Robin Dunbar

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Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar (6293027302).jpg
Dunbar at Festival della Scienza
in Italy, 2011
Born
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

(1947-06-28) 28 June 1947 (age 76) [1]
Alma mater
Known for Dunbar's number [2] [3] [4]

social brain hypothesis gossip hypothesis

Baboon research [5] [6] [7]
Spouse
Eva Patricia Melvin
(m. 1971)
[1] [7]
Awards Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (2021)
Huxley Memorial Medal (2015)
Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (FRAI) (2015)
Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) (1998)
Scientific career
Fields Anthropology
Evolutionary Psychology [8]
Institutions University of Bristol
Stockholm University
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
University College London
University of Liverpool
Thesis The social organisation of the gelada baboon (Theropithecus gelada)  (1974)
Website www.psy.ox.ac.uk/team/robin-dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar FBA FRAI (born 28 June 1947) [9] [10] is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, [4] a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". [20] [21]

Contents

Education

Dunbar, the son of an engineer, was educated at Magdalen College School, Brackley. [1] He went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, [1] where his teachers included Niko Tinbergen; he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy in 1969. [1] Dunbar then went on to the Department of Psychology of the University of Bristol and completed his PhD in 1974 on the social organisation of the gelada, Theropithecus gelada, a monkey that is a close relative to baboons. [22]

He spent two years as a freelance science writer. [10] Dunbar told BBC Radio interviewer Jim Al-Khalili in The Life Scientific in 2019 that he "got his first real job" only at the age of 40. [23]

Academic career

Dunbar's academic and research career includes the University of Bristol, [7] University of Cambridge from 1977 until 1982, and University College London from 1987 until 1994. In 1994, Dunbar became Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool, but left Liverpool in 2007, to take up the post of Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. [9] [24] In 2012, Dunbar migrated over to the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, after receiving a competitive research grant from the European Research Council.

Dunbar was formerly co-director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project (BACRP) "From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain" and was involved in the BACRP "Identifying the Universal Religious Repertoire".

Digital versions of selected published articles authored or co-authored by him are available from the University of Liverpool Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioural Ecology Research Group.

In 2015, Dunbar was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal—established in 1900 in memory of Thomas Henry Huxley—for services to anthropology by the council of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the highest honour at the disposal of the RAI. Dunbar is also a Humanists UK Distinguished Supporter of Humanism.

Awards and honours

Dunbar's work is mentioned in The Big Bang Theory , Season 4, Episode 20 ("The Herb Garden Germination"), when Amy Farrah Fowler is talking with Sheldon Cooper while listening to a lecture by Brian Greene (2011).

Dunbar is a featured character in the adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind into graphic novel (2020).

Dunbar's work is described in the epilogue of Blake Crouch's novel Upgrade (2022).

Published books

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gelada</span> Species of Old World monkey

The gelada, sometimes called the bleeding-heart monkey or the gelada baboon, is a species of Old World monkey found only in the Ethiopian Highlands, living at elevations of 1,800–4,400 m (5,900–14,400 ft) above sea level. It is the only living member of the genus Theropithecus, a name derived from the Greek root words for "beast-ape". Like its close relatives in genus Papio, the baboons, it is largely terrestrial, spending much of its time foraging in grasslands, with grasses comprising up to 90% of its diet.

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References

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  4. 1 2 Dunbar, Robin I. M. (2010). How many friends does one person need?: Dunbar's number and other evolutionary quirks . London: Faber and Faber. ISBN   978-0-571-25342-5.
  5. Barrett, L.; Dunbar, R. I. M.; Dunbar, P. (1995). "Mother-infant contact as contingent behaviour in gelada baboons". Animal Behaviour. 49 (3): 805–810. doi:10.1016/0003-3472(95)80211-8. S2CID   53152282.
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  14. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1995). "The price of being at the top". Nature. 373 (6509): 22–23. Bibcode:1995Natur.373...22D. doi:10.1038/373022a0. PMID   7800033. S2CID   4310682.
  15. Dunbar, R. (1997). "The monkeys' defence alliance". Nature. 386 (6625): 555–7. Bibcode:1997Natur.386..555D. doi: 10.1038/386555a0 . PMID   9121575. S2CID   2064690.
  16. Dunbar, R. I. M.; Pawlowski, B.; Lipowicz, A. (2000). "Tall men have more reproductive success". Nature. 403 (6766): 156. Bibcode:2000Natur.403..156P. doi: 10.1038/35003107 . PMID   10646589. S2CID   7722496.
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  18. Dunbar, R. (2003). "PSYCHOLOGY: Evolution of the Social Brain". Science. 302 (5648): 1160–1161. doi:10.1126/science.1092116. PMID   14615522. S2CID   144329128.
  19. Dunbar, R. I. M.; Shultz, S. (2007). "Evolution in the Social Brain". Science. 317 (5843): 1344–1347. Bibcode:2007Sci...317.1344D. doi:10.1126/science.1145463. PMID   17823343. S2CID   1516792.
  20. Dávid-Barrett, T.; Dunbar, R. I. M. (22 August 2013). "Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences. 280 (1765): 20131151. doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.1151. ISSN   0962-8452. PMC   3712454 . PMID   23804623.
  21. Dunbar, Robin I. M. (30 September 2014). "How conversations around campfires came to be". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (39): 14013–14014. Bibcode:2014PNAS..11114013D. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1416382111 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   4191795 . PMID   25246572.
  22. Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald (1974). The social organisation of the gelada monkey (Theropithecus gelada) (PhD thesis). University of Bristol.
  23. "The Life Scientific" interview, BBC Radio Four, 23 July 2019.
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  25. "Faculty of Science". liv.ac.uk. Retrieved 2 December 2007.[ permanent dead link ]