Robin Dunbar - How Many Friends Does One Person Need [2010][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: September 27, 2010
We are the product of our evolutionary history and this history colours our everyday lives - from why we kiss to how religious we are. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar explains how the distant past underpins our current behaviour, through the groundbreaking experiments that have changed the thinking of evolutionary biologists forever.
He explains phenomena such as why 'Dunbar's Number' (150) is the maximum number of acquaintances you can have, why all babies are born premature and the science behind lonely hearts columns. Stimulating, provocative and highly enjoyable, this fascinating book is essential for understanding why humans behave as they do - what it is to be human.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In an entertaining and informative new work, evolutionary psychologist and Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, Dunbar (Evolutionary Psychology) investigates the ways in which evolution is still at work in homo sapiens, and the brain functions and abilities that separate us from other species. Covering an impressive breadth of topics and disciplines, Dunbar explores the ways in which our brains control every aspect of our social lives (surprise, we are less complicated than we think). Our needs, preferences, and commonalities are a function of what-not who-we are. Dunbar addresses the unusually large size of the human brain and concludes that monogamy is at fault; the brains of more promiscuous species are much smaller. Comparing the length of pregnancy in various species, he states that "human babies are born wildly premature"; in mammals, gestation time is dictated by the size of the brain, and humans "ought to have a gestation of twenty-one months." Full of interesting facts and Dunbar's winning personality, his effort reads like a fascinating lecture that most readers would be all-too-happy to attend.

From Booklist
150. Dunbar’s Number: the number establishing the limit on meaningful relationships one person can maintain. In showing how this number reflects the biological history of humans as distinctively social primates, Dunbar illustrates how recent advances in evolutionary science have enlarged the explanatory power of the Darwinian paradigm. Within this increasingly potent paradigm, readers learn, for example, why societies experiencing birth ratios unfavorable to females face serious crime surges in the decades ahead and why tall politicians (e.g., Obama) enjoy a pronounced advantage over short rivals (McCain). Dunbar’s work, of course, connects with the sociobiological theories advanced by E. O.Wilson in the 1980s, leaving some readers with the same questions about the potentially reductive implications of an overly biological framework. Does the distinctively human impulse to worship, for instance, manifest only the way that ritual behavior biochemically fosters group cohesion among anthropoids? Some readers may indeed wonder if Dunbar might not use his science more plausibly if he shared with biologist Peter Medawar an appreciation for its limits. Still, this is lucid and provocative. --Bryce Christensen

Reviews
An eclectic collection of essays on humanity and evolution with something for everyone. Dunbar explains, among other things, why monogamists need big brains, why it is worth buying a new suit for an interview, how to interpret an advert in a lonely hearts column, the perils of messing with evolution and, of course, how many friends one person needs (150 as it happens, aka "Dunbar's number"). He speaks with authority and seduces us as only a master storyteller can. (Kate Douglas, New Scientist)

Lucid and provocative. (Bryce Christensen Booklist 2010-11-01)

Entertaining and informative...Covering an impressive breadth of topics and disciplines, Dunbar explores the ways in which our brains control every aspect of our social lives (surprise, we are less complicated than we think). Our needs, preferences, and commonalities are a function of what--not who--we are...Full of interesting facts and Dunbar's winning personality, his effort reads like a fascinating lecture that most readers would be all-too-happy to attend. (Publishers Weekly (starred review) 2011-01-24)

[A] fascinating volume that ranges widely across time, space and human practices...Tossing off light-hearted examinations of such fairly innocent topics as why we kiss and why all babies look very much alike, Dunbar is unafraid to tackle sensitive and controversial issues as well. These essays deal with race, gender, intelligence, class, and nationality in dispassionate and unflinching ways that do not seek to cushion hard facts with mealy-mouthed sanctimony...Far from being a catalogue of gloom and doom, this book leaves the reader marvelling at how far homo sapiens has come, and how far we might yet ascend. (Paul Di Filippo Barnes & Noble Review 2011-03-03)

For the past thirty years [Dunbar] has conducted research designed to uncover the workings of our ancestral hardware: to decode the scripts that drive much of our behavior and make us what we are as a species. Although Dunbar emphasizes the value of kin, he is anything but a sentimentalist. In this book, he chases after averages and patterns, after predictive links between current behavioral and physical traits and what, in the Pleistocene or Neolithic past, would most likely have been mating or survival advantages...In general, understanding the Darwinian back-story of our species is arguably a way to short-circuit the infelicities of our gut responses: a way to combat gut-level racism, sexism, beauty/symmetry biases, height biases, ageism, and the many variants of tribalism and jingoism...Dunbar shows that, if we go far enough back in our family trees, we are all the product of a tangled skein of heroes and villains, of conquering populations and conquered ones, of dominant and minority races, of in-groups and out-groups. Whether we as individuals call ourselves one or the other is often just a matter of how far back in time we set our stakes combined with the limits of our instruments for probing ourselves. Knowledge such as this may well be the only way out of the ancestral cave. (Michele Pridmore-Brown Los Angeles Review of Books 2011-05-24)

It is an entertaining as well as informative read. (Rosalie West Portland Book Review 2011-06-01)

About the Author
Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.