Inheritance

“An insightful and breathtaking exploration of humanity’s evolutionary baggage that explains some of our species’ greatest successes and failures.” —Yuval Noah Harari, author of SapiensThe ancient inheritance that made us who we are—and is now driving us to ruin.Each of us is endowed with an inheritance—a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it’s failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction.In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperil its future. He argues that three biases—conformism, religiosity, and tribalism—drive human behavior everywhere. Forged by natural selection and harnessed by thousands of years of cultural evolution, these biases catalyzed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and the arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of multiethnic empires. Taking us deep into modern-day tribes, including terrorist cells and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how, as we lose the cultural scaffolding that allowed us to manage our biases, the world we’ve built is spiraling out of control.By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance unveils a surprising new path to solving our most urgent modern problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey, one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.

An insightful and breathtaking exploration of humanity’s evolutionary baggage that explains some of our species’ greatest successes and failures., Inheritance describes how Harvey Whitehouse’s efforts to understand a culture in Papua New Guinea led ultimately to a new account of how empires rise, stand, and fall. This lucid and original book is important not only as a guide to underlying dynamics in contemporary society but also as an exemplary interweaving of approaches from the natural and social sciences., This fascinating book combines groundbreaking research with compelling storytelling to reveal how humanity's deepest tendencies toward conforming, believing, and belonging have profoundly shaped our many histories and current realities. Crucially, Harvey Whitehouse goes further to explore how the very tendencies that have got us here can now become invaluable tools for reshaping our collective futures. The result is profoundly thought-provoking—dive in., Harvey Whitehouse has woven his extensive studies of our inherited human nature into a remarkably readable book that aims to help us respond more effectively to contemporary problems. He offers a powerful argument that the behavior change we need is more likely to occur if we make use of our evolved human nature, rather than seek to transcend it., A bold and sweeping analysis that ranges widely through time, across geographies, and through different kinds of human societies. A book of rare ambition and scope.

Harvey Whitehouse is Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford. He is a founding director of Seshat: Global History Databank and the author or editor of nine books, including The Ritual Animal.