Dunbar’s Number, My Struggle With Fruit

Why is it so hard to force a slice of lime down the neck of a Corona? Nothing proves the darwinist nature of life, the Might is Right aspect of nature like these little everyday struggles. Ultimately, if you show the lime slice mercy, it will bite you in the face like the scorpion did to the rabbit in Aesop’s parable, after he asked if he could swim across the river on the rabbit’s back. Hence I demonstrate the force of my Nordic nature by jamming fruit into beer. Because I know if the lime slice had the chance, it would do the same to me, citrus bastard: “That’s the rule of nature, now get in my drink!”

Dunbar’s number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion. Dunbar’s number is a significant value in sociology and anthropology. Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it indicates the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. Dunbar theorizes that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

I remember seeing my fat brother overpowered by a lime once, who extorted him terribly. He demanded to be stored in a cool, dry place; my brother also had to take him to the store to pick out a mango, to keep him company. And if he refused to spray a fine mist over him three times a day, he would wake up with a slimy, decapitated radish head beneath his covers: if he was forgetful, we woke up to screams the next morning. I tell you it was chattel slavery, what fruit will do to men, when unleashed from the natural master-fruit relationship.

In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 147.8 (casually represented as 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Dunbar then compared this prediction with observable group sizes for humans. Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years BCE, i.e. during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter-gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories — small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes — with respective size ranges of 30-50, 100-200 and 500-2500 members each.

Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

Some modern theorists, particularly those representatives of the School of Self-Contradictory Teddy-Bear Intellectualism (SSCTBI), based in Zürich, have questioned the persistence of Man-Fruit dominance hierarchies, the so-called “Fruitarchy”. In studies published during the heyday of the Equal Rights for Fruit movement, researchers in cultural anthropology asked the question: “Why is all the fruit sitting together in the lunch room?”. Other great works of this era include Horseface Mead’s character study, “Ripening On The Grape-Vine”, and the liberationist Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Pear Tree”, in which he calls for an end to “Produce-parteid”. Many influential thinkers and writers amongst the Intelligentsia were asking themselves: Why can’t fruit also be lawyers? doctors? politicians?.

Inside the Monkeysphere: a crude and somewhat humorous explanation of Dunbar’s number...
1. What do monkeys have to do with it?

Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if you wish. We’ll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. You’d be sad if Slappy died, wouldn’t you?

Now, imagine you get five more monkeys. Tito, Bubbles, Fluffy, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is distant and quiet. And so on. They’re all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Then a thousand.

How long until you can’t tell them apart? Or remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? If you get enough monkeys, you’ll eventually have enough that you no longer even care if one of them dies.

Now, each of these monkeys is every bit the monkey that Slappy was. It’s just that you don’t give a rat’s ass any more.

The blockquotes in this article are explaining the concept of Dunbar’s number, by the way, and also using a humorous straightforward explanation with monkeys to get the point across.

That this was such an odd thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend time worrying too much about the garbage man’s welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don’t usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it’s not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

For instance, I live in a town heavy on little ordinances about what one can and cannot throw out in the trash. Thus, if you listen to people around here speak on the subject of garbage you get nothing but snide comments and strategies to get around the petty rules.

There is almost no thought about what the drain acid or the Black Plague-infected rats in the garbage will do to the poor sanitation worker.

Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.

As a product of European culture, the erudite sayings I slip between blockquotes are like manna raining down on an adoring readership. My breath is culture.

simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it’s our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church.

This is literally the reason society doesn’t work quite right. The people who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They’re sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

Let’s duke out whatever small differences we have in the comments section of this thread, once and for all- I challenge all of you! I will start by saying that I like 80’s music and my favorite color is blue! Anyone care to prove how my tastes are subversive to the racialist movement?! AAAGHH.
“We will never win, as long as you go on liking the color blue.”

Posted by Potential Frolic on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 03:23 PM in
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