Look, I’m not ananthropologist and I’m trying to sneak in some lemmy while no one’s watching at work, so I’m not going to be able to immediately supply you with concise excerpts of anthropological learnings on human nature.

The gist of Mutual Aid is that cooperation within a species is a vital factor of evolution. That’s why I namedropped Darwin. That thesis complements the origin of species.

Yeah Darwin’s book is still relevant but we have also learned a lot more with his theories as the foundation

Still doesn’t mean that you can’t learn anything from a book published in 1902, or that it’s not worth reading anymore.

comparing biology to anthropology?

Why is this controvertial? Aren’t humans a biological species? Anthropology and biology are about as connected as physics and math is.

Your books are working off of what the primitive societal needs of long ago were, right?

No, they aren’t (exclusively). They give testimony of how we got here and that things can be different as they are now.

Do you really think that those same concepts apply to the society of today?

Yes, at least partly. The human brain has had the same biology for the last 100.000 years. You can learn things about human nature from this massive time scale. The basic gist of basically everything Graeber wrote is that societies are formable things. The societies we form will in turn change the way humans interact with each other (changing “human nature”). This in turn means that the whole notion of “progress” being a linear thing, only going into one, unchangeable direction is wrong.