Last month, on my flight to Armenia, I read a terrific book - Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis, which made me think a lot about love and family. The book explains that we (humans) have evolved to work together and be social (not on social media!) This sense first developed because it made us more likely to live longer; our need to form a group has had a meaningful impact on our collective human history.
The book explains that our ability to construct societies has become an intuition. It is not just something we can do - it is something we must do of course. And this ability has led to eight common traits that we can find in every society on earth: Individual identity, love for partners and children, friendship, social networks, cooperation, preference for our group, some kind of order, social learning, and teaching. The book spends a great deal explaining how each of these traits is found in seemingly diverse people (from the Roman Empire to Kenya's Turkana communities). Our world has gone from being a small group of hunter-gatherers that were strongly related to the modern world where we can live in a big city with millions of other people. And the fact that social order has remained the same notwithstanding those changes is simply amazing. If we really want to explain human behavior, the social order alone is only part of the narrative. A lot is going on! We have the genetics we were all born with. We have hormones running through our bodies. We have our childhood and how that shaped us. We also have learned behaviors - the understanding of what's allowed and what's not allowed that is passed to us through societal norms. In Blueprint, the author focuses mostly on the last part - person-to-person communications. The book is a refreshing read. In fact, one of the things that makes it so readable is all of the fascinating examples and stories that the author relates to. The beginning of the book looks at a bunch of shipwrecks that caused people getting stranded on remote and deserted islands. Each group of people had to develop their own form of group or society, and some were more successful than others. Interestingly, the groups that performed the best - meaning that a high probability of its people survived to be rescued - included some or most components of our social order. The groups that didn't' have these elements fell apart fast and even devolved into cannibalism. One of the most exciting sections in the book was about comparing bonobos and chimpanzees. Chimps are actually really hostile with each other and sometimes they will kill members of their own group to asset dominance. On the other hand, Bonobos are mainly peaceful and playful creatures. They are one of the only species other than us - humans who engage in sexual intercourse for pleasure, not just for reproduction ends. The book talks about a few theories for why the two types of apes are so different, even they really look the same. Chimpanzees are more likely to share territory with gorillas and have fewer access to food than the bonobos; therefore, aggressive chips might even have a better chance to survive. And maybe bonobo females - like us humans - evolved to value cooperation over-aggression when choosing a mate. It's actually surprising to learn that the field of comparing the social behaviors of humans with other animals is actually not really a developed as I thought. Blueprint gives an excellent basic level understanding of it. I agree with the scientific conclusion of the book; that every one of us on earth has more in common than not. It begs the questions, like how we can leverage that commonality to get things done. Can we get our seven billion people to work together and solve big global problems like climate change? Can we argue that our similarities are powerful enough to overcome our few differences? Well, the book really doesn't answer these questions, but it indicates that the answer is yes by showing us that we have an innate capability and need to cooperate. The truth is that a lot of us are fascinated by the differences between us - but the differences are actually pretty small compared to the similarities. The book gave me a sense of optimism. Nowadays, it is easy to feel down reading news headlines every day about how polarized we are becoming. I found Blueprint to be a refreshing reminder that, when we say we are all in it together, it is not just a motto - it's evolution. So we are all in it together!
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AuthorRoozbeh, born in Tehran - Iran (March 1984) Archives
April 2024
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