Argues Physician and Sociologist Nicholas Christakis. I

Good Despite all evidence to the contrary, “the world is getting better,” argues physician By and sociologist Nicholas Christakis. It’s in our genes. Design By Julia M. Klein hen you think of shipwrecks, you circumstances. Many other shipwrecks— Published in March, and debuting on might imagine the vicious adoles- notably the British explorer Ernest Shack- the New York Times bestseller list, Wcent dystopia of William Golding’s leton’s famously abortive Imperial Trans- Blueprint (Little, Brown Spark) is a sci- Lord of the Flies or the sexual de- Antarctic expedition of 1914-17—off er entifi c manifesto—a fl ag marking a terri- pravities of the Bounty mutineers and stellar examples of leadership and altru- tory of hope during what Christakis con- their descendants on Pitcairn Island. Or, ism. Stranded on desolate Elephant Island cedes is an era of polarization and peril. considering the risks of starvation, you and awaiting rescue, Shackleton’s recruits “It may therefore seem an odd time for might fret over the prospects of cannibal- relied on “friendship, cooperative eff ort, me to advance the view that there is more ism. Such cases have been documented. and an equitable distribution of material that unites us than divides us and that “Two out of the 20!” protests Nicholas resources,” Christakis writes. When the society is basically good,” he writes. “Still, A. Christakis G’92 Gr’95 GM’95, whose valiant Shackleton returned with help to me, these are timeless truths.” ambitious new book, Blueprint: The Evo- more than four months later, all 22 of the Ranging fearlessly across disciplines, lutionary Origins of a Good Society, in- men he’d left behind were still alive. Blueprint refl ects the prodigiousness of cludes a chapter on the “natural experi- To Christakis, this tale of human hero- Christakis’s learning and sums up his ment” of shipwreck societies. As Christa- ism is not an outlier: the ebullient, recent research interests. But it is also a kis interprets the data, that low number 57-year-old Yale-based physician and triumphant declaration of his world of man-eating men is cheery news: it sociologist sees the bright side even of view, lessons garnered from a mainly underlines the human tendency toward disaster—and he’s developed a theory fortunate life that has also been shad- cooperation, even under life-threatening that explains why. owed by tragedy. The book marshals a 50 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE May|Jun 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS SHARP May|Jun 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 51 wide variety of evidence to argue not Happiness (2006). “I think that’s what specifi c interventions on maternal and only that societies are fundamentally impresses me most about Blueprint: It’s infant health, the project is now explor- benign, but that their goodness has a this sweeping synthesis … I can’t think ing the connections between bacterial fi rm genetic underpinning. of too many people I’ve ever met who’d patterns and human networks and how Christakis, the Sterling Professor of be capable of producing a work with that neighborly relationships aff ect the inci- Social and Natural Science at Yale and kind of breadth and sweep.” dence of depression. director of the university’s Human Na- Blueprint, in asserting social univer- ture Lab, also suggests that genes and hristakis’s intellectual leaps have, in sals and insisting on their genetic ori- cultures interact and co-evolve in a vari- the past, occasioned controversy, gins, has an even loftier feel than Con- ety of ways—with culture, in some cases, Cand are likely to do so again. Con- nected. “He’s more than interdisciplin- fostering (relatively rapid) evolutionary nected: The Surprising Power of Our ary—he’s almost transdisciplinary,” says change. One classic example he cites is Social Networks and How They Shape Renée C. Fox, the eminent Penn medical the culturally transmitted ability to con- Our Lives—How Your Friends’ Friends’ sociologist who was Christakis’s disserta- trol fi re and cook food, which changed Friends Affect Everything You Feel, tion adviser. “His work has become more teeth, muscles, and the stomach, and Think, and Do (2009), coauthored with and more macro. Starting with very “freed up energy to power the demand- the political scientist James H. Fowler, grounded phenomena that he studied ing human brain.” A more recent in- was an immense popular success. The ethnographically, he keeps enlarging the stance involves a group of “sea nomads,” book and Christakis’s related academic framework within which he is doing re- a people called the Sama-Bajau who live articles drew on data from the Framing- search and analysis and refl ection.” in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philip- ham Heart Study, a longitudinal public- pines and spend several hours a day div- health experiment, to suggest that obe- “If it were not healthy for us to live in ing for food. As a result, Christakis writes, sity, happiness, and other traits spread a social state, evolution would not they have evolved “genetic mutations through social networks in unexpected have sustained it,” Christakis says in a that appear to equip them with the abil- yet ultimately predictable ways. The freewheeling two-hour interview in his ity to cope with oxygen deprivation.” claims spawned voluminous newspaper Yale offi ce, interrupted by a talk with an Central to Christakis’s claims is the idea and magazine coverage; the research undergraduate aspirant to the lab, the of what he calls the “social suite.” Societ- “caught the cultural zeitgeist,” Christakis joyous introduction of a lab member’s ies, he says, are universally characterized says. “The attention—it was insane.” He six-week-old son, phone calls from two by love for partners and off spring, friend- even showed up on Time’s annual list of of Christakis’s three adult children, and ship, social networks, cooperation, in- the 100 world’s most infl uential people. the constant pinging of texts. “We would group bias, mild hierarchy, learning and At the time, a handful of economists not live together if all we did was kill teaching, and recognition of individual and mathematicians groused at Chris- each other. Then we would have evolved identity. These traits, he maintains, are takis’s statistical methods and conclu- to stay away. We would not live socially.” biologically ordained. In his view, culture sions. He reacted by continuing to re- The glittery array of academics who and environment account only for varia- fi ne—and to double-down on—his social have endorsed Blueprint includes Penn’s tions in how these hard-wired social ten- networking studies. “We thought some Adam Grant [“Good Returns,” Jul|Aug dencies are expressed. In the case of part- of the criticism was reasonable, and 2013], the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of ner love, for example, diff erent cultures some was stupid, and some was unfair,” Management and Psychology at Wharton, over the millennia have prescribed mo- he says. “So we said in response to the and Angela Duckworth Gr’06 [“Charac- nogamy or polygyny or (in rare cases) critics, ‘OK, we’ll give you more and big- ter’s Content,” May|Jun 2012], the Chris- polyandry as norms. But, for Christakis, ger experiments.’” topher H. Browne Distinguished Profes- it is the genetic blueprint that is founda- Some of these have been as sweeping sor of Psychology and a 2013 MacArthur tional. It is our genes that “explain why as Christakis’s theories. In partnership Foundation “genius award” recipient for culture exists at all.” with the Honduras Ministry of Health her research on “grit.” Steven Pinker, the Bold and imaginative leaps—across and the Inter-American Development Harvard psychology professor whose 2011 evolutionary biology, genetics, psychol- Bank, Christakis is spearheading a mul- volume, The Better Angels of Our Nature: ogy, anthropology, sociology, and other tiyear fi eld experiment involving about Why Violence Has Declined, is footnoted fi elds—are a Christakis signature. “He’s 30,000 people in 176 villages in rural in Blueprint, calls Christakis’s book a polymath,” says Daniel Gilbert, the Ed- Honduras, using software, Trellis, devel- “timely and fascinating.” gar Pearce Professor of Psychology at oped by his lab to map social networks. “Despite the failures of our society, the Harvard and author of Stumbling on Begun as an inquiry into the impact of pogroms, the Inquisitions and the Cru- 52 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE May|Jun 2019 sades and the endless war, the world is we’ve had every single kind of person you getting better,” Christakis says, agreeing can imagine come through this lab.” with Pinker. But he notes their diff erent Grounded in the hard sciences, Fotouhi emphases: “Steven is arguing about the has the skill set to apply mathematical historical forces. I’m interested in forces techniques to social-science questions. that are prehistoric. Before colonialism, Marcus Alexander, a Serbian immigrant before the pogroms, before anti-Semi- whose title is research scientist, has pur- tism, before all of that stuff , we did all sued a similarly eccentric career arc. He these things: We loved each other, we earned his doctorate in government at befriended each other. Harvard, where Christakis was one of his “Now, we also killed each other, we did two dissertation advisers. Then, at Stan- all that stuff , too. The historical and cul- ford, he completed two years of medical tural forces are overlaid over this bio- school and a postdoctoral stint as a labora- logical foundation. And I’m completely tory biologist. At the Human Nature Lab, aware that every century, every millen- he supervises the “wet lab,” involved in the nium is replete with horrors.

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