Intelligence Squared Surprise Gift: How Inherited Generational Traits Underpin Our Societies, with Harvey Whitehouse
Jul 17, 2024
Harvey Whitehouse, a renowned social anthropologist and Director at Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, delves into the impact of inherited generational traits on modern societies. He shares transformative experiences from Papua New Guinea that reshaped his understanding of conformity, tribalism, and ritual. Together with Brian Klaas, they explore how these traits could help or hinder our response to current global challenges like environmental degradation and political instability, emphasizing the importance of collective inheritance for cooperation.
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Ritual Frequency and Social Scale
- Small-scale societies have intense, infrequent rituals; larger societies have frequent, routinized ones.
- Routinization helps standardize behavior and scale up societies.
Rituals in Papua New Guinea
- In Papua New Guinea, men underwent painful initiation rituals for group bonding.
- The arrival of missions introduced high-frequency rituals, enabling larger-scale unity.
Supernatural Agents
- Supernatural agent concepts often violate intuitive physics.
- A simple ghost concept: an agent that can move through walls.
