http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Related: Social, Economic, Political Environments • Societal evolutionSocial Determinants of Health The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines the social determinants of health as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries.
Caring doesn't scale We are social creatures. We align ourselves in groups made of family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. When we have similar interests in activities, beliefs, political leanings and shared experiences, these bonds are strong. When we occasionally bump into the same people on our way to work, we might smile and say hello, but these are much shallower interactions.
Robin Dunbar: How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Bio Robin Dunbar Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, specializing in primate behavior. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, roughly 150, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Professor Dunbar is a director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project (BACRP) "From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain" and is involved in the planned BACRP "Identifying the Universal Religious Repertoire". To download this program become a Front Row member.
The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes - Life With Alacrity For those of you not familiar with Dunbar's number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150. According to wikipedia: “Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
Robin Dunbar Professor Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947)[10][11] is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and is best known for formulating Dunbar's number,[5] a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".[22][23][24][25][26] Education[edit] He spent two years as a freelance science writer.[11] Academic career[edit]
Oxytocin Changes Everything What does petting a cat, hugging a friend, deep breathing, a walk in the woods, and giving away money to someone have in common? These are but a few ways to release the hormone of love and connection, Oxytocin. We humans are like puppets on strings.
Göreme Göreme (pronounced [ˈɟøɾeme]; Ancient Greek: Κόραμα, Kòrama), located among the "fairy chimney" rock formations, is a town in Cappadocia, a historical region of Turkey. It is in the Nevşehir Province in Central Anatolia and has a population of around 2,000 people.[1] Former names of the town have been Korama, Matiana, Maccan or Machan, and Avcilar.[2] When Göreme Valley nearby was designated an important tourist destination, a "center" for all tourism in Cappadocia, the name of the town was changed to Göreme for practical reasons. The Göreme National Park (tr) (Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı in Turkish) was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985.[1] Communities of practice and Dunbar's number Posted at 17:01 in . Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London who hypothesized that there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, and predicted that 150 is the "mean group size" for humans. Ross Mayfield wrote a very interesting post last year starting from there on Ecosystem of Networks and came out with this nice summarized graph, which I have been struggling a little with to be honest since I saw it for the first time (are axes consistent from one raph to the other?..)
What's Your Dunbar Number? There are several key indicators - numbers we take seriously - to indicate "how we're doing." Cholesterol levels, salary, and IQ score, for example. And now the concept of a "Dunbar number" is being tossed around. Briefly, the term is used to suggest that we can only manage, cognitively, a limited number of relationships. Symbiogenesis Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism. The idea originated with Konstantin Mereschkowsky in his 1926 book Symbiogenesis and the Origin of Species, which proposed that chloroplasts originate from cyanobacteria captured by a protozoan.[1] Ivan Wallin also supported this concept in his book "Symbionticism and the Origins of Species". He suggested that bacteria might be the cause of the origin of species, and that species creation may occur through endosymbiosis. Today both chloroplasts and mitochondria are believed, by those who ascribe to the endosymbiotic theory, to have such an origin. A fundamental principle of modern evolutionary theory is that mutations arise one at a time and either spread through the population or not, depending on whether they offer an individual fitness advantage. Nevertheless, this general case may not apply to all examples of evolutionary change.
Why we shouldn’t judge a country by its GDP Analysts, reporters and big thinkers love to talk about Gross Domestic Product. Put simply, GDP, which tallies the value of all the goods and services produced by a country each year, has become the yardstick by which we measure a country’s success. But there’s a big, elephant-like problem with that: GDP only accounts for a country’s economic performance, not the happiness or well-being of its citizens. With GDP, if your richest 100 people get richer, your GDP rises … but most of your citizens are just as badly off as they were before. London Review Bookshop Located in the heart of Bloomsbury, just a Rosetta Stone’s throw from the British Museum, the London Review Bookshop has established itself as an essential part of the capital’s cultural life. Opened in 2003 by the London Review of Books, it’s a place for people who love books to meet, talk, drink excellent tea and coffee, consume delicious cake, and of course, browse. Our selection of more than 20,000 titles ranges from the classics of world literature to the cutting edge of contemporary fiction and poetry, not forgetting a copious display of history, politics, philosophy, cookery, essays and children’s books. And our lovely shop, designed by Amanda Culpin of utility, provides the perfect setting in which to explore them all. Our aim has always been to represent on our shelves the distinctive ethos of the Review – intelligent without being pompous; engaged without being partisan. Don’t just take our word for it.
Research Intelligence - Issue No 17 - The ultimate brain teaser Relative to their body size, monkeys, apes and humans have unusually big brains. It has been suggested that this reflects the complexity of their social lives. This hypothesis is gaining support thanks to ground-breaking research by a University of Liverpool scientist, whose methods have been taken up by primate researchers around the world. These same methods could soon shed light on the story of human evolution. Judged by our genomes, there's surprisingly little difference between humans and chimps: 95% of our DNA is similar, making chimps our closest ape 'cousins'. Judged by most other measures, there are significant distinctions between the two species.
Dunbar's number rules the Twitterverse › News in Science (ABC Science) News in Science Tuesday, 7 June 2011 Genelle WeuleABC Social networks Ashton Kutcher might have more than six million followers on Twitter, but his brain's not big enough to have deep conversations with more than 150 of his nearest and dearest.