3min chapter

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas cover image

49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

CHAPTER

The Robustness of Network Structures

The robustness of this kind of network structure, I think is a wonderful lesson for human beings who intelligently design networks in computers or on the internet. And it's often because we try to imagine what the threats are ahead of time and we're not very good at that. Whereas natural selection just sort of has put up with a whole bunch of unpredictable threats and generates therefore a very generally robust way of dealing with them. That transitivity of elephant networks or dolphin networks is very similar to our own. Why should it be that the friend of a friend among dolphins is the dolphin's friend? Well, because it's purpose. You know, and it's clearly evolved independently because again, our

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