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Dunbar's number really can't be the whole explanation of man's inhumanity to man. Among primitive societies where people live as small bands in which everyone k
by leoc 19y ago
Dunbar's number really can't be the whole explanation of man's inhumanity to man. Among primitive societies where people live as small bands in which everyone knows everyone, the murder rate is high. (According to /Guns, Germs and Steel/.) There's certainly lots of intracommunal violence and nastiness among most other ape bands too. And don't people in our society tend to be murdered by people they knew?
- asdflkj 19y agoI don't think anyone is claiming that it's "the whole explanation". It's only an explanation for why people don't care about other people, which sometimes has violence and suffering as a side effect. In other cases, violence and suffering is purposeful, and this happens for other reasons.
- leoc 19y ago> What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere. There's plenty of cruelty between acquaintances in the world, and a great deal of it is random and ass-headed. Lots of that cruelty falls under the headings of oppression, crime, and racism too. (War and spam are between strangers almost by definition.)
- chaostheory 19y agoI forget what the research was called or who it was done by, but there's another magic number: 8. Once a group/faction grows beyond that number, sub-factions within the group begin forming....