Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they’re so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It’s very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy – where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
Just because we say networks are important doesn’t mean that networks explain everything. We’re just adding additional information. Networks don’t work like a match – they work like a magnifying glass. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
We’re not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It’s not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
It is well to look around at whom, and not just what, surrounds us. Population structure will change everything. Our health, wealth, and peace depend on it. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
We will create life from inanimate compounds, and we will find life in space. But the life that should more immediately interest us lies between these extremes, in the middle range we all inhabit between our genes and our stars. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends. Nicholas A. Christakis Read Quote
