Abstract: The idea that people are connected through just "six degrees of separation," based on Stanley Milgram's "small world study," has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the "small world problem," reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that we actually live in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class. An explosion of interest is occurring in the small world problem because mathematicians have developed computer models of how the small world phenomenon could logically work. But mathematical modeling is not a substitute for empirical evidence. At the core of the small world problem are fascinating psychological mysteries.

Could It Be A Big World After All?

"Can you imagine having Stephen Jay Gould as a babysitter?"

Gould's Serious Fun

... Fukuyama told Salon why he thinks that the right to be cloned and to tinker with our offspring's genes aren't liberties that we should all enjoy, and what should be done to restrain the onrush of biotechnology.

This appears to be more oriented toward concerns about actions rather then concerns about thoughts. Therefore I find it more reasonable.

Salon.com Technology | Clone free

Gould died of cancer at his home in New York City.

It is a sad day for science. And given his failing health, I am all the more impressed with his recent publication of a mammoth 1464 page treatise on evolutionary theory.

washingtonpost.com: Famed Harvard Biologist Stephen Jay Gould Dies