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Narrated by Not Yet Available
Harvey WhitehouseUnabridged
Narrated by Not Yet Available
Harvey WhitehouseUnabridged
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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 imperiled 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
An insightful and breathtaking exploration of humanity’s evolutionary baggage that explains some of our species’ greatest successes and failures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| BN ID: | 2940191831985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2024 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
