BOOKS // The Roots and Branches of our Family Tree
For our Kith & Kin issue, we recommend a host of books that push the boundaries of our understanding and open our minds and hearts to our beautiful, interconnected world: its past, present, and future. // HSB
Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World
by Harvey Whitehouse
EXCERPT //
Conformism. Religiosity. Tribalism. In anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse’s powerful book Inheritance, he argues that we need to shift the way we think about our cultural inheritance if we’re to course correct on a collision with this triumvirate of our most deeply embedded instincts. “Judging by the observable behaviors of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, our closest primate relatives do not conjure up a world in which the spirits of the dead demand to be fed, placated, or petitioned for assistance. And yet in human societies, such ideas proliferate like wildfire,” he writes. “While the specific features of these beliefs are expressed in endlessly different ways in different cultural groups, their basic components crop up time and again through history.” But this isn’t just another book arguing for the elimination of religion or spiritual thought: It’s an attempt to understand their biological and psychological underpinnings—a great inheritance that has kept us alive for thousands of years. “It is a book about how we might invest our inheritance more wisely in the future,” he writes. He wants to break down academic barriers that leave what we know about human nature out of sociology, for instance, which presently has an orientation to humans as “blank slates.” We’re no such thing, Whitehouse argues, and we ignore our nature at our collective peril. //
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