Both deal with imaginary relationships. Although the benefits for genetic survival of some behaviors are reasonably clear, others such as altruism seem puzzling. One of the more mysterious is mathematics. Most likely, any budding prehistoric mathematician would have met a fate similar to that of Archimedes, who it is said was killed by a Roman centurion because, being preoccupied with a mathematical problem, he failed to take appropriate notice of the soldier. According to The Math Gene , an important clue to resolving this puzzle can be found in that bad joke about mathematics, soap operas and imaginary relationships.
People clearly have an extraordinary interest in human relationships.
Thinking about relationships what Devlin calls gossip is one of the most common preoccupations of the human mind. Devlin s argument develops along several parallel tracks. One concerns the nature of mathematics as an enterprise very different from arithmetic. Mathematics requires nuanced understanding of relations among abstract patterns. Complex mathematical structures are built, like nested Russian dolls, by encapsulating into new patterns specific relationships among simpler patterns.