Christakis mentions many of the things that separate and divide human beings, most significantly, violence, selfishness, cruelty, and tribalism (and the subsequent rejection of others). And yet Blueprint is a profoundly optimistic work. For one, Christakis suggests that the human capacity for empathy is one of our most hopeful qualities. The book explores the various ways human beings are fundamentally similar, despite all of our outward differences. This common humanity, he believes, has its origins in our shared evolution; thus, he insists that we carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society. At the core of all societies is what is called the social suite, which includes the capacity to have and recognize individual identity, friendship, social networks, cooperation, and social teaching and learning. Blueprint is a big book and, hence, full of ideas: Christakis discusses unintentional communities, intentional communities (from Walden Pond to Brook Farm to urban communes in the 1960s); building small societies; imaginary societies (Wells' The Time Machine, Huxley's Brave New World); monogamy and traditional marriage; the bonds between humans and animals; genes and culture; and much more. A welcome burst of sunshine in a troubled world.--June Sawyers Copyright 2019 Booklist

Christakis (Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives), a Yale professor of social and natural science, proposes that the human capacity for cooperation and empathy derives from an "evolutionary blueprint for making a good society" possessed by everyone. Setting himself against scientists focused on aggression and selfishness as the "dark side of our biological heritage," Christakis lays out what he considers powerful evidence that biology-not socialization-is ultimately responsible for good deeds. He begins by analyzing how social structures developed among survivors of shipwrecks, extreme circumstances that he treats as real-world experiments. Reviewing dozens of such cases leads Christakis to conclude that these survivors did not "invent wholly new sorts of effective social order," but followed an evolutionary playbook. His book's scope also includes other species, including primates and elephants, known to exhibit altruism and self-sacrifice, and massive online gaming communities. Not every reader will come away persuaded of Christakis's thesis that the "arc of our evolutionary history is long" but "bends towards goodness." Nonetheless, his thoughtful and comprehensive analysis, a valuable complement to Steven Pinker's similarly themed The Better Angels of Our Nature, provides much food for thought and a refreshingly optimistic perspective. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the tradition of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" and George Orwell's "1984," science fiction writers have long imagined alternative worlds that portray either hopelessly dysfunctional societies or else the converse: worlds free from conflict or competition. In "Blueprint," Christakis presents a heavily researched argument for something that more closely resembles the utopian option, making a forceful case for our capacity for friendship and cooperation - a conclusion grounded in evidence from his own and others' research into real and virtual environments, including studies of social networks and massive multiplayer online games. Saturated with information, Christakis's book is well, if not tightly, made. His view is crystallized in his description of a "social suite" for human society - eight common features (including "love for partners and offspring" and "preference for one's own group") identified through his and others' observations of world cultures. "When you put a group of people together," he writes, "if they are able to form a society at all, they make one that is, at its core, quite predictable.... Humans are free to make only one kind of society, and it comes from a specific plan. Evolution has provided a blueprint." The unavoidable presence of others - people we might interact with, cooperate with or avoid - he insists, has been as powerful as any predator in shaping our genes. "Blueprint" considers the power of crowds not just as a force that can instill fear, but one that can bring about great good; and, with that, the question of whether we can broaden our perspective away from tribalism and toward an appreciation of a more universal heritage. Finding commonalities among the great diversity of human cultures may seem an intractable task, but Christakis argues that at the heart of all societies is something more atavistic, that lacks brutality and fosters friendship and sharing. Just as carbon atoms can fall into the structure of a diamond or coal, depending on how they are connected, the evidence shows that good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things simply as a result of the network they find themselves embedded in, and regardless of their own convictions. AARATHI PRASAD has a doctorate in geneticsfrom Imperial College London and is the author of "In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine."

Christakis is a medical doctor and sociologist. This combination underlies this unusual study of how natural selection, always interacting with culture, produces a biological blueprint for social living. Christakis believes that "humans are fundamentally good and that … we are pre-wired to make societies that are filled with the sorts of things moral systems see as good. The social blueprint is a non-theological, human-independent source for the good things in life that we value." He details the ways in which what he calls the "social suite" of heritable traits evolved. This suite consists of the capacity to have and recognize individual identity; love for partners and offspring; friendship; social networks; cooperation; preference for one's own group; mild hierarchy; and social learning and teaching. Strangely, Christakis gives a detailed account of how all of these traits might have evolved--except "mild hierarchy." Indeed, he does not explain what he means by hierarchy, except as being central to a network. For a sociological account of society, this study is weak on institutions of power. Still, this is an expert work showing how one could select for crucial elements of sociability. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Beau Weston, Centre College

A social scientist looks at the good and bad sides of human character, arguing that we are evolutionarily inclined "to make a particular kind of societya good one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning."How should one behave in the wake of a tragic shipwreck? Writes Christakis (co-author: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, 2009, etc.), director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, two 1864 incidents in the South Pacific offer "an almost perfect natural experiment." One crew, led by a captain who "seemed mostly interested in his own survival," splintered and finally resorted to cannibalism, while on the other ship, "the men stuck together and worked collaboratively from the very beginning," with no humans eaten. The men on the successful crew even organized an adult education program of sorts, playing chess and teaching each other mathematics, languages, and the like. By the author's fluent account, the fate of the Grafton speaks to the better angels of our nature, which in turn tends to the good. What he calls a "social suite" of positive features that incline us to love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, and other such desiderata has an evolutionary nature and may even carry an adaptive advantage, certainly as compared to the dysfunctional characteristics that so often emerge in times of stress. Christakis examines the positive traits of communal societies such as the Shakers (a group that has disappeared, of course, thanks to a curious view of human reproduction), which exhibit altruism, compassion, and, interestingly, "an acceptance of individual differences" that can manifest in many ways. On the nature/nurture front, Christakis notes that kindness and altruism, or alternately nastiness and avarice, "may depend heavily on how our social world is organized." The shipwreck experiment would seem to speak to that, as does the roiling social division of today. As he explores human nature and its possibilities, the author touches on all sorts of fascinating anthropological matters, such as the evolution of monogamy and the relative friendliness of affluent vs. working-class people.A refreshingly optimistic view of our kind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.