Sublime

higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps—are held constant.

The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.

Additional studies by Lieberman and his collaborators uncovered other examples where evolution placed “big bets” on the importance of sociality by adapting other expensive systems to serve its needs.

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.

As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

social norm greatly influences our decisions and behavior, often more so than personal gains or even moral standards.

But occasionally some would find forecasts that would change their behavior enough to perturb the overall price pattern, causing other investors to change their forecasts to re-adapt. Cascades of mutual adjustment would then ripple through the system. The result was periods of tranquility followed randomly by periods of spontaneously generated pert

This framework allows us to connect spatial and material aspects of settlements available in the archeological record to social and economic network processes and their products, including a society’s collective capacity to produce private and public goods and its associated division of labor and knowledge.