The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

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.

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.

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.

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

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.

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.