Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, and, in his professional allegiances, both a physician and a sociologist. He has written about social networks, obesity, smoking, and happiness.1 An achieved academic, Christakis is not a man inclined to leave a base uncovered. Blueprint is an engaging book, and if at five hundred and twenty pages it is too long for its argument, it carries the extra weight gracefully. Human beings, Christakis argues, are disposed to create morally refreshing societies. “A scientific [emphasis added] understanding of human beings actually fosters the cause of justice by identifying the deep sources of our common humanity.”2 Those sources are deep because they are biological, and common because they are held in trust by the entire human race. “The thing about genes,” Christakis writes, “is this: we all have them.”3 The correlative claim that our genetic heritage must act to foster the cause of justice follows as the triumph of hope over experience.
Blueprint’s blueprint is a social suite comprising eight junior suites. They are, reducing things to their essentials: identity, love, friendship, cooperation, solidarity, dominance, learning, and social networks.4 These are at the core of every human society, and they are expressed anew whenever societies are created.
Shipwrecks offer Christakis the occasion to suavely consider societies formed when half-drowned sailors discover the advantages of dry land. Some shipwrecks end passably or peacefully, the survivors dividing their labor while sharing their hardships. Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic is an example. When the Endurance was crushed by ice, Shackleton secured the safety of his men on Elephant Island, and then sailed a small boat across seven hundred and fifty miles of open water to reach the wrong side of South Georgia. Crossing the island on foot, he sought and found help. His men remained disciplined, determined, and dutiful. No one was lost. The sailors of HMS Bounty were somewhat less creditable. Having given themselves over to what Captain William Bligh called the “allurements of dissipation”5 on landing in Tahiti, they gave themselves over to the improvisations of debauchery on getting rid of Bligh. When they were not murdering one another, the women they had kidnapped were murdering them. Only two of the mutineers survived. Christakis is careful to insist that he is no genetic determinist.6 The genes that he commends are serviceable but not domineering. They guide, shape, impel, dispose, induce, incline, or inveigle. In the case of the HMS Bounty, they did rather less inveigling than one might have hoped.
Written history goes only so far, and then it gutters out. With a fine sense of the essentials, the Sumerians conveyed their tax rolls to posterity in the fourth millennium BCE. What came before must be inferred from the detritus that prehistoric man left behind. Paleoanthropologists believe that modern human beings emerged roughly two or three hundred thousand years ago; human language, shortly thereafter. Before its emergence, human beings could not talk, and afterwards, they would not stop. If language was useful, it is odd that it was isolated, and if not, odd that it emerged.7 Roughly forty to fifty thousand years ago, men learned to decorate themselves, control fire, create primitive tools, and master representational art sufficiently to produce imperishable masterpieces on cave walls throughout Europe and Southeast Asia. It is to those hunter-gatherers that Christakis assigns the genetic changes that allowed them to become sociable. When this happened, Christakis does not say, and how it happened, he does not know.
In his Chronicon, Eusebius recounts a story that he attributes to Berossus:
Now it happened that in the first year, in the confines of Babylonia, there emerged from the Red Sea an awesome creature which was named Oannes. … [it] had the complete body of a fish. Yet the fish’s head was another appropriate [human] head, and by the tail were [a pair of] human feet, and it could speak human language. … this creature kept company with humans during the day, completely abstaining from any kind of food, instructing people in letters and the techniques of different arts [including] city and temple [building], knowledge of laws, the nature of weights and measures, how to collect seeds and fruits; indeed he taught humankind everything necessary for domestic life on earth.
“From that time on,” Eusebius remarks regretfully, “no one [individual] has discovered more.”8
The monster in this story is a matter of myth; not so its moral. Had Oannes addressed the fish, they would have continued placidly to gulp. Fish are fish, but men are men, and men, but not fish, have the power to acquire the arts of civilization. Why this should be so remains a mystery. Within evolutionary thought, mysteries require miracles. They are not frequently withheld. Language? A long-ago lucky break, Noam Chomsky has long argued, endowed a single human being with the capacity recursively to organize his thoughts.9 One man, one mutation, and, thereafter, Ovid in his exile. It is a poignant image, but no more than that. The power to organize one’s thoughts requires thoughts to be organized, and without them, recursion is as isolated as the capacity to dream in color.
Although Christakis is writing about society, there is very little sociology in this book. Love is an occasional feature of human life. Thousands have lived without it.10 Bipedalism is universal. It is not clear why Christakis would think either a feature of social life. Personal identity receives a perfunctory treatment. A dog looking in a mirror sees another dog; a man, alas, sees himself. This Christakis accepts as evidence that we have some sense of personal identity denied to dogs. It cannot be said that this represents a stirring standard of success. Time and again, Christakis forgets that he is impelled by his commitments to study society, its classes, its structures, and their dynamics. The blueprint is, in fact, a list of things found in society—les choses trouvées—and as long as his standards are lax, Christakis might have added language, abstract thought, bureaucracies, markets, art, architecture, civil engineering, music, mathematics, pointless pride, cooking, sanitation, racial rage, fashion, storytelling, dance, ritual, myth making, poetry, science, taboos, philosophy, religion, gossip, envy, resentment, body adornment, a rich variety of perversions, politics, contracts, sport, taxes, and funeral orations. If love, why not gender? Every society before our own has divided human beings into just two genders, the distinction unvarying, inviolable, and irrefragable. If friendship and cooperation, why not enmity and conflict? If hierarchy, why not force? The simple rule, the good old plan. He takes who has the power, he keeps who can. If personal identity, why not original sin? “With respect to original sin,” Samuel Johnson observed, “the inquiry is not necessary; for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from their crimes.”11 If social networks, why not the law? If solidarity why not factionalism, as when groups devolve into groupuscules and then groupies?
Whatever the plausibility of evolutionary sociology, it suffers the accidents characteristic of evolutionary psychology. Their skid marks are the same, as forensic analysts say.12 Does the experience of being in love feel overwhelming? Sometimes it does. Men tingle, women twitter, and together they undertake the exercise that makes the real world bake and shake. “There are biological reasons,” Debra Soh writes, “that explain why the experience of being in love feels so overwhelming.” It is love that “allow[s] two people to bond in a way that increases the likelihood they’ll procreate and maintain an environment in which the resulting offspring survive.”13 By this standard, central heating, indoor plumbing, Scotch whisky, and old Frank Sinatra records may all be said to have a biological reason and so a biological explanation. The male tiger copulates in what appears to be a spirit of snarling irritation, departing the next morning satisfied, solitary, indifferent, and aloof. Many men do as much. Or as little.14 The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with love, and found him a native of the rocks.15 But if love is not necessary for reproductive success, neither is it sufficient. “When love is over, how little of love even the lover understands.”16 It is marriage that plays a role in the complex economies of human life. Marriage is, after all, a social institution, one embedded in law, justified through custom, and sanctified by religion. Playing a biological role, does it have a biological explanation? Although research is, no doubt, continuing, it would seem unlikely that there is a gene governing prenuptial contracts. Between what is inscribed in the genome and what is observed in real life, there is, and must be, the reciprocating pistons of human will and action. Evolutionary psychology is surely correct in assigning to an amorous paroxysm some say-so in the scheme of things, but since this was never in doubt, it was never in need. Given the discontent that it frequently provokes, marriage must have had some strong compelling force in its favor.
Christakis is a sophisticated man and would, I expect, be pained to accept the evolutionary psychologists as compagnons du devoir. He is in their company anyway. His argument is unvarying and proceeds from some common feature of social life to the gene acting as its presumptive cause. The argument has no independent point of adhesion in molecular biology, and thus may be run equally in reverse, proceeding from the presumptive human genome to some common feature of social life.17 If the human genome is everywhere the same, what explanation for human diversity? And if human behavior is everywhere the same, what explanation for genetic diversity?18 When these equations are divided by their genes, the result has rather less to do with a scientific understanding of human nature than Christakis imagines.
If pigs cannot fly, neither are they ever born with wheels mounted on ball bearings. Whether this is a fact of life or a law of nature is unclear.19 The concept of a morphospace has, in this regard, come to play a stately role in evolutionary rituals. “Morphological spaces, or morphospaces [emphasis original],” Philipp Mitteroecker and Simon Huttegger write, “are mathematical spaces describing and relating the phenotypic configuration of biological organisms.”20 Given the living pig, points in its morphospace represents the possible pigs, phenotypic variants. Those variants are described by a finite set of discrete parameters—wing length, for example. Although living pigs have wings of length zero, who is to say that in some corner of their morphospace, they may not be found with wings large enough to embarrass a condor? Who, on the other hand, is to say that pigs with wings are pigs? If not, what are they doing in a space devoted to pigs; and if so, why cannot pigs fly? It is obviously not clear how deviance is to be defined, a problem as much in zoology as in the law. Whatever the definition, living creatures do not seem especially disposed to an equitable exploration of morphospace. The great museum of possibilities is, like the Uffizi Gallery, filled with empty rooms, closed corridors, whole suites blocked off, inaccessible.21 It is a point to which Christakis is sensitive and one that he proposes to expand so that societies themselves find themselves embedded in some very large morphospace—something like a set of sets. The anthropologist Lee Cronk, in an exercise devoted to ethnographic hyperspace, has determined that there are (1 × 1053) possible human societies. Only a tiny fraction of them, Christakis remarks, “had ever been observed by anthropologists.”22 Busy as they are said to be, anthropologists cannot look everywhere. But from the fact that almost all of the societies in Cronk’s ethnographic hyperspace go unvisited, it hardly follows that those that remain are similar. All that one can say is that human beings seek one another out, and they seek one another out, to complete the inference, because they are human beings.
Qui se ressemble s’assemble and vice versa.
The conclusions that Christakis wishes to reach rarely survives a confrontation with cases. Friendship is an idea broad enough to encompass Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka and Johann Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe. To say that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Eckermann were friends because each man had a gene for friendship is to say no more than that they were friends. Whatever the gene for friendship, it was not sufficient to prompt their friendship, and if it was necessary in the sense that without it they could not have been friends, as much is true of their livers. A gene is, after all, a particular molecular configuration, and insofar as it codes for anything, it codes for the order of amino acids. It does nothing more. And it does not do that alone. The genetic apparatus is under enzymatic control, and so causally circular. It may be true that human friendship is linked to the human genome; it is a claim that requires the confinement of a causal connection.
This we do not have. For one thing, the details are missing. We can complete no connection between a particular gene and any phenotypic trait. For another thing, the conceptual coordination required is one urged between radically incommensurable domains. The gene is described in molecular biological or biochemical terms, but human action and human nature are not. A different vocabulary is required, and once specified, it becomes quickly plain that there is nothing obvious tying the two together. Social life has its own distinctive character. Explanations involve a complicated give-and-take between observation and conjecture. Why do so many young women cover themselves in tattoos, looking in the end like Yakuza gangsters? Because they want to, is one answer. It is better than nothing, if only because it fits the facts. They are, after all, covered in tattoos. Those tattoos, in turn, dispel any doubt about what these women want. Just look at them.23 These exchanges convey the impression of circularity, but a more appropriate metaphor might be an indeterminate equation in several variables in which the presumption of desire and its satisfaction in indigo represent one, but only one, possible solution—token and tattoo.
Body adornment is an ancient human obsession, with prehistoric women, their remains suggest, as willing to adorn themselves, or be adorned, as women in the twenty-first century.24 The desire to make oneself sexually attractive is neat enough to fit plausibly into the scheme of evolutionary biology. Men are easily led, and as easily misled, and the woman eager to do both may well have had an evolutionary advantage denied her drab sisters. But the manifold of desire and decoration has a curious geometry all its own. A woman may, by progressive nakedness, pique a man’s interest, and then his desires. Men in Victorian England, the fools, found an exposed ankle thrilling, while in the United States or Europe, only garments offering direct access to the main chance have a similar effect. These are circumstances that suggest that nakedness follows a simple linear relationship: more is better. The contrary is true. Clothing may proceed to the very threshold of the genitals, but nakedness is a universal source of shame—token and taboo.25
Blueprint is not a work of evolutionary biology, and it makes no claims otherwise. In justifying the premises to his argument, Christakis relies on the standard doctrine, now become the standard dogma. Both in The Blind Watchmaker and in The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins very nicely set out the essentials. Random mutations and natural selection drive biological change. In a still lower gear, random variations and natural selection drive change beyond the margins of an organism. Maddened by the same reproductive urge, bowerbirds construct elaborate nests and men, elaborate cities.26 If these ideas are now part of the Great Gabble, they remain well below the level of the serious sciences. They encompass neither the revolution in evolutionary thought introduced by Motoo Kimura’s theory of neutral mutations, nor the criticism that an inherently random process cannot produce the complex structures characteristic of molecular biology, let alone human society. Men in the Kalahari find it profitable to go for days without water; in Silicon Valley, the advantage is lost. Jedem Tierchen sein Pläsierchen. Environments change, no doubt, for reasons of their own. Those changes must be described by a random variable. The product of two random variables is again a random variable, randomness going straight down to the bottom in Darwinian theories.27
Blueprint is a cheerful book. Like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis is not a man to be worried overmuch by the charge of fatuous optimism. But it is a narrow book. It is narrow in its cheerfulness, and it is just this narrowness that suggests fatuity. “We do not,” Christakis writes, “find a functional society without love, friendship, cooperation or personal identity.”28
If this is what Christakis believes, it is only because he has not looked.29
In Among the Believers, V. S. Naipaul recounts a conversation in Jakarta with an Indonesian businessman, a Muslim, someone who “had the Indonesian feeling of things going wrong.”30 He was, Naipaul observes, a man full of rage. “We have to kill a lot of people,” the businessman remarks. “We have to kill one or two million of these Javanese.” It had happened before in Indonesia, Naipaul adds, still in conversation:
In 1965 the communists had been wiped out. A million people had been killed, he said, not half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escape killing, and many of them were still around.
I said, “If the killing starts, you may go yourself.”
“I might. I hope not. But I might.”
“I was told that in 1965 some people took out the gamelan when they went killing.”
“Of course. To add to the beauty.”31
In Bali, Naipaul observes some pages earlier, “the killing was as fierce as anywhere else,” and there, too, “to give a touch of ritual to the butchery, the village gangs took out the gamelan orchestra when they went killing.”32 The exquisitely mannered Balinese, in possession of an ancient culture, they, too, had crossed the kala pani—the black water. Christakis is not wrong to think that human beings, and the societies that they create, are similar.
He is wrong in finding this unequivocally a good thing.
Biology places the heavy hand of its constraints on human societies.33 No one doubts that this is so. We do not know what these constraints are, or how heavy the hand, and so we cannot determine how widely societies meeting them may vary. But the twentieth century offers a sobering lesson in the lurid power of diversity.
What cause in Nature for such hard hearts?
There is none.
Humani nihil a me alienum puto, Terence remarked. The idea is not foolish. But neither is it obvious. So many have seen it the other way around. Nothing alien is human to me. If the blueprint circumscribes the terrible societies of the twentieth century, it is too broad to be of interest, and if determined by the human genome, too narrow to be of hope.
We must look to other sources for our common humanity.
