How Humans Are Like Fungi

The social networks we form add up to a giant "human superorganism."

Question: What do you do on a day-to-day basis?Nicholas
Christakis: I'm a professor of medicine and professor of medical
sociology at Harvard Medical School and a professor of sociology in the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences and I do what I would call network science,
so I, for the last ten years, have been studying how and why human
beings come to be embedded in social networks. Not the kind of online
kind that people might think about all the time nowadays, but the kind
of ancient kind that we have formed for hundreds of thousands of years.
And I study how we humans come to form these very elaborate networks and
what these networks come to mean for our lives, and the sort of the
field as it were of medical sociology is concerned with all sorts of
phenomena, social processes and social phenomena that influence health
and health care. But I'm focused primarily on I would say a subset of
that or not a subset, but a different field. Let's say network science.Question:
What kind of research went into your book "Connected"? Nicholas
Christakis: We have done work on the social, psychological,
mathematical and biological rules that govern how human beings come to
form social networks—the structure of networks—and then we've also
examined the kind of social and psychological rules or attributes of how
social networks function. So how do we form social networks and how do
they affect our lives, and it's what we would consider to be the anatomy
and the physiology of a kind of human superorganism. In a very
fundamental way we are like ants or actually kind of like fungi too,
where individual human beings assemble themselves into these elaborate
complex structures and we're... James Fowler and I, my coauthor, are
deeply concerned with how and why we form these structures and what they
mean for our lives. So in the book we present about... We talk a lot
about our own research, but we also pull in the research of many other
scientists who have been looking at a variety of phenomena, and we talk
about the role of social networks in human emotions. We talk about the
role of social networks in human romantic and sexual behavior, in
health, in politics and in economics, and then we also talk a little bit
about the genetics of human social networks and the sort of modern
online variety of social interactions, and then we close with an
argument in the book about why we form social networks and what in a
very deep sense they mean for our lives.Recorded March 31, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen