Word: socialism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Knowing that Merkel is under pressure because she has made saving Opel a key campaign issue, GM could be using the threat of insolvency to pressure Berlin into providing more aid. Merkel and her political rivals, the Social Democrats, have come too far down this road to back out now, some German commentators have suggested, exposing the government to high-pressure tactics from...
...Being social isn't for dummies. Animals that gather into packs, herds or troops - never mind into cities and countries - need to be smart. How else to negotiate the complex rules and hierarchies of their cultures? It's not for nothing that sharks, among the dimmest of the large carnivores, are loners, or that humans - far and away the smartest - are so enthusiastically collectivist...
What this ought to mean is that social animals have bigger brains than solitary ones, and the research has indeed suggested as much. A landmark 2007 paper called "Social Brain Hypothesis," published in the journal Evolution, showed that increased sociality was linked to steadily bigger brains in at least three orders of mammals: primates like us, carnivores like lions and ungulates like zebras and bison. (Watch TIME's video "Chimps & People: Dangerous Bedfellows...
...carnivores, but they did so in depth. Sampling both living terrestrial carnivores and the fossils of extinct ones, they analyzed overall brain volume relative to body mass in fully 289 species. They also factored in what is known (or, in the case of fossils, theorized) about each species' social behavior. What they got was a surprising mix of findings. (See pictures of 10 species near extinction...
What doesn't seem to track, however, is a consistent connection between these measures and the complexity of the animals' communities. "The universality of the social-brain hypothesis does not apply," says Finarelli...