Nicholas Christakis in Copenhagen
I’m excited to share that Nicholas Christakis is coming to Copenhagen. It’s (as far as I can tell) his first ever visit to the city, and on Wednesday September 23rd he’s giving an academic guest lecture at the Pioneer Centre for AI, jointly hosted by the University of Copenhagen and DTU.
If you have done any work on social networks, Nicholas needs no introduction, and if you came to networks via some other path, there’s a good chance that you’ve been building on his ideas whether you noticed or not.
Nicholas’ CV is ridiculously awesome. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale (the university’s highest faculty honor), where he directs the Human Nature Lab and co-directs the Yale Institute for Network Science. He trained as a physician (MD, Harvard) and as a sociologist (PhD, Penn). He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of more than 220 scientific articles and several bestselling books, including Connected, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, and Apollo’s Arrow. In 2009, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. And did I mention he has a TED talk that’s been seen by more than 2 million people!?
But it’s not just prizes and fancy titles. His actual academic work has been consistently mind-blowing for many years. With James Fowler, Nicholas wrote the famous studies of how obesity, smoking, and happiness spread through social ties. Later, this became an entire research program on social contagion and became the book Connected (translated into 20 languages). And his lab does empirical social science at a scale most of us only daydream about: mapping the social networks of Hadza hunter-gatherers, building software platforms like Trellis and Breadboard to run massive social experiments, and running a randomized trial across 176 villages in Honduras with nearly 25,000 participants. More on those villages in a moment.
The lecture is about “How Social Connection Is Embodied”. This is something Nicholas has been thinking about for a long time (I remember a talk about this topic at Harvard in the early 2000s): how our social lives are reflected in our bodies, right down to blood biomarkers, genes, and gut microbes. Here is the abstract:
Natural selection has shaped our species to be social and has endowed us with important capacities, such as love, friendship, and cooperation. Our biology reflects this. Our bodies respond to, and foster, social interactions in myriad ways. Here I provide an overview of work in our lab regarding this phenomenon. I discuss how our bodies respond to social isolation, including via circulating biomarkers in our blood. I review evidence that we have evolved the capacity to pick particular people as suitable mates. I show how our genes also shape how many friends we have, where we are located within social networks, and even who we pick as friends (i.e., the people who become a kind of “functional kin” to us). In a line of other work, using a large sample of isolated villages in Honduras, I show how the social networks we form depend on, and affect, our gut microbiome. Commensal microbes circulate in our social networks and these microbes in turn produce chemicals in our bodies that can shape both our behavior and our health. Finally, I discuss ongoing work in which we are exploring the fascinating topic of human social chemosignaling. Humans evolved to produce and detect odors that signal important social phenotypes, suggesting that we can smell out people who are suitable friends to us, or modify the behavior of the people around us by the volatile organic compounds our bodies emit. Human society is deeply biological.
The practical details:
- Time: Wednesday, September 23rd, 14:00 – lecture followed by Q&A
- Place: Auditorium 1, Copenhagen University Library (City Campus), Gothersgade 140, Copenhagen K
- Registration: mandatory, and seats are limited – sign up via the event page
One important note: the guest lecture is for academic audiences. But there’s good news: he’s also giving a public lecture the evening before: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society at Science & Cocktails, Tuesday September 22nd at Den Grå Hal in Christiania. That’s the Blueprint material, live on stage, with hipness and cocktails. Highly recommended.