Robin Dunbar

Education

The son of an engineer, Dunbar was privately educated at Magdalen College School, Brackley. He went on to study at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate student at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his teachers included Niko Tinbergen; he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy in 1969. 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.

Career and Research

Dunbar spent two years as a freelance science writer.

Dunbar's career includes appointments at the University of Bristol, 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.{{cite web

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

• 2015, Huxley Memorial Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
• 1998, Elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA)
• 1994, ad hominem Chair, Psychology, University of Liverpool

In popular culture

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

• Dunbar. 1984. Reproductive Decisions: An Economic Analysis of Gelada Baboon Social Strategies. Princeton University Press
• Dunbar. 1987. Demography and Reproduction. In Primate Societies. Smuts, B.B., Cheney, D.L., Seyfarth, R.M., Wrangham, R.W., Struhsaker, T.T. (eds). Chicago & London:University of Chicago Press. pp. 240–249
• Dunbar. 1988. Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall and Yale University Press
• Foley, Robert & Dunbar, Robin (14 October 1989). "Beyond the bones of contention". New Scientist Vol.124 (No.1686) pp. 21–25.
• Dunbar. 1996. The Trouble with Science. Harvard University Press.
• Dunbar (ed.). 1995. Human Reproductive Decisions. Macmillan
• Dunbar. 1997. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press.
• Runciman, Maynard Smith, & Dunbar (eds.). 1997. Evolution of Culture and Language in Primates and Humans. Oxford University Press.
• Dunbar, Knight, & Power (eds.). 1999. The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh University Press
• Dunbar & Barrett. 2000. Cousins. BBC Worldwide: London
• Cowlishaw & Dunbar. 2000. Primate Conservation Biology. University of Chicago Press
• Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett. 2002. Human Evolutionary Psychology. London: Palgrave
• Dunbar, Barrett & Lycett. 2005. Evolutionary Psychology, a Beginner's Guide. Oxford: One World Books
• Dunbar. 2004. The Human Story. London: Faber and Faber
• Dunbar. 2010. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. London: Faber & Faber (paper)
• Dunbar. 2014. Human Evolution. Pelican Books
• Dunbar. 2016. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior (Illustrated)
• Dunbar. 2021. Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Little, Brown and Company
• Dunbar. 2022. How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures. Pelican Books
• Camilleri, Rockey & Dunbar. 2023. The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups London: Penguin

Papers

• Dunbar (2020): "Structure and function in human and primate social networks: Implications for diffusion, network stability and health". Proceedings of the Royal Society A 476.2240 (2020): 20200446.
• Dunbar & Susanne Shultz (2023): "Four errors and a fallacy: pitfalls for the unwary in comparative brain analyses". Biological Reviews 98.4 (2023): 1278-1309.
• Dunbar (2024): "The social brain hypothesis–thirty years on". Annals of Human Biology 51.1 (2024): 2359920.

References

References

1. (2013). "Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
2. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates". Journal of Human Evolution.
3. (2003). "Social network size in humans". Human Nature.
4. Dunbar, Robin I. M.. (2010). "How many friends does one person need?: Dunbar's number and other evolutionary quirks". Faber and Faber.
5. (1995). "Mother-infant contact as contingent behaviour in gelada baboons". Animal Behaviour.
6. (1980). "Determinants and evolutionary consequences of dominance among female gelada baboons". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
7. "British Academy Fellows Archive". [[British Academy]].
8. "Professor Robin Dunbar FBA". [[British Humanist Association]].
9. (2013-08-22). "Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences.
10. Dunbar, Robin I. M.. (2014-09-30). "How conversations around campfires came to be". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
11. Brown, Andrew. (15 May 2003). "Science to watch people by". The Guardian.
12. Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald. (1974). "The social organisation of the gelada monkey (Theropithecus gelada)". University of Bristol.
13. 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."[https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0006zt6 The Life Scientific]" interview, BBC Radio Four, 23 July 2019.
14. (1977). "Dominance and reproductive success among female gelada baboons". Nature.
15. (December 2017). "Faculty of Science". liv.ac.uk.