Sublime

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

As a result, between 2003 and 2007, 96% of people studied in such behavioural experiments came from countries that were home to only 12% of the world’s population.

high versus low frequencies of social support and those that measured how well integrated you were into your social network and your local community.

it was the social measures that most influenced your chances of surviving,

The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and we

What are the values, heuristics, norms and networks that currently shape human behaviour – and how could they be nurtured or nudged, rather than ignored and eroded?

Sociologists have been aware for some considerable time that social networks decline progressively as we enter old age.

promiscuity tends to break down into polygyny as powerful men discover that they are in a position to demand exclusivity from multiple reproductive partners, either in sequence or in tandem.