Inheritance: How Evolution Shaped Our Brains and Forged the Modern World

A new book by a renowned anthropologist and one of the smartest thinkers of our times provides a sweeping account of human history, latching onto three traits that humans share across time and space.

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The Fox, the Flag, and the Tribe

On Boxing Day, 1944, First Lieutenant John R. Fox found himself surrounded by Nazi forces in the village of Sommocolonia, Italy. Badly outnumbered, Fox radioed for artillery support. But as the German troops closed in, it became clear to Fox that there was only one solution to achieve the strategic objective of defeating the enemy and giving his fellow troops a fighting chance.

He sent an urgent transmission, giving his friend—Lieutenant Otis Zachary—fresh artillery coordinates. Zachary immediately realized that the coordinates were for Fox’s own location. Any bombardment would surely kill everyone, not just the Nazis. Fox had decided to sacrifice himself to save his fellow troops.

His last words crackled over the radio: “Fire it! There’s more of them than there are of us. Give them hell!”

Fox was killed. So, too, were roughly 100 German soldiers. The artillery attack bought crucial time for—and likely saved the lives of—his comrades. It was one of the bravest, most selfless acts of the war. However, Fox only received the Medal of Honor for his heroism in 1997, 53 years after his death. The reason? Fox was Black, part of a segregated American division known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Fox identified so much with his nation and his fellow soldiers that he was willing to engage in the ultimate sacrifice on their behalf. But the nation he fought for didn’t see him as someone who fully belonged, his recognition delayed for decades. He was considered sufficiently in the tribe to be allowed to fight—and die—for its cause, but not enough of a member to be recognized for his valor.

More recently, during the Libyan uprising against the Muammar Gaddafi, a teenage revolutionary saw a passing tank from the Libyan regime. He climbed on top of it, and replaced the regime’s green flag with the rebel one. He expected to be killed—and he was. He willingly died just to remove a symbol of oppression.

These stories raise profound questions about why Homo sapiens, when brought together in groups, behave in heroic, or strange, but often perplexing ways.

Why do some humans take our apparent instincts for social cooperation to the ultimate extreme, sacrificing themselves for others? How do we, as collective groups, make sense of who does and doesn’t belong? Why do we center so much of our lives around ritualistic bonding? And, crucially, can we understand those impulses from our evolved cognition, the long, but systematic process of our brains being forged to navigate a complex social world? If so, are there universal parts of our brains that—no matter where we live or die, no matter our unique culture—make us human?

Harvey Whitehouse, a whip-smart wildman anthropologist at Oxford, believes he has cracked part of the case. His extraordinary, captivating new book—Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World—published today¹, provides a thrilling window into our evolved minds, which universally embody three key traits that haven’t just shaped ourselves, but have constructed our modern world—warts and all.

If Whitehouse is correct, evolution has made us social creatures who are all innately drawn to conforming, to believing, and to belonging. Wherever we grace the planet, those three traits seem to determine much of our behavior. Decades of research studies and unique lived experience are brought to bear to help answer some of the deepest questions of what it means to be human.

Sometimes, these impulses are destructive. Conformism, religious belief, and tribalism have, at various times, unleashed some of the worst impulses of our species. But can we reclaim that evolved inheritance, harnessing those sometimes destructive traits and make them work better for human progress?

Jungle Initiations and Ancient Blessings

In the late 1980s, a British graduate student from the University of Cambridge moved to one of the remotest places on the planet, embedding himself in one of the least studied cultures of Papua New Guinea. For two years, he observed, asked questions, and learned from the Baining tribe—a people with rich cultural traditions and rituals, including elaborate fire dances.

A Baining fire dancer.

That British student, Whitehouse, clearly won over his hosts, for he was invited to become an initiated member of the Baining. Typically, these rituals were intense—and painful—but were a rite of passage required to don the costumes that signified being a full-fledged member of the group. As Whitehouse writes:

“[The initiation] included the insertion of sharpened bone into the skin at the base of the spine, which was then used as an anchor point to carry the weight of a heavy mask during hours of dancing. The bright coloration on the headdresses was meanwhile produced from the blood of their wearers by scraping their tongues with a sharpened leaf and then spitting repeatedly until the costumes glistened crimson.”

Whitehouse explains that he, like other younger members, were spared the more extreme pain of ritualized mutilations. Through a somewhat tamer process, Whitehouse became a member of the tribe. “It was therefore a moment of great pride for me when I first danced as an initiated man shrouded in foliage and masked by a bark-cloth face covering,” Whitehouse remembers. “This outfit was traditionally worn when carrying out acts of homicidal violence in a trance-like state, under the cloak of anonymity.” Whitehouse was, thankfully, also spared having to murder anyone to prove his devotion.²

These rituals feel strange, unfamiliar, or to use that word that anthropologists hate—exotic. Nonetheless, that initiation brings to mind another exotic ritual that I observed for myself recently.

A few months ago, I attended a feast held in an ornately decorated room, the ritualized eating overseen by images of powerful, historic Big Men who had once presided over the hallowed space, their memories etched onto its decorated walls. The most precious artwork of all depicted the holy man who had founded this tribe, clad in a traditional headdress. Young and old were brought together, all wearing the black robes available only to the initiated; none would be permitted inside without them.

Before we ate, the highest-ranking member of the tribe stood, silenced everyone by banging a bizarrely shaped wooden mallet next to the food, then blessed the dishes with an ancient, long-dead language of their cultural ancestors, inviting the presence of an invisible spirit. I tried not to violate the tribe’s elaborate customs, which included always passing the sweet, weakly fermented drink to the left—never to the right—a ritual that apparently harkened back to warriors always keeping their sword hand free.

That was how I met Harvey Whitehouse—over a formal dinner at the University of Oxford, drinking port, complete with formal gowns, oil paintings of former bishops and college presidents, accompanied by Latin blessings for the Holy Spirit announced with a gavel. The divergences between this elaborate expression of Oxford high table culture and those of initiation in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea are obvious, but was the underlying motivation similar? It brings to mind a saying that one encounters routinely in modern Thailand: “same same, but different.”

When he returned from Papua New Guinea, Whitehouse became a bit of an amateur “ritual spotter,” noticing strangeness everywhere—in what had previously seemed familiar. And it wasn’t just the bizarre customs of England’s elite universities. “Why place gifts under a special tree and wrap them in coloured paper? Why should one shake hands with an uncle but kiss an aunt?”

Whitehouse began to investigate the evolved science of rituals—why we do them, how they emerged, and, crucially, whether there is something innate underlying ritual that all humans share, even if we manifest our traditions in drastically different ways. Just as some linguists have proposed that there is a “universal grammar” underlying our varied array of languages, was it possible that there was something universal about how our minds compel us to behave in groups?

Conforming, Belonging, and Believing

As the philosopher Erik Hoffer once put it: “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

Whitehouse describes an experiment he designed with colleagues in Texas, in which young children are shown a video of a woman manipulating a series of objects—an “orange sphere, a blue cube, a purple chess piece, a multicoloured peg board, and—most intriguingly of all—a silver painted box.” She handled them in no apparent pattern, twirled around, tapped on one another, for no discernible rhyme or reason. Then, the boy or girl would find the same objects in front of them, left to play however they saw fit. What the children did was to imitate the actions of the video, twisting them and tapping them in the same way as what they had seen. It doesn’t matter that there’s no purpose; sometimes, ritual is just about ritual. And it starts from the outset of our lives.

Other times, rituals start with a clearly defined purpose, but continue regardless: Whitehouse points to drawing the curtains, which is mostly done for privacy, but that some persist in doing every night before bed, even when nobody could plausibly see inside. Others are causally opaque; we accept that we can’t and won’t ever know why we do them, but we do them all the same. Some of these are deemed magical, or religious, such as making a cross across one’s body while walking into a church. It doesn’t matter if we can’t articulate exactly how that movement is supposed to produce the desired outcome, but it’s done nonetheless.

In an amusing anecdote, Whitehouse recounts how a daughter observed her mother chopping both ends off of a food before placing it in the oven. In adulthood, the mother sees the daughter doing this and asks why. The daughter is puzzled. Isn’t this how you prepared the meal? Isn’t this the right way to cook it? It turns out the mother cut off both ends simply to fit it in the undersized cooking dish they once owned. But the daughter, unaware of the reason, had simply imitated it, wrongly assuming it was a cultural convention – a ritual.

However, whether it’s tapping purple and orange objects or preparing a food in a certain way, these are relatively weak forces for conformism. What Whitehouse explores, with persuasive analysis, is why certain rituals can create intense pressures to conform—even to the point where we sacrifice ourselves for the group.

As I’ve previously highlighted, Whitehouse has come up with a theory of the trade-offs associated with intense rituals compared with lower, stakes, but more frequent cultural expressions of conformism. Getting a bone stabbed through your skin and having your tongue bloodied to paint a mask is the former variety, known as an imagistic ritual. It creates intense social bonds, but it can’t be done regularly or on a widespread basis. By contrast, doctrinal rituals—frequent, lower stakes, less intense—create weaker bonds, but are easier to scale up and repeat.

In modern American politics, storming the United States Capitol on January 6th was a destructive imagistic ritual; its participants have a far stronger sense of shared identity than those who merely fly Trump flags or don pro-Trump memorabilia. Regularly attending Trump rallies, by contrast, is more akin to a doctrinal ritual: wear the red hats, chant the same words, boo the right enemies invoked in Trump’s rambling speeches. The January 6th group is smaller, but more intense; the rally attendees group is larger, but fused with more tenuous social glue.

Whitehouse argues that the history of social complexity embodies a shift known as routinization, in which ritual became embedded in daily life as larger groups of people began to work together in complex civilizations. This arose alongside the onset of agriculture, giving way to much bigger aggregations of people. Just as the farming season required a greater commitment to daily and seasonal rituals, so too did the routinization of doctrinal practices help cement the far larger communities together. Using archaeological data from a diverse array of sites, Whitehouse and his colleagues found that larger, more recent settlements tended to use routinized rituals, whereas imagistic bonding was more common in the more ancient past of smaller groups.

Using vast amounts of data from historians and archaeologists, they assembled a global history databank known as Seshat, Whitehouse and his collaborators have concluded that two key drivers—warfare and agriculture—were core catalysts for large-scale human cooperation, the kind necessary to build advanced civilizations, from nations to empires. (I flippantly refer to this as the “war and peas” hypothesis). Both involve ritualized mechanisms to ensure that humans—including those who don’t know each other personally but inhabit a shared “imagined community”—will work together for shared goals.

Whitehouse invokes the work of other anthropologists, who have argued that agricultural production reshaped cultures substantially, partly because they required far more forward planning than hunter-gatherer societies. The more forward planning and larger number of people involved, the more social glue required; this created strong evolutionary “selection pressures” to reward cultures that managed to create conformism and tribalism on a much broader scale.

At the extremes of conformism and tribalism, a phenomenon known as identity fusion can arise. Whitehouse and other researchers measure this by asking people to pick a pictorial representation of how they feel in relation to a broader group—be it a nationality, a sports team, or, a band of brothers who fought and died together on a foreign battlefield. Consider, for example, how you would graphically represent your own relationship to your nationality in which you are one circle, and your country is the other.

While conducting research within Libyan revolutionary militias, Whitehouse and colleagues found off-the-charts scores in identity fusion with family and fellow fighters. But when confronted with a forced choice question – you had to choose only one group you were most fused with – those who experienced frontline combat were much more likely than those who didn’t directly fight to choose their brothers in arms over their biological kin.

According to evolutionary theory, there are good reasons why these dynamics emerged. There is, for example, a bird known as the superb fairywren. It’s a dazzling creature, but it is most extraordinary for what it does when its offspring are threatened. It will begin “creeping around in peculiar darting movements and squeaking in a way that—to a hungry predator—appears exactly like a succulent mouse.” It offers itself up as food to save its young, a textbook case of kin selection, in which such behaviors evolved “because they increase the chances that the hero’s genes will be passed on, if not by their own reproductive efforts, then through the mating success of their closest relatives.”

Similar evolutionary pressures exist in humans. However, it goes further than that, because we are capable of self-sacrifice for those well outside our kinship networks. Whitehouse has also conducted research using a tool known as agent-based modeling to showcase how groups defeated in battle—or social groupings that face setbacks—become more effective cooperators. We evolved to pull together when things go wrong. And as we become more tribal, fusing our individual identities with group community, Homo sapiens becomes capable of the most selfless acts imaginable in the animal kingdom.

Finally, Inheritance is rich in examples about the shared evolved psychology of religious belief (Whitehouse has long been regarded in academia as one of the founding fathers of the cognitive science of religion).

For instance, one study Whitehouse conducted with Japanese researchers plopped babies in front of videos that showed two cartoon competitors trying to win a prize. One exhibited human-like traits, dutifully following all the laws of physics with no exceptions. The other had at least one supernatural power. Suddenly, it might, say, teleport across the screen, or fly across a valley. Babies have never seen these things in real life, so how would they react before they had been taught by others about supernatural powers?

Babies exhibit surprise in two predictably measurable ways. The first is sucking. They suck harder when they’re interested in something, a hallmark sign of an outcome that intrigues them. Similarly, they look for longer at that which surprises them, and turn their gaze away when an outcome matches their expectations. When the supernatural agent won in the cartoon competition, it made sense to the babies—they spent less time looking. But the babies were particularly shocked when the supernatural agent lost the battle for the cartoon prize. That’s when they stared for longer.

This finding, as Whitehouse notes, “was the first study to show that even preverbal infants expect beings with supernatural powers to be socially dominant…even before we have learned much about the religious beliefs of our group, we expect the gods (or their earthly ancestors) to be in charge, and not the other way around.”³

This study capitalizes on a seemingly universal trait of our religious cognition, which causes us to latch onto concepts that are minimally counterintuitive, in which the supernatural follows familiar behavior, but with a striking tweak. The idea that a ghost can think like us, remember things like us, but walk through walls is easier to imagine than a totally unfamiliar spectral being.

Or, as Whitehouse puts it, it’s possible for humans to come to terms with a weeping statue—an object that does exactly one counterintuitive thing that is normally reserved for human emotions. But if you try to tell people that the magical statue, say, only exists on Wednesdays, it suddenly seems ludicrously implausible. This affinity for minimally counterintuitive phenomena doesn’t seem to be a feature restricted to Western Christianity, but rather, as Whitehouse argues, is a universal of human minds.

Similarly, when the most profound events happen in our lives, whether in Papua New Guinea or Phoenix, our species instinctively sees supernatural design stitched into it. Even for those who aren’t religious, or may even be atheists, it’s difficult for us to initially overcome the lurking intuition that an invisible hand is guiding us at the most moving, fortunate, or unfortunate moments we experience.

Together with conforming and belonging, then, belief in some form of religiosity seems to be a nearly ubiquitous feature of human society. That points to evolved cognition, rather than coincidence.

Harnessing our Inheritance

Whitehouse closes the book with riveting accounts of how these traits—which sometimes work against us—might be the key to overcoming many modern social challenges. Rather than trying to tamp down some of our innate features of how our minds work, he argues that we can harness them more effectively, overcoming scourges from climate change to religious grifters to social media dysfunction and political tribalism.

As with any sweeping argument that recasts humanity using a few key variables, there are reasons for caution. Evolutionary psychology is difficult to test, because we can’t travel back into the mists of time and observe the thoughts or group behaviors of our prehistoric ancestors. Psychology studies of infants and children have their pitfalls, and while Whitehouse is careful to discuss replication, there are psychology findings in other realms of scholarly research that haven’t held up to repeated scrutiny. And quantification of “big history,” while certainly worthwhile, requires a fair number of assumptions that sometimes may turn out to be incorrect or incomplete.

However, Inheritance backs up its claims with the best available evidence. It’s extraordinary and endlessly thought-provoking. It crams decades of research together with a lifetime of thought from one of the world’s best scholars, someone who hasn’t confined himself to the Ivory Tower, but has instead explored—and developed—entirely new fields of academic inquiry by actively observing the diversity of our species. You may not agree with everything, but the book has the laudable audacity to provide a new framework for seeing ourselves—and for interrogating how the evolved minds we inherited from our ancestors have reshaped the modern world.

Whitehouse is too modest to say so, but he’s also an illustration of his own research. His career is a reflection of an identity squarely fused to a sense of belonging not to a particular tribe, but to the astonishing breadth of humanity. And, while thankfully not so dramatic as the heroic self-sacrifice of John R. Fox, Whitehouse has, over and over again, willingly put himself in danger—from the rainforests of Papua New Guinea to the frontlines of Libya’s militias—not to save his own skin or advance his career, but to answer those most human questions about our cultural and cognitive inheritance: where have we come from, who are we, and where are we going next?

Inheritance, by Harvey Whitehouse, is out today in the UK and out in the US in August. You can order it here in the UK and here in the US.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. If you enjoyed this article, please forward on to anyone else you think might also enjoy it in your social tribe—and consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my writing (lots of others are doing it, be sure to conform!). Alternatively, you can pick up a copy of my new book—FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters—to support me. It will give you full access to over 120 essays like this one by yours truly.

1. Inheritance is out in the UK today, with a US publication date in August.

2. It is doubtful that a research ethics committee would approve of ritualized murder.

3. I’ve written extensively on the question of moralizing gods, or the so-called “Big Gods” hypothesis, so I won’t repeat it here. If this article interests you, you’ll like that one, too.