59. Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

Nicholas Christakis is a physician and sociologist at Yale University, and Director of the Human Nature Lab at the Yale Institute for Network Science.

His previous books included Connected, about how social networks affect our health and our lives, and Death Foretold, about the sociology of prognosis. We discuss his new book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society in which he writes about how evolutionary pressures gave human beings a set of social skills and desires that we can capitalize on to build a better society.

We also talk about Human Universals by Donald Brown. A related newer book is Our Common Denominator: Human Universals Revisited by Christoph Antweiler.

"Let’s Shake Up the Social Sciences,"an essay by Nick, may be of interest to social scientists.

Here is a transcript of this episode.

Rating the Show

If you enjoyed this show, please rate it on iTunes:

* Go to the show’s iTunes page and click “View in iTunes”* Click “Ratings and Reviews” which is to the right of “Details”* Next to “Click to Rate” select the stars.

See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >>