Sublime

He wished to convey the excitement of science to the intelligent nonscientific reader. He had been thinking about such a work for fifty years. He could not accept what he called the narrow-minded, sentimental view that nature loses its…

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It turns out brain size does correlate with group size: the neocortex, the part of our brain that deals with complex thinking and reasoning, grows in primates relative to the number of fellow primates they are likely to live with. Brains evolve to handle the number of social contacts we are going to have.

(Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers. He also was the first to synthesize MDMA since it had been patented by Merck in 1912 and forgotten. Recognizing its psychoactive properties, he introduced the so-called

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.

A number of long-range random links, if combined with densely knit clumps, produce a low degree of separation of each person from everyone else on the planet. This patterning of networks and the low level of separation of people worldwide is one reason why future diseases, rumours, information and innovations can spread rapidly (Watts 1999, 2003).

The book

the pathogen theory, espoused by such mainstream scientists as Gregory Cochran.