About the Book
“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 Sapiens
The 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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
Fascinating…Whitehouse explores these topics from various angles, addressing the role of ritual, the role of intense emotional experiences in forging violent groups, and the possibility of fundamentally reimagining the materialistic basis of society…[he] ranges widely across disciplines and timescales to formulate his exhilarating narrative of human history.
A thought provoking look at social forces, and the ways ordinary people can change the world.
Explores how evolutionary inheritance, shaped by millennia of natural and cultural selection, continues to influence human behaviour and societal development. From the origins of agriculture to the complexities of modern geopolitics, Whitehouse’s research offers insights into the forces driving human history and the challenges.
One of the best books on the evolutionary inheritance of the modern human world which you are likely to read…In a crowded intellectual field, not always notable for underclaiming or sophistication, [this book] buzzes with ideas that demand attention.
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.
A compelling, thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately hopeful new perspective on our history, present crises, and future potential. The human biases that Harvey Whitehouse examines all have a dark side, but as he shows, these same capacities for belonging, belief, and bonding can also be channeled in positive directions. This book is a masterpiece—important, thought-provoking, and great fun to read.
Harvey Whitehouse has written a scientifically robust book with profound implications. As a scholar of how group identities form and what binds people strongly or weakly to cooperate across many cultures, he identifies the biasing domains of behavior that define us: conformity, religiosity, and tribalism. He explores how we have evolved from living in small groups to not-always-cohesive mega-societies. He then asks how we could use this knowledge to address global challenges—can we get beyond our local selfish interests to cooperate on a global level? A constructive, provocative, and hopeful perspective on our futures that merits deep reflection.
Inheritance is a brilliant synthesis of insights from psychology, anthropology, and big historical data analytics that throws penetrating light on the evolutionary trajectories of human societies, and on how we collectively can shape a better future for humanity.
This is a tour de force, a compelling work of scholarship and advocacy that astonished me by providing an entertaining analysis of human social change and growth over the last ten millennia, and then a blueprint for a future transformation of human civilization. I recommend this gripping read to anyone interested in the questions of why human civilization is careening forward so recklessly, without coming to grips with the dangers of climate change, nuclear war, or pervasive misinformation, and what cultural innovations might empower a collective change of direction.
A profoundly important book of breathtaking scope. Harvey Whitehouse shows how evolution sculpted our psychological makeup, how we overcame its limitations over the course of world history, and how we can wield this knowledge to face the challenges of the future. Full of deep insights into human nature, this is a work of compelling conviction by a master in the field.
A very powerful, provocative, and inspiring analysis of the human condition which seeks to explain where our societies are going wrong today—and how to put them right. Whitehouse bravely takes an ambitious interdisciplinary view that captures the sweep of history, tackling topics ranging from social media and modern political polarization to ancient religious cults, nomadic societies, and more. His arguments about the three core features shaping humans—conformity, religiosity, and tribalism—are thought-provoking and offer an excellent lens to frame events today. Compelling and highly readable, this book shows why anthropology matters.
