The evolutionary origins of a good society – Nicholas A. Christakis

Society can be seen as a scaled up version of children’s play. Play often has in-group favoritism, trade complementarity, social hierarchy, cooperations, networked apology, social learning, evolved morality. Awe an evolved emotion that helps us connect to each other? quiets self interset and take interest in larger things.

Culture is whole set if ideas and artifacts produced by a group. Ideas transmitted by social yet affect individual behavior. Are their society universals? Almost all cultures individual have names might this make identification a universal social trait? Idea is to seek what is common to all, even if we can find a few examples. This book seeks to find evolutionary universals, not cultural ones. For instance, the use of music in birds, elephants, whales and us. Friendship in ours and other species makes it a candidate for a universal. Looking for the ones coded in genes rather than those that arose independent in many places in response to environmental needs, such as fishing nets. The practice of medicine is not encoded in genes even though every society has some type of healers, but the need to health and survival and the need to help one another is