How Many People Can God Love?

Facebook users have "friends." Some have hundreds of friends. How many friends, real friends, can a person have?

How many friends do you have? Some people think you can never have enough. There's a Facebook page entitled "Raise the maximum number of Facebook friends allowed." The petitioner is not satisfied with the paltry 5,000 friends that Facebook has deemed to be enough. More friends are necessary, the writer claims, but not for in-depth conversations or a soul-searching exchange of ideas about the meaning of life. No, he (it's got to be a "he") needs more friends because that will make games like Mafia Wars and Farmville more fun. If there are more people, more "friends" to play with, the games will have more variations and last longer. More friends mean better play time.

Not so fast, says Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford. The ideal limit on friends is actually 150. More than that and we limited humans simply can't keep track. It doesn't matter if the 150 are all in your neighborhood and you see them every day, or if you have connections with ...