In this issue of Nautilus, we bring you a new understanding of kinship—and how it can unite us, ocean waves, and even distant stars.
In the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the Mali tribe has long practiced a valuable skill: building huge families. These aren’t genealogies created through blood and marriage, mapped out into discrete trees. As the British anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse discovered in his years of living among them, “they had the ability to conceptualize vast portions of humanity as one giant family … related both physically and spiritually.”
When a natural disaster struck Australia, a well-resourced country more than a thousand miles away, the tribe, which had lean economic resources, felt inspired to pool what they had and donate it to disaster relief. To the Mali, the Australians weren’t former colonizers. They weren’t even neighbors. “The way they spoke about it, the Australians were like family to them,” Whitehouse writes, wondering if this radical disregard for geopolitical, economic, and historical boundaries could help illuminate a different way forward in a deeply fractured century.
But kinship extends far beyond other humans, even other animals. We seem driven to find relatedness throughout the natural world, as Nautilus associate editor Kristen French discovered on a recent reporting trip to Brazil. There, she unpacked her surfboard and communed with the first ocean wave to be granted personhood status. It now has its own right to existence, protected under law. The wave is opaque with sediment, polluted, hard to surf. But as one local anthropologist and surfer told French, it “brings to us this kind of request for listening … to understand the language of nature,” an effort to remind people they are also a part of the planet and its cycles.
On the flipside, some kinships we create can work against us. A growing view of artificial intelligence as kin to the human brain is eroding our sense of what’s special about our own abilities to reason and make good judgments. As philosopher and AI ethicist Shannon Vallor explains to Nautilus contributor Philip Ball, large language models that employ artificial intelligence are superficial analogies to the brain. In fact, Vallor says, LLMs are more like “mindless toasters that do a lot of cognitive labor without thinking.”
In the stories ahead, we’ll explore these unexpected minefields of our quest to relate to AI, surf the protected wave in Brazil, and travel to Papua New Guinea to learn what the concept of family can truly mean. We’ll also learn about what inspires animals to adopt, discover siblings among stars, and more.
It turns out that what connects us is bigger than we thought. 
Lead image: melitas / Shutterstock
