Talk at the Chalke History Festival: 'Inheritance: The evolutionary origins of the modern world'

Every human being is endowed with an inheritance: a set of ancient biases – forged by natural selection and transformed by cultural evolution – that shape every facet of our behaviour. For countless generations, this inheritance has been taking us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organised religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. Suddenly, we find ourselves on a path to destruction. Professor Harvey Whitehouse, Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, unveils a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history – one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data. The result is a powerful new perspective on the human journey; one that transforms our understanding of where we have been and where we are going.

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