Evolution's Ghost

More on Language Deficiency (last post)

Relating that map to medical data, the pair found that, on average, the chance of any particular person becoming obese was 20 percent higher if a friend of a friend (or friend of a co-worker, or co-worker of a relative) was obese. The connecting friend need not become fat himself, and he might have moved a thousand miles away. Most importantly, the two people connected through him need not know one another. Even more surprisingly, the pair found that the effect extends to three degrees of separation. Any individual's risk of being obese was 10 percent greater if someone at three removes -- say, the friend of a friend of a co-worker -- was obese.

The relevance of this finding with respect to my last post is to show that in fact the empirical phenomenology is already quantified and accumulating in support of the basis for my hypothesis regarding the importance for making this area of our lives more conscious and linguistically accessible. More from the article...

The key point, Christakis says, is that people act like waves in a pond, and that our behaviors, like our diseases, ripple out as if from a fallen pebble, following the laws of physics whether we know it or not. In some respects this contradicts the social-atom model of decision-making, whereby each individual can and should be held responsible for each and every choice. In fact, "a smoker may have as much control over quitting as a bird has to stop a flock from flying in a particular direction," Christakis and Fowler write.

But, Christakis adds, any social link is a two-way street: The ties that affect you are also carrying your influence out to other people. The American media didn't pick up on that symmetry, but news outlets in less individual-oriented cultures did. So most United States newspaper headlines telegraphed the obesity study by saying, "‘Are You Packing it On? Blame Your Fat Friends,’" Christakis says. "But a lot of the British headlines had a different tone: 'Are Your Friends Gaining Weight? Perhaps You Are to Blame.'” Even as social-network theory seems to undermine the primacy of the individual, it also raises the individual's role, Christakis says. "We're saying that if you make a positive change in your life, you don't just benefit yourself; you also benefit your friends and their friends and so forth."

That expands the standard view on personal responsibility. The individual is not a social atom, with no impact on others; nor is it a social victim, helpless to resist their influence. Rather, Christakis believes, we each should realize that even our "private" decisions really do have an impact on others far removed from those we know directly, and we should take responsibility for the influences we transmit. If you decide to eat better and get more exercise, he says, "Maybe you don't care about all the strangers you'll help. But you're going to affect people you do care about--your family, your friends, and your neighbors." 

In fact, Christakis notes, the new theory of social networks invokes ancient principles -- responsibility matters precisely because we care about what we do to and for others, not just ourselves. 

David Berreby blogs about behavior at Bigthink.com and has written about science for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He is the author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity, published by Little, Brown.

 These studies present empirical evidence of a process which is taking place on a higher more complex level which has its source not in the individual but in the relationships between individuals. There's no escaping the influence by putting some physical strategy in place like keeping a certain distance per se as the findings show influence ranges across 3 degrees of relation, where the terminal effects take place in individuals who are completely unknown to one another.

This is the frontier of our evolution as a collective species and which science in all of its monumental accelerating momentum to quanitify phenomena is already fully engaged in mapping even while the real possibilities present are yet lacking any language sufficient to express them. The upside or scientific salvation now part of the growing relevant data being gathered is that the influence of of relationship doesn't actually depend (at least instinctually as far as the studies I've so far been able to include here) on language. At leaast on the lower levels of function in man. But there is a threshold at the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental/integral. Where one man is expressing a vibrant energetic level of action which is integral and carries the dynamic space of process and the intrinsic unity expressed within him in relationship to it, the question seems encouragingly less of a hindrance as at every level of function in man up until this point such action's influence carries and leap frogs over 3 degrees in its effectiveness.

So, with that let me just conclude by repeating my original point of inquiry regarding what would be the expansion of possibilities should that higher influence be carried along lower functionality in language. In my mind, this is the real outstanding and current challenge for social network theorists to begin working on today. At least give us ONE that understands these possibilities which I am clarifying and his work will eventually begin to show up in a wider than expected range or area surrounding him. Everything else possible it seems to me will only repeat and reconfirm what we already have studied and quantified.