It says so in the Bible, already!

“Peter cast out his nets and caught many fishes.
And the number of fishes was 153″ or words to that effect.

Of course the Hebrews were into numerical symbology 2000 years ago, assigning different values to each letter. Interestingly, the sum of the digits of the Greek word PETRUS is 153. And the sum of the digits of the greek word for Nets is also 153; just them old scribes playing a numbers game.

I wonder if the sum of the digits of Dunbar is 153 too?

I think it was in a study of The Well. Must. Go. Google….

Don’t know if it’s true but it’s interesting.

Long time reader, first time writer…

Despite living in LA, I have never met a successful actor (or unsuccessful one for that matter). But my girlfriend has met several, and she describes them as projecting such warmth and having such an ability to charm you to such an extraordinary degree that you would swear they were your best friend. I have heard Magic Johnson described in the same way. Perhaps the politicians you describe, who sound very charismatic indeed, are doing the same thing.

Best,
Steve

Perhaps their neocortices have the unusual ability to maintain relationships (or at least appear to) with far more than the conventional 150?

Without any irony, this might indeed be the case, and our present political
system does just select the ‘fittest’ with regard to this ability. The sad thing is thought that this is not an adaption to external change, but it’s us ourselves who change the environment we live in faster than our brains can possibly adapt to it, so that most of us ‘fit’ only inappropriately. Evolution just takes time, and the human brain didn’t evolve to cope with 300 emails a day, 200 ‘friends’ on facebook, and all the information available on the www.

Coincidentally, I came across Dunbar only yesterday in a book I am currently
reading, “The Ingenuity
Gap” by Homer-Dixon. I can really recommend it if you are interested in
this kind of questions like, how well can we humans cope with the
increasing complexity of our societies. Let me quote the paragraph
following the explanation of Dunbar’s studies:

“A capacity to monitor 150 other people was probably quite satisfactory for
most human beings until the twentieth century. But today’s information
technologies have extended our reach to a far vaster community – indeed, the
community is, for all intents and purposes, infinitely large. And there’s an
implicit expectation that we should be able to smoothly manage our complex
interactions with all the members of this community. Given our evolutionary
heritage, it’s not surprising that most of us fail to live up to this
challenge. It’s not surprising, either, to hear that the rising incidence of
depression and other anxiety-related mental illnesses in our societies might
be partly caused by this failure.”

(Comes with references that I’ve left out). For an review of his newer book see here. He does a great job bridging the gap between sociology, politics, and natural sciences (biology, physics, neuroscience etc).

Best,

B.

As for Farley files and science fiction, see Robert Heinlein’s Double Star.

I also remember him connecting this to some French social theorist (Levi-Strauss?) who also found that the maximum size of a tribal society is about the same number. To maintain larger societies, we humans have to sort of subsume our individuality to some extent. It gets a bit blurry here, I remember something about “icons” being introduced to represent a new “unit” of social structure (maybe like a congressional district or something), and collections of these “icons” were best kept under Dunbar’s number too.