100 John B. Calhoun 



Kunghit Haida suggests that each larger semiclosed social system includes 

 within it all the culturally limited basic group numbers. But even if some 

 are skipped or unrecognizable, the one group structure which must be 

 preserved is that of 12 adults. Recent studies by Zimmerman and Broderick 

 (1954) and Zimmerman and Cervantes (1960) confirm this suspicion. 

 Their approach has been to focus on any given family, designated the ego 

 family, and then to determine with how many other families its members 

 have frequent and close associations. These latter are designated as friend 

 families. Absence of divorce or desertion, juvenile arrest, or children not 

 completing high school comprised criteria for judging a family as "good" 

 or "successful." Presence of these traits were used to delimit the "bad" or 

 "unsuccessful" families. Values held by a family were judged on the basis 

 of their religion, region of origin, income level, and kinship bonds. The 

 good ego families typically have five friend families with whom they have 

 a high coincidence of values, and furthermore, if the ego family is char- 

 acterized as good most of the friend families are likely also to be so char- 

 acterized. On the other hand, bad ego families generally have fewer friend 

 families and they are likely to differ from them with respect to the value 

 traits. The fewer the values shared by the several families forming such a 

 cluster, the smaller the cluster will be and the greater the probability that 

 each family will be characterized by one or more of the traits denoting it 

 as an unsuccessful family. 



The ideal state then appears to be six families, 12 adults, composed of 

 an ego family and five friend families. Shared values bind such a cluster 

 despite the dispersal of the member families through the local community. 

 Furthermore, each friend family in a particular cluster is, as an ego family, 

 the center of another cluster. In this way an extension of the cluster de- 

 velops to include 26 total families. Although similar bonds between families 

 may include a larger network, insofar as any particular family is concerned 

 the 25 friend families and extended friend families form the limit of de- 

 pendence and social support relationships. This approximation of 50 adults 

 of the family-friend cluster further argues for the reality of Nb = 50 as a 

 basic grouping revealed also in Birdsell's supra-horde of Australian abo- 

 rigines and of the incipient agricultural village of the Jarmo type. Reduction 

 of the size of the family cluster below the optimum of six when values held 

 by member families diverge from each other represents another example of 

 the principle of group fragmentation, enunciated by Birdsell, which follows 

 a clash in values. Zimmerman and Cervantes refer to this conflict as a 

 "confusion of values." 



All the information in this section, when viewed as a whole and in the 

 context of the earlier sections concerning the evolution of a basic group 

 size, suggests the following tentative generalization: Modern man derived 



