Sublime

brain size determines mentalising ability, and mentalising ability determines the number of friends you have.

This book is about the social body in which we are the unwitting cells. It is about the hidden ways in which that social group manipulates our psychology, and even our biology. It is about how a social organism scrambles for survival and works for mastery over other organisms of its kind. It is about how we, without the slightest sense of what the

may be part of our purpose as human beings in the larger scheme of things.

Pictures of the invisible world can have wild inaccuracies, but every view that flourishes does so because it solves at least one major problem.

Stress is not a product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary.

publicly visible.

Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a careful observer of his country’s native red grouse, concluded that these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep their flock from starvation. The grouse, Wynne-Edwards contended, gauged the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted their behav

The sculptor at the end of his day simply sweeps away the heaps of useless dust and shards of stone. So does Nature. But those discarded scraps from the natural workshop are the bodies of creatures who moments before were alive, creatures like you and me. Nature creates by placing her inventions in competition with each other. In the world of human

social networks are held together not by the bulk of people with hundreds of connections but by the few people with tens of thousands.