By David Mehegan

Notwithstanding the book’s research foundation, albeit colorfully amplified with personal and historical anecdotes, as a civilizational story Inheritance is a lightweight effort.

Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World by Harvey Whitehouse. Harvard University Press/Belknap. Cloth. Illustrated. $35. 356 pp.

Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, director of the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford, is the founder of Seshat: Global History Databank and author of nine books. His sphere of interest is group behavior: tribes, ethnic groups, organized religions, nations, political parties, football fan clubs. As such he inhabits the tribe of sociology.

The book scans a broad and long sweep of sociological history from times ancient to modern in a fairly breezy and accessible style. Notwithstanding its research foundation, albeit colorfully amplified with personal and historical anecdotes, as a civilizational story it is a lightweight effort.

Whitehouse has a way of taking a seemingly commonplace fact, proving it with experimental protocols (usually of his own design), and proclaiming in so many words, “Zounds! I have made a remarkable discovery!”

In explaining how “the modern world” came about, he briskly asserts that development was guided by three “biases”: imitation, which he calls conformism; religiosity; and tribalism. With remarkable astuteness he announces that people throughout history have imitated one another, “and this compulsion to imitate, I will show [a phrase he uses often], enabled humanity to store the discoveries of earlier generations, allowing cultural traditions and knowledge to accumulate over time. I refer to this aspect of human nature as conformism.”

What? People throughout history have acquired knowledge from predecessors and ancestors, maintained that knowledge, and built upon it to grow and develop? Who knew?

Imitation and tradition are not the same as conformism. And even if they were the same, how is conformism a more essential human “bias” than the impulse to dissent — to refuse to conform? Mutation, the resistance to conformity, drives biological and social evolution. Those who break with the crowd are the ones who bring about change.

“Based on psychological research,” Whitehouse writes of the “bias” of tribalism, “we will see how tribalism has been harnessed and extended over the course of history. Some of our findings on this topic have been unsettling. For example, it turns out that one of the powerful factors driving the rise and spread of civilization in world history is warfare.”

“It turns out?” Nobody knew of the Hellenistic influence of Alexander the Great or the Latin diffusion of the Roman Empire, to say nothing of the ancient Chinese empires or the Assyrian and Persian hosts rampaging through the Hebrew Bible? Who would be “unsettled” to learn that the Norman Conquest had a profound influence on British history and civilization?

Have you pondered the courage to fight and die for friends, family, or country? Did you attribute it to solidarity or patriotism, a sense of common cause, even something called love? Whitehouse calls that behavior “fusion.” But surely that word is simplistic: allies, comrades in battle, members of a political party, tribe, family, or religious group, are not fused — they do not become one, any more than lovers do. Similarity, commonality does not constitute fusion.

Whitehouse’s treatment of religion is markedly trifling. Do you Jews, Christians, and Muslims think you have a complex faith based on thousands of years of evolved philosophical thought? Sorry, but there has been a misunderstanding. Whitehouse announces that you are saddled with a “religiosity bias.” This bias, he writes, “not only shapes the things we think of as ‘faiths’, ‘superstitions’, and ‘fairy tales’ but also advertising and consumer behavior.”

Notice the cavalier conflation of faith, superstition, fairy tale, and advertising. Religion, Whitehouse patiently explains, was not “given to us by God as many adherents to organized religions insist. Rather … it is an inescapable byproduct of the way our brains evolved.”

In his discussion of tribalism, Whitehouse writes of what he repeatedly calls “the ritual stance”: “Some rituals do not have any specifiable outcome…. Think of the Catholic practice of self-crossing, for example. Worshippers do this when they enter church but in most cases they could not say why. They just do it because, well, everyone does it. It’s what you do… The opacity of self-crossing … is irresolvable.” How does Whitehouse know that this gesture is a mindless, pointless ritual? The fact that he doesn’t know the actual name of it — or the meaning behind it — shows not its “opacity” but that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Of the relation of religion to morality Whitehouse informs us modestly, “Today some of the best answers to this question come not from Greek philosophy but from scientific research. Studies undertaken by my colleagues and I [of course] have shown that much of human morality is rooted in a single preoccupation: cooperation.” So much for moral philosophy from Buddha to Socrates to Jesus to Heschel. Whitehouse et al. have figured it out experimentally.

Whitehouse’s use of the word “bias” is a ti- off to his own. In this book he evinces no interest in the humanities — religion, philosophy, art, literature — perhaps because those values tend to be held and advanced by exceptional individuals. He is not concerned with individuals but with the masses.

While it might sound from the title to be a disinterested work of history, Inheritance concludes with a kind of liberal manifesto: how do we harness our knowledge of human “biases” and nature to bring about the positive political and social change we want, coming to grips with “environmental degradation, societal breakdown, and violent conflict”? Whitehouse’s solution is “to cultivate forms of leadership capable of turning the herd in new directions and appealing to popular instincts in ways that are beneficial to society at large and not just manipulative elites.”

Are we a herd with “popular instincts” to be “turned” with inventive political schemes? There is no suggestion here that democracy and the rule of law as we know them could be a solution; they do not represent, after all, new “forms of leadership.” Whitehouse helpfully recommends the forms of collaborative grass-roots governance that he saw in his years of study in rural villages in Papua-New Guinea. Right, suggest that to thugs like Putin or Assad or the warlords ravaging Haiti and Sudan. There’s no notice paid in the book to the present rampancy of such monsters, but then evil men are not groups.

David Mehegan is the former Book Editor of the Boston Globe. He can be reached at djmehegan@comcast.net.