Nicholas A. Christakis Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Nicholas A. Christakis:

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

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

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

Whether we appreciate it or not, we live out our lives surrounded by an intricate pattern of social connections... We're all embedded in this network; it affects us profoundly and we may be unaware of its existence, of its effect on us.

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness.

Nicholas A. Christakis

It is the spread of the good things that vindicates the whole reason we live our lives in networks. If I was always violent to you or gave you germs, you would cut the ties to me and the network would disintegrate. In a deep and fundamental way, networks are connected to goodness, and goodness is required for networks to emerge and spread.

Nicholas A. Christakis

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks, and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society, we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

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

What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions.

Nicholas A. Christakis

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers.

Nicholas A. Christakis

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.

Nicholas A. Christakis

I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend.

Nicholas A. Christakis