Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World

“Traditionally, we are seen as victims of our biology and environment, but Whitehouse offers the intriguing (and even fun) view that we are the masters of our destiny.”

Anthropology is seldom proactive. In Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, Harvey Whitehouse describes it as the study of our “combination of culturally evolved traditions and biologically evolved institutions.”

Whitehouse explores how humanity might “invest” our 12,000 years of certain drivers into an “inheritance more wisely in the future.” The “same features of human nature that are bringing us down could, in theory, also be harnessed to reform our economies, conserve our planet’s resources, expand our cooperative capacities, and manage conflict more effectively.”

This work is built around three biological biases: conformism, religiosity, and tribalism, not reproduction and child-rearing. An argument can be made that Whitehouse’s three elements are identical. As for biological drives, the author approaches that idea throughout Inheritance, as with a look at Göbekli Tepe and Ćatalhűyűk many thousands of years ago.

Whitehurst sees “routinization” leading to more sophisticated societies but also being challenged or encouraged by change, depending upon historical circumstances. For example, the introduction of agriculture affected belief in the supernatural and the future.

Not intended as “a work of crudely reductionist evolutionary psychology,” Inheritance looks at how these factors have been “harnessed and extended by thousands of years of cultural evolution,” “unnatural history” rather than “natural history.” The final chapter takes these ideas into modern history.

Traditionally, we are seen as victims of our biology and environment, but Whitehouse offers the intriguing (and even fun) view that we are the masters of our destiny. The author sees this as a good thing, leading to “recognizing the limitations of the garden and working around them rather than against them.”

The author argues that conformism “explains many of our most astonishing cooperative accomplishments but also some of the most appalling atrocities.” Children begin as proto-anthropologists, learning the customs and features of their small, originally alien world's identity, even if they never understand the meanings.

“Overimitation” can serve no discernable purpose or be “magic” because a person assumes an outcome without technical knowledge of how the result is obtained. Ritual is learning and does pass on knowledge, but it also carries many kinds of dangers of trust.  “It also enabled us to become more future-minded than ever before.”

Conforming can have the opposite effect when combined with secularization and commercialization, with an overconsumption that becomes “increasingly unsustainable.” The author believes, however, “that the same conformist instincts that led us down this path to destruction can also lift us out of it.”

In “religiosity,” traditional organized religion is threatened by modern faiths such as the "advertising industry, social media, and news conglomerates.” Religion, like conformity, “tells us what to do.” As with society, “the gods are always in a position of dominance.” Even babies recognize adults as these supernatural beings.

Whitehouse argues that no religion is naturally inherent, but acceptance, through exposure, of the aversion and adherence to rituals, has a biological basis. Inheritance looks at how the fusion of an individual into a society might work.

People are also attracted to counterintuitive beliefs, including supernatural beings and known fiction. This can lead to what is defined as socially deviant behavior but also includes accepting ideas that are greater than physical reality, such as the future.

As with conformism, however, Whitehouse believes we can harness this bias for a bright future. Conformism and religiosity inherently support the idea that a person or a society has a future, even by different means beyond death, such as continuing a society’s initiations into adulthood. Tribalism further encourages self-sacrifice and shared experience.

Finally, humanity is driven by tribalism. Some “findings on this topic are disturbing, such as “one of the most powerful factors driving the rise and spread of civilizations in world history is war.” The author was able to “mine 400 documents” from 60 societies to look for cooperation. In 99.98% of the instances, cooperation was considered morally good. We may not need religion to be moral, but we need our tribe.

Whitehouse also applies his views to historical writing: Historians “can provide a rich picture of things that happened long ago” but often fail to “actually explain scientifically the patterns we observe in human history.” Scholars need “big data and the statistical analysis of past civilizations.”

Inheritance overlaps with historical works that attempt to find the patterns, or determinism, that drive behavior, but maybe that goal is best left to anthropologists. Historians do not have the advantage of experimentation as a research tool.

Even if they disagree with the author, interested readers may feel they learned more from Inheritance than from related college courses. Throughout this work, the author includes stories of how anthropologists have experimented with and researched the “diversity of human social and cultural systems” worldwide, “over 600 of them [ethnographic observations] from scores of different countries.” That can encourage careers in anthropology.

The prose is lively, even entertaining, and highly quotable. Whitehouse tries to keep his arguments focused and organized, although his thoughts sometimes jumble. Inheritance is annotated.