At the end of Social Climbers, David Attenborough presents us with the skulls of several different primates and arranges them on a boulder by size. The primates with the smallest brains, he explains, live in very small groups. The ones with the largest brains live in very large groups.

Now picture New York City, Mumbai or Tokyo.

Human brains are larger than our skulls. We have expanded them with writing, math, computers and the Internet. As Bruce Schneier recently pointed out while relating Dunbar’s number: “as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure.”

Via TPMDC: “Finally, we’re making progress here.”

Witness an effective display of what a reality-based community looks like: professional gadfly Chris Matthews chides a demagogue into admitting there is only one reality.

We are entitled to different opinions, but not different facts.

In the case of Obama’s birthplace (Hawaii), those who have chosen to “resist” this fact are as childish as those who resist the fact that the U.S. landed on the moon. Both camps have rallied around a selfish view of the world – a world run by vast conspiracies invisible to all but them.

It’s interesting how a native son of Hawaii and an assimilated Alaskan are among the chief political protagonists of our time. Both Hawaii and Alaska are far-away, exotic, exciting. Both are currently celebrating their 50th anniversaries as states.

Perhaps, the tantrum-throwers will next question whether Hawaii really is in the United States. Or Alaska. Or Texas. (The latter two already have prominent secessionist movements.) I am reminded of children who have not yet learned that reality is not a choice:

[These] children may misconstrue ‘see’ as mutual engagement. If so, when covering their eyes they are really attempting to avoid engagement with others.

Exactly.

Has America gotten happier over the last generation? According to one academic survey, no.

By far the most extensive and detailed time series comes from the U.S., and the full series covering the 60 years from 1946 to 2006 shows a flat trend.

So, who is getting happier? Well, most everyone. Eighty percent of the 26 countries sampled are getting happier. India, Ireland, Mexico, Puerto Rico and South Korea are getting happier the fastest. This survey, as others do, credits deep and happy relationships – rather than material wealth – as a key to happiness.

Earlier today I read the beginning of a book review that noted:

Today’s kids aren’t smoking much pot because pot is a “social” drug, shared among peers who gather in parking lots and other hangouts; teens have less unstructured time now and tend to socialize online. They still get high, only on prescription drugs pilfered from adults or ordered off the Internet. “There’s no social ritual involved,” he observes, “just a glass of water and a pill,” which “fits well into a solitary afternoon.”

But what may appear to be a solitary afternoon on a video camera looks mighty social according to a server’s logs. Virtual communities (social networks) are populated first and foremost by the young.

Which made me wonder: is social networking making us all happier – especially our young people?

two weeks ago, the moral leader of the straw hut party, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, walked away from her elected post, apparently to focus on fighting the myths of global warming.

one week later, a giant mass of black algae drifted towards Alaska: “Whitledge said he doesn’t know why an unprecedented bloom of algae appeared off the Arctic coast.”

we would play “hide and seek” with forces we hardly understand?

watching movies about nature, i’m reminded that opposable thumbs are very cool. once upon a time they helped us grasp fruit. then tools. today, they help us to TXT.

TXTing was the cheapest fruit on the Telco tree – voice and data much more expensive. (for the Telco, it’s very cheap to send sms’es.) this pricing encouraged many consumers to learn to communicate with their thumbs.

the popularity of TXTing worldwide suggests that there is tremendous demand for instant telecommunications, no matter what form it takes – thumbing included.

these new forms of communication can have wide-ranging and surprising effects. consider the case of japan. japanese computer users who want to send an email have to work through several menus to find each character. (there are a few thousand possible.) txt’ing, in slang, is much easier.

as TXTing has taken off in Japan, it has invigorated the nation’s publishing industry with a new literary genre: the cell-phone novel (as opposed to, say, the typewriter novel or the quill and ink novel.)

by making it easier to write, cell phones have inspired more people and more young women, in particular to write. thumb’s up to that.

Politesse and politics are two sides of the same coin: how we all get along.

So it’s not surprising that the last two weeks have been dominated by a story of politesse. We’ve been talking about whether or not a Latina can enrich the juridical system. But this is politesse – a way of getting around the more provocative question that we dare not ask.

The real question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is pointed in a different direction. Are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and/or their subsidiaries the only ones who can enrich the juridical system?

(If you’re wondering what the “crazy uncle” of the lot, the one who lacks tact, is saying, here’s Pat Buchanan’s answer: White men built this country.)

The patriotic answer to this question, the underlying debate, is “no.” WASPs are just one of the ingredients in the all-American apple pie. They’re very tasty, for sure, but you can’t make an apple pie out of just apples. (For the record, apple pie is an exotic dish: “In the English colonies the apple pie had to wait for carefully planted pips, brought in barrels across the Atlantic, to become fruit-bearing apple trees.”)

In a democracy, the more voices are heard, the freer the republic. This is true at every level: the juridical, legislative, bureaucratic, theological, commercial, artistic etc.

(There are so many examples, but I’ll choose just one: the recently elected controller of the City of Los Angeles did a very good think to leak the cost of the MJ funeral to the press. This is why we need diversity in every office and a wide array of pulpits, etc.)

Diversity is not easy to manage. (Neither is liberty, duh.) We surely don’t want a sclerotic parliamentary system like that of Italy, which, frozen, lends favor to a craven strongman like Berlusconi.

but we also don’t have to be a one-party state to survive. that’s just silly. and any one who advances this claim, however politely or indirectly, is willfully ignorant of our nation’s history. we were founded, quite simply, to provide equal representation to citizens with diverging points of view – titles, religious beliefs, assets, etc.

some might argue (or imply, indirectly) that the wealthy, because they pay higher taxes, should have greater representation (see WASP and subsidiaries above). perhaps, they should also have more advocates and thus more rights in our courts? how about guaranteed seats at the front of bus?

alas, the public space is not for sale. we’ve abolished the sale of votes and our legal system stipulates a jury of peers – not lords. remember our most basic credo: all men are created equal. no matter how pure the silver spoon in their mouths.

speaking pragmatically, the richest have the most to gain from a thriving democracy. the 19th century oligarchs came to understand this the hard way. it’s a lesson that was lost on some of their heirs.

or, perhaps, these heirs and their would-be vassals mistook the history of contemporary Latin America, with its banana republics, stratified societies and democraduras, as a road map for the future. god help them. but not in my country.