Nicholas A. ChristakisBlueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

Abstract

Nicholas A. Christakis Blueprint:The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society New York. Little, Brown Spark. 2019. 520 pages. IN A TIME WHEN we stand more divided than we have in decades and global leaders treat international relations as zero-sum games, it is necessary to be reminded of our capacity for more. Yale professor Nicholas Christakis’s latest book, Blueprint, does just that. Often when our evolutionary past is invoked within the context of sociology or politics, it is to unveil our primitive urges, which have served our species in a distant past. Christakis’s view on the interplay between our genes and the cultures and societies we build is much more nuanced and adds significant weight to the other side of the argument. “It’s not our brains or brawn that allows us to rule the planet. [It’s] the human ability to construct societies,” Christakis states early in his book. He goes on to define what he calls “the social suite,” a set of eight traits, which include love for partners and offspring, friendship, social networks, and cooperation. The central thesis of his book is that this suite, encoded in our genes, is naturally present in all our societies and thus represents the blueprint for the kinds of stable societies humans can create—a staggeringly optimistic claim. Much of the book centers on various historically and geographically widespread examples of societies and how, despite their tremendous variety, the social suite manifests in each of them. From shipwrecked crews that go on to form new societies facing existential peril, to artificial societies in sociological experiments, to a number of natural societies spread across all continents , the discussion of these cultures alone makes Blueprint a worthwhile read. An exception to the rule that the author discusses is the Na of Tibet, a tribe of a few ten thousand members, where no lasting partnerships between a man and a woman are tolerated. But even this society is not fully capable of suppressing the innate human capacity for romantic love—couples leaving their village to be able to share their lives is not uncommon. Further outliers include the few societies that have no friendships and a society that does not allow their children to play. In all these cases, however, Christakis emphasizes that it takes very strong cultural forces to suppress the tendencies of our social suite. “Our evolution has shaped not just our bodies and minds, but also our societies,” Christakis contends, stressing that “cultural evolution and genetic evolution should perhaps not be treated as separate at all.” He advocates abandoning the strict “withinour -body” genetics altogether and gives Books in Review NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS in Istanbul as a professor of translation studies at Boğaziçi University. She worked with twelve other translators, including Mel Kenne, a previous collaborator on the magical realism of Turkish novelist Latife Tekin. Ergülen has a broad poetic range. Pomegranate Garden features works from 1982 to 2019. Pomegranate Garden delights in prose poetry, symbolism, free verse, narrative, premodern classicism, and the occasional mystic spiritual. But arguably, Ergülen best succeeds at what Parker notes as his “down-to-earth concerns of humanity itself.” In his poem “Borrowed Like Sorrow” (2005), he writes, “Mornings are tough / much more so than poetry.” His quotidian commentary becomes profound in his elegy to the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, written the year he was assassinated . “In truth we are neither Turks, nor Kurds, nor Armenians, / ours such a ‘father,’ Hrant, we are all orphans,” Ergülen writes in “Gazel of Orphans” (2007). He is unabashedly joyful about his work, in an autobiographical way that lends itself to ecstatic, performative poetry. “I love a bit of Haydar and a bit of Ergülen poetry,” he wrote in his poem “I Could Never Be an Evening!” (2011). In such poems, and throughout Pomegranate Garden , there are references to other famous Turkish poets, like Attilâ İlhan, Cemal Süreya, and Oktay Rifat. He does not mention them out of competitive spite, as is common among poets in Turkey, but in solidarity. Ergülen celebrates poetic universality , as an essential human activity for all. “[T]he world is poetry’s garden too...