Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World

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Synopsis
“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.
Copyright:
2024

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
368 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780674291621
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Harvey Whitehouse
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Science, Religion and Spirituality, Psychology, Social Studies
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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