Ep. 13 – Nicholas Christakis on the animal origins of goodness

“When you go to these elephants and you study their networks and you study their behavior, you find in elephants the same, I would argue, type of friendship that you find in us,” Dr. Christakis says. “I find that incredibly moving. If we can share this property with elephants for God’s sake, we can certainly share it with each other.”  (Photo: Via Yale Human Nature Lab)

For decades, researchers have debated whether or not animals make friends. “Friends” — the taboo “f word” — was generally put in quotes if it was used at all. But if you study the social networks of elephants, whales and other animals, it is clear that they have friends just like we do, according to the renowned sociologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis. Friendship, like other societal characteristics, evolved independently and convergently across species. Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, Dr. Christakis is a leading Yale sociologist and physician known for his research on human social networks and biosocial science. In this episode, he speaks with us about the ancient origins and modern implications of our common animality and his remarkable new book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.

In his new book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Dr. Christakis investigates the biological foundations of our impulse toward the good. “For too long,” he writes, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness, and cruelty. [But] our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin …. we come to this sort of goodness just as naturally as we come to our bloodier inclinations.”
“You could take a diamond and crush it until you get little tiny carbon atoms,” Dr. Christakis says. “But those carbon atoms wouldn’t have the properties they had when they were assembled together in the form of a diamond, which had the properties of refracting light and being hard and so forth. That’s a general statement about emergent properties—properties that arise from groups and that do not reside in individuals. In the case of elephants, when we decimate the population through habitat loss and poaching, we don’t just lose those individuals. We lose something broader that those elephants had created with each other: a way of being in a society.”  (Photo: Jordan Makarof)

Dr. Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and biosocial science. Director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab and the author of three books and over 150 articles, Dr. Christakis has been elected a fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Last year, Yale awarded him a Sterling Professorship, the University’s highest honor. Blueprint has been hailed by writers like Steven Pinker, Anne Applebaum, and Cass Sunstein as “sweeping,” “magnificent,” and “inspiring,” a book that is both “deeply scholarly and, at the same time, a genuine pleasure to read.”

Recommended books:

The Iliad by Homer

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert 

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham

Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir by Joyce Poole

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family by Cynthia Moss

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