25 - Nicholas Christakis - A Blueprint for Universal Liberal Humanism

4:54 Universals that we express between ourselves
6:06 The social suite
10:06 Fiction, empathy & social learning
14:20 Qualities we share with other animals
16:24: Groups, in-group bias, co-operation (at 23:28 Helen interjects to talk about intersectionality)
31:37 Would aliens visiting us be friendly?
37:15 AI
40:01 Why isn’t Earth a dystopia?
43:09 The decline in poverty worldwide
44:55 Steven Pinker’s approach v. Nicholas’ approach
45:58 Are people really happier? What about meaning?
50:30 Social media, the digital world, bureaucracy
53:05 The main lessons of the book Blueprint

You can find Nicholas’ book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society here:
https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Evolutionary-Origins-Good-Society/dp/0316230030

His book Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and how they Shape our Lives can be found here:
http://www.connectedthebook.com/

Find out more about Nicholas’ work with the Yale University Human Nature Lab here:
https://yins.yale.edu/our-labs/human-nature-lab.

You can follow Nicholas on Twitter @NAChristakis.

Other sources mentioned in the podcast:
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion:
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777;

Pietraszewski et al (2015) “Constituents of Political Cognition: Race, Party, Politics, and the Alliance Detection System,” Cognition 140, pp. 24–39:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715000578

Jonathan Gottschall (his work in general):
http://jonathangottschall.com/

The article by John Staddon Helen critiqued:
https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/is-secular-humanism-a-religion/