Synopsis
What if almost everything we think we know about the 'natural' family is wrong?
We're told babies look like their fathers to assure anxious dads of their paternity. A dose of post-partum anxiety, it's said, helps mothers keep their children safe. And, apparently, women invest more in reproduction than men because eggs are more expensive to produce than sperm. The received wisdom is that our behaviour and familial roles are universally driven by genetic concerns. But none of this is true.
In the ground-breaking The Myth of Human Nature, evolutionary anthropologist Heidi Colleran looks at cultures all over the world and throughout history whose different social orders radically challenge our assumptions in the West - and dismantles the stories told about how the brute facts of biology govern our behaviour.
By exploring other cultures we quickly discover that the imperatives of genetics are not the best way to understand human beings. Blood is not the essence of kinship. The nuclear family is an invention. Fathers can be female. Parenthood can be collective.
If, as Colleran suggests, we accept that the West's is not the master narrative of family-making, and that family is not biological destiny but is instead one of our species' most powerful acts of imagination, then own social structures might look very different in the future. And that's exciting.
