awareness and sense of individual agency as they identify more strongly with the group, which often leads to antisocial behaviors they would never consider if they were acting alone. They can form a mob, cease to think for themselves, lose their moral compass, and adopt a classic us-versus-them stance that brooks no shared understanding.



Crowds are especially feared by those in power when they emerge organically, without explicit organization, as they frequently do.



Children’s behavior often involves innately making a kind of miniature and temporary society. From an early age, humans cannot help themselves.



They believed it required as much bravery to approach the end of an age as to start it.



Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.



One of the more intriguing consequences of collective child-rearing, however, was the virtual absence of marriage between peers. The longer individuals resided together on a kibbutz as children, the greater their aversion to sexual contact with one another. These findings support the so-called Westermarck effect, a psychological hypothesis proposed in 1891 by the Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck. He suggested that childhood co-residence served as a kinship cue (people decide who their siblings are based on who they grew up with).



Effective leaders have to help minimize group conflict, deal with troublesome individuals before they compromise group harmony, keep work on schedule, make rational decisions in emergencies, deal fairly with conflict, and facilitate communication.



Balancing group identity and individuality is key for successful social systems.



the tendency to cooperate is a property not only of individuals but also of groups. Cooperation depends on the rules governing the formation of friendship ties. Good people can do bad things (and vice versa) simply as a result of the structure of the network in which they are embedded, regardless of the convictions they hold or that the group espouses. It is not just a matter of being connected to “bad” people; the number and pattern of social connections is also crucial.



Third, these examples—especially those far outside the region of the morphospace human societies actually occupy—can highlight how similar our societies are and how small a part of the range our species actually occupies. With ant colonies as an alternative, all human societies look extremely familiar.



across many cultures throughout Amazonia, and in a few scattered elsewhere, children are believed to have multiple fathers.



In one sample of two hundred and twenty-seven Aché children followed over ten years, 70 percent of those with one father survived to age ten, but 85 percent of those with two or more fathers did.



We can see that many cultural practices might, from some points of view, enhance survival in difficult circumstances. Our ability to be cultural animals (with whatever beliefs, practices, or technology) and engage in teaching and social learning is an important part of the social suite.



When scientists say that there is a gene or genes “for” a trait, it means that variations in a genotype correspond to variations in a phenotype, not necessarily that a specific gene is solely responsible for a specific phenotype.



There is rarely a one-to-one relationship between genotype and phenotype. Instead, genes yield particular behaviors more than others on average—just like smoking cigarettes substantially increases your chance of getting lung cancer on average but does not make it a certainty.



The environment in which genes find themselves is not always the same either. Although genetic information is basically unchanging throughout an individual’s lifetime, human physical and sociocultural environments are quite variable. As a consequence, genes can have very different effects on individuals depending on the context.



the more social connections someone has, the higher one’s tolerance for pain—and even a connection to animals will do.



The presence of pets encourages human interactions and possibly even increases empathy.



It seems to me that people’s squeamishness about animal friendship reflects a certain degree of arrogance.



It is true that we appear to be the only species that says “good-bye” and that other species seem to lack any special leave-taking rituals.69 But we are not the only species that says “hello” and that has specific greeting behaviors. Indeed, anticipation of the future is not absolutely necessary for the formation and maintenance of friendship ties. Only the cognitive ability to remember the past is needed. Even if the ability of other animals to anticipate the future is unclear, there is no doubt that many species have memory and even a sense of time.



Many birds recognize their nest sites rather than their offspring, as sneaky ornithologists moving eggs and chicks around have discovered.



Among humans, mutual exposure during childhood similarly weakens the sexual attraction between individuals when they are adults (as we saw with the kibbutzim). Conversely, there is some evidence that biologically related people reared apart sometimes report an overwhelming (and usually terribly unwelcome) physical attraction when they meet as adults.



Feeling close to someone involves some inclusion of the other in one’s self-identification.



Spending time with a friend or writing personal notes are good examples, because they are not scalable and are hard to fake.



Scalability is an important factor: maybe explains why social media happy birthdays do not feel genuine



The fact that you are irreplaceable to your friends even though you are unremarkable to strangers suggests that there is a deep connection between individuality—another key part of the social suite—and friendship.



Referring to someone as “irreplaceable” is a common form of praise. And many psychological phenomena in our species reflect the threatening nature of social replaceability, including the fact that we seem to like to form groups that are small enough for individuality to be appreciated. Ironically, then, individuality is crucial to the formation of social groups and to how the whole emerges from the parts.



when people are left to choose friends among a group of people to whom they are not actually related, they have a discernible, if slight, preference for people who resemble them genetically.



Just as friends tended to reciprocate friendship, enemies tended to reciprocate animosity, but the rates of reciprocation were quite different: 34 percent and 5 percent, respectively. That is, if you named someone as a friend, it was likely that person had also named you as a friend, but if you named someone as an enemy, it was less likely that individual had also named you as an enemy. This difference highlights the fact that people have secret enemies more often than they have secret friends. People declare their friendships to each other but are less likely to state that they are enemies.



We also found that the more friends a person had, the more enemies he or she was likely to have, with each ten extra friends being associated with one extra enemy.



Group identity, like sustained friendships, provides a solution to the risks of unreciprocated cooperation.



Prejudicial treatment of out-groups starts when people are very young and it does not seem to vary much with age, which suggests that the capacity for intergroup cognition is innate.



Many of the vilest expressions of racism and prejudice are likely extreme forms of out-group hatred, not of in-group affection.



the more identities available for individuals to assume and the more cross-cutting they are (such that people who are discordant on religion might be members of the same political party, for instance), the more tolerant a society can be of outsiders and, hence, of everyone.



Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that binary opposition (male/female, good/evil, hot/cold, conservative/liberal, human/animal, body/soul, nature/nurture, and so forth) is one of the simplest and most widespread ways that humans come to terms with complexities in the natural world.



The independent evolution of eyes has occurred at least fifty times across different species—as if seeing the light is inevitable.



You might take it for granted that you can differentiate yourself from others and tell others apart, but the ability to have an individual identity and recognize the identity of other individuals (especially beyond one’s mate or offspring) is uncommon in the animal world.



There is much evidence that grief is physiologically harmful and can even increase one’s subsequent risk of death,



Some theorize that grief motivates people to connect with others in order to reduce the pain. In this account, grief is adaptive because it keeps humans, a social species, from being alone



some hypothesize that the anticipation of grief might compel people to work harder to keep loved ones alive, which would be advantageous.



another theory views grief as a signal from those who are suffering, a sort of plea for help.



It is difficult to maintain cooperation as group size increases.77 Each person becomes individually less important for cooperation.



evolution tends to favor free-riders more in larger groups.



This willingness to pay a personal cost to punish someone else who is hurting a third person is known as altruistic punishment.



culture 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 that are socially transmitted.



Though most of the cultural traditions we see in animals are practical ways to enhance survival—new methods to gather food, for example—some new cultural traditions seem arbitrary. A group of chimps at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust, a sanctuary in Zambia where the chimpanzees live in forested enclosures, developed a useless practice of putting a long blade of grass into one ear, like an earring (see figure 9.6). This appeared to serve no practical purpose and was thus akin to a fad in humans.



While as much as a third of humans during the Paleolithic period died from intentional violence, only about one out of a thousand people in even our most violent communities die from it today.



Status can be defined as the relative ability to gain or control valuable or contested resources within a group.



Social learning is especially adaptive when a species faces an environment that is changing so frequently that genetic evolution—in which individual mutations lead to small differences in form and function—cannot do its job quickly enough.



Humans are unusual among mammals in having the capacity to be marathon runners. Though we cannot outrun even our household pets in a short sprint, we have all sorts of adaptations that equip us to run for a long time (these include slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are useful for endurance, and the ability to regulate body temperature during long periods of exertion).



Worldwide, the ability to digest milk in adulthood is uncommon and is generally absent in East Asia and Africa. Overall, perhaps 65 percent of the world’s population (including a significant fraction of North Americans and Europeans) lose their lactase enzymes by adulthood.



Positivism asserts that truth can be known only via scientific study involving the application of logic and mathematics to the natural world in a manner that is verifiable and reproducible.



Reductionism assumes that the whole is merely the sum of its parts and nothing more.



Essentialism is the position that things in the material world (including people and society) have a fundamental set of properties that are necessary for their identity.



determinism is the position that the state of any system is completely fixed by its preceding state or states.



at least 99 percent of the DNA in all humans is exactly the same.



In 1900, 41 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture; in 2000, only 1.9 percent was.

78 reviews
March 30, 2019
Nicholas Christakis' new book is a delightful look at why cooperation is hardwired in human society. He has the rare ability among academics to reach the common educated reader. Its clear prose and fascinating examples (e.g., what accounts for the vastly different results of 19th century shipwrecks) remind me of Jared Diamond's books. Christakis explains the riveting science that backs up his surprising conclusion that the evolutionary process favors cooperation rather than conflict in human society. When so much of what we see in the media focuses on war, greed, and misery, this compelling and humane work is a much needed corrective that explains why altruism and sacrifice make evolutionary sense. What a fascinating read!
Profile Image for Aurélien.
12 reviews10 followers
June 26, 2019
Excellent review of where we stand on the relationship between evolution and human society.
The author is a sociologist with a focus on social networks and he shows that our number of friends and relationships depend on our genes (for humans as well as for elephants!). Consequently, it is possible that natural selection selected for pro-social genes/behaviours which made us friendlier.
One of the best things about Blueprint is the feeling you get that we are at the dawn of very interesting times where we are going to learn so much more about the genes, culture and their coevolution.
It's engrossing throughout, for readers looking for similar themes, I would recommend The Secret of our Succes from Henrich and The Goodness Paradox from Wrangham (both authors are cited by Christakis).
Profile Image for Buchdoktor.
1,978 reviews148 followers
November 25, 2019
Das Nicholas Christakis prägende Ereignis seiner Kindheit waren die Menschenmassen, die 1974 Konstantin Karamanlis bei seiner Rückkehr nach Griechenland aus dem Exil erwarteten. Als Mediziner, Soziologe und Statistiker erforscht er inzwischen Soziale Netzwerke und Kräfte, die das Handeln in Menschengruppen bestimmen. Seine Forscherkollegen und er nutzen moderne Medien, um weltweit Probanden zu rekrutieren und zu befragen. Eins von Christakis Themen war u. a. die Veränderung von menschlichem Verhalten durch Influencer zur Senkung der Kindersterblichkeit. Aus der Beobachtung, dass aktuell und kulturübergreifend eine nie dagewesene Polarisierung von Gesellschaften zu verzeichnen ist, resultiert Christakis Forschungsansatz, ob die Voraussetzungen für Gruppenbildung mit ihrem „Stammesdenken“ genetisch bedingt sein könnten. Blueprint/Bauplan als griffiges Schlagwort trifft dabei nicht ganz Christakis Annahme, unsere Gene lieferten bereits einen Plan für die menschliche Spezies als Gruppenwesen. Christakis Hoffnung: Wenn wir die Grundlagen unserer Kultur als genetisch bedingten Bauplan begreifen könnten, müssten wir Vielfalt großzügiger tolerieren und damit unsere Überlebenschancen als Spezies verbessern können.

Der Autor versammelt Grundwissen über das Sozialverhalten kleiner Kinder (Bindungsfähigkeit, angeborenes moralisches Empfinden, Empathie, Kooperationsfähigkeit), Erkenntnisse aus der Zwillingsforschung und aus der Beobachtung großer Säugetiere (Primaten, Elefanten, Wale). Am Beispiel der Shackleton-Expediton (1922) und der Meuterer der Bounty (1789) auf Pitcairn Island zeigt er, welchen Einfluss Persönlichkeitszüge und Führungsqualitäten auf die Überlebenschancen gestrandeter Teams haben können. Ein weiter Bogen führt von Thoreau am Walden Point zu alternativen Lebensformen der Shaker, im israelischen Kibbuz, in Twin Oaks und städtischen Kommunen. Auch das intensiv erforschte Zusammenleben wissenschaftlicher Teams auf Forschungsstationen in der Arktis trägt zum Wissen über Gruppenprozesse bei. Schließlich erklären Details zur Partnerwahl und die Durchsetzung der Monogamie (zum Schutz von Status und Besitz) wie Gewaltbereitschaft gesenkt und der soziale Frieden gewahrt werden kann.

Ob Gruppenidentität ein gemeinsames Feindbild erfordert und wie generell das „Wir und die da“ entsteht, fand ich höchst interessant. Christakis Forschungsergebnisse z. B. zum Testosteron-Spiegel in der männlichen Biografie könnte so interpretiert werden, dass Kooperation, Uneigennützigkeit und Empathie sich in einer Gesellschaft durch die Partnerwahl von Frauen theoretisch durchsetzen müssten, weil Männer heute nur selten ihre Partnerin in fremden Clans rauben müssen. Für die höchst komplexen Probleme, die derzeit aus Angst vor Überfremdung resultieren, scheint mir das jedoch zu kurz gedacht. Ein Blick auf die Straße und in die Parlamente erzählt zurzeit allerdings eine andere Geschichte. Für die Einsicht, dass in der Wirtschaft und im Berufsleben diverse/vielfältige Teams aus Männern, Frauen, verschiedenen Generationen und Kulturen homogenen Teams überlegen sind, dafür haben Konzerne bereits erhebliches Lehrgeld bezahlen müssen.

Auf 460 Seiten (ohne Quellenangaben gezählt) liefert Christakis so umfangreiches Grundwissen, dass ich mich ab und zu fragte, wie er den Bogen zum Ausweg aus der Spaltung von Gesellschaften noch schlagen wird. Sehr eindrucksvoll seine Kartierung von Gruppenbeziehungen, die anschaulich zeigt, welche Fehler in der Teambildung sich frühzeitig beim Treffen am Kaffeautomaten abzeichnen würden, wenn denn jemand einen Blick dafür hätte. Wer sich für Verhaltensforschung, Gruppenbildung und Partnerwahl interessiert, bekommt eine Menge Fakten geliefert. Das Buch lässt sich problemlos lesen und profitiert von Christakis nüchterner Selbsterkenntnis über den blinden Fleck in der Forschung. Die Menschen erzählen Forschern manches, aber nicht alles – und wenn männliche Anthropologen noch nicht vom weiblichen Orgasmus gehört hätten, bedeute das noch lange nicht, dass es ihn nicht gibt …

Wer direkte Lösungen erwartet, wird vermutlich bei Christakis nicht fündig, man findet jedoch Erklärungen, die direkt vor der eigenen Nase warteten, ohne dass man sie bisher erkennen konnte.
Profile Image for Sean Goh.
1,491 reviews93 followers
August 12, 2019
Lengthy and spanning a range of topics, from evolutionary biology to sociology.
TL;DR: friendship (non-reproductive long-term bonds amongst non-kin) is almost unique to humans, and Maslow's hierarchy might be inverted (the social needs help to satisfy the basic needs).
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The desire for social connection and interpersonal understanding is so deep that it is with us to the end.
Even though people may have varied life experiences, live in different places and look superficially different, there are significant parts of others' experiences that we can all understand. To deny this would be to abandon hope for empathy.

Some scientists believe that awe is an evolved emotion intended to cause a cognitive shift that reduces egocentricity and makes people feel more connected to others.

We form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other humans. This is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom, but it is universal in us.

Humans have always made their social environments, while shaping the physical environment is a recent innovation. The one constant in human environments is the presence of other humans.

The ability to make and use a bellows appears frequently in successful stories of castaway survivors.

All over the world, irrigation systems seem to be associated with the emergence of social stratification and a divergence between elites and the populace.

Intentional utopian communities have always struggled with the problem of individuality.

Celibacy reflects a rejection of the real world, because it intrinsically means that the way of life cannot reproduce itself. Paradoxically, the Shakers required connection to the outside world, because that was the movement's only source of new adherents.

Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing, the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires party or state allegiance to be paramount.

Almost every innovation in child welfare in the US, including orphanages and subsidised child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.

Structure: not only the hierarchy in a group but also the pattern of social relations in the group (are friendships reciprocated? extent of mutual friends)
a shared moral understanding = a unified set of beliefs and a common sense of purpose, was crucial for a sense of belonging.

Groups can have both instrumental leaders (task oriented), and expressive leaders (relationship oriented). Effective leaders have to help minimise group conflict, deal with troublesome individuals before they compromise group harmony, keep work on schedule, make rational decisions in emergencies, deal fairly with conflict, and facilitate communication. Sometimes it is not possible for the same person to do both, hence generals and diplomats (war and peace leaders).

Groups in isolated environments often note the problem of "constant gossip" that adversely affects interpersonal relations.

Collective activities such as games and songs are especially important when groups lack long-standing rituals or shared religious ideologies.

Even the possibility of being able to change social connections can shape communities for the better.

Kissing is most common in Africa and South and Central America. No ethnographers familiar with forager or horticultural groups in sub-Saharan Africa, Amazonia or New guinea have ever reported witnessing romantic-sexual kissing.

It seems that across evolutionary time, that humans evolved to love their offspring first, then their mates, then to feel affection for their biological kin, then their affinal kin (in-laws), and then their friends and groups.

Roughly 85% of human societies have permitted polygyny at some point.
However polygyny deprives many men of partners, and causes many women to have to share their husband and overall household.

By offering a man a high certainty of paternity (through pair bonding), a woman is better able to secure her husband's investment in her children. Mutual attachment solves an evolutionary conundrum.
The drive to love your partner is universal.

Like weddings all over the world, Turkana weddings include dancing, feasting, gossiping, and flirting among unmarried guests.

The 'sneaky fucker' strategy: bystander males taking advantage of alpha males while they are fighting to mate with other inaccessible females.

Our many marriage systems reflect the human capacity for social learning, a key part of the social suite.

"Crazy bastard" strategy: where males at risk of being shut out of reproduction engage in riskier and more violent behaviour to secure a mate, by discounting their futures more steeply.

First law of behaviour genetics: all human behavioural traits are heritable.

Only the cognitive ability to remember the past is needed to make and maintain friendship ties, anticipation of the future isn't necessary.

We are supposed to respond to our friends because they have a need, not because of what they have done for us or what we can expect from them. Real friendships are based on how each party feels about the other, not what each party can do for the other.
Friendship is demonstrated by time-intensive, exclusive behaviours, honest expressions of emotion, and accepting vulnerability.

In Greece male friends tirelessly and publicly accuse one another of being masturbators.

The introduction of formal institutions (banking etc) may weaken traditional friendship ties.
Being less reliant on friends in their community, Americans can afford to be more geographically mobile.

The ability of friendships to be useful during reversal, when an even exchange is not possible, is precisely what makes friendship so valuable as an adaptation in our species.

Friends tended to be significantly more genetically similar than strangers drawn from within the same population. As a benchmark the effect's size corresponds to the coefficient of relatedness expected for 4th cousins.

The sense of togetherness and mutual aid leads to the higher evaluation of the in-group.
When groups are united against a common enemy, negative attitudes abate.

Both altruism and ethnocentrism need each other. In-group altruism in the service of out-group conflict.
All it takes for people to like their own group and dislike others - is for people to be able to simply switch groups.

Societies that stress uniqueness and individuality and that provide fertile terrain for friendship based on the personal and specific can actually be those where our common humanity is more easily recognised.

The possibility of being alone reinforces the ability of a group to be together.
One distinctive reason for animals to form social groups is the enhanced learning that can take place.

Genes can have effects outside of the body (e.g. beavers' dam building, bower birds building nests.

Status can be measured by prestige (benefits one can offer others) as well as dominance (traditional alpha male strength - i.e. costs one can inflict on others)
In most species the trade off between dominance and prestige is usually presented as the shift from bodily to cognitive resources.

When group size was increased, cultural knowledge was more often preserved, improvements more often made, and complexity in tool packages more often maintained. When it comes to cultural innovation and preservation, size matters.

Religions are a cultural feature that secondarily allow unrelated individuals to expand the circle of cooperation, exchange goods, and maintain a division of labour.

As a species, humans have evolved higher order needs (belonging, transcendence) precisely in order to more efficiently satisfy the basic needs of life. (Inversion of Maslow's hierarchy of needs)
Profile Image for Otto Lehto.
453 reviews171 followers
May 13, 2020
Christakis's book is good and thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology and its impact on social life. Its "blueprint" refers to the set of evolved characteristics that underlie every human society despite the diversity of social expression in their customs and laws. The word "blueprint" is a bit of a red herring, however, since it does not entail a set of clear-cut instructions that determine the social construction of rules. It is simultaneously something less and more than that.

From the point of view of evolution, all societies are constrained by behavioural traits that have been shaped by natural selection and cultural modification. They have endowed communities with a "social suite" (the author's own term) that embody the evolved passions and social instincts of humanity. The European conquerors of the Americans and the conquered native tribes, despite millennia of separation, shared much more in their biology and in their social life than either side was willing to admit. Both were driven by in-group bias and kinship loyalties that shaped their community rules, beliefs, and practices. Both sides had given different but overlapping expression to the biological roots of shared human sentiments, instincts, and evolved habits.

There are a lot of books about evolutionary psychology, but Christakis's book stands above the pack in three respects: 1) It is entertainingly written and full of interesting anecdotes, for example about castaway societies and their fates. 2) It synthesizes a a century of academic literature, including hundreds of studies across multiple disciplines, into a compact narrative that avoids both hyperbole and understatement. 3) Its narrative crystallizes into memorable takeaway lessons that marry the two virtues above - the suaveness of expression and the solidity of the science - into one of the best introductions to evolutionary psychology out there, leagues above most of the competition.

The book is not getting a full five star review from me, however, because the chapters are full of well-worn examples from evolutionary game theory, behaviourism, kin vs. group selection, the selfish gene theory, etc. As a result, the thorough narrative may feel a bit schoolmasterly, or familiar, to some readers. Although a bit vanilla or unadventurous in its detours, the author has clearly done a good job popularizing evolutionary psychology. Opposable thumbs up!
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