BOOKS boasting that they are going to explain the modern world (or, sometimes, the “modern mind”) by reference to evolution do not always inspire confidence. There is an awful lot of nonsense churned out in this genre, up to and including academic papers purporting to explain anything — from women’s use of make-up to the reason that newborns cry at night — by what happened during the Pleistocene epoch.

The problem is that the other end of the spectrum — the view that humans are a “blank slate”, everything being culture and nothing nature — is no more credible. Despite its being the “basic dogma for most social scientists”, as Harvey Whitehouse puts it in his introduction, the idea that millions of years of evolution should have shaped our physical form (few outside creationist circles have a problem with this) but left our mental landscape completely untouched is untenable.

So it is that Whitehouse, Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Oxford, has given himself quite a needle to thread. He does so admirably, and Inheritance is one of the best books on the evolutionary inheritance of the modern human world which you are likely to read.

Whitehouse sets the bar modestly and clears it easily. Our evolutionary past does not dictate who we are in any kind of deterministic way. It does not mould us in every detail and is no substitute for culture or ethical reflection. Rather, it has left us with the “building blocks” of human nature, ingredients (my word rather than his) from which the bewildering range of human societies and cultures cook up their values, practices, and institutions.

Whitehouse has excellent credentials, having spent years in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea and subsequently collaborated with numerous archaeologists, ethnographers, child psychologists, and the like to acquire an impressive erudition, which he brings to bear on the three ideas that structure the book.

First (though there is no hierarchy in the priority), humans are “conformist” or “ritual”. We naturally imitate one another, forming non-instrumental approaches to life, which develop into customs and cultures. Second, we are naturally religious, inclined to believe and spread ideas about the existence, power, and intervention of non-natural beings. Third, we are tribal: committed, sometimes violently, to the preservation and success of our in-group.

Whitehouse traces these “biases” back not only into our evolutionary past, but also to our childhoods, and the first section of book, in particular, is replete with references to laboratory experiments in which these biases can be seen to emerge in our nascent psychology and prehistory.

Part two explores how our need to conform, to believe, and to belong informed and were themselves informed by the growing social complexity of human history. Agriculture, civilisation, and the rise of moralising religions used rather than abandoned our evolutionary inheritance.

The third section then looks at how, now we live in the age of the “teratribe”, each bias threatens to overwhelm us unless we recognise and redirect it. It is the weakest of the three. I am not sure, for example, that our natural conformism is a more fruitful lens through which to analyse our problems in dealing with climate change than is, say, the standard collective-action problem.

Nevertheless, even here, the book is perceptive and provocative. In a crowded intellectual field, not always notable for underclaiming or sophistication, Inheritance buzzes with ideas that demand attention.


Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the host of the Reading our Times podcast.

Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world
Harvey Whitehouse
Cornerstone £25
(978-1-5291-5222-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50