Robin Dunbar

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Robin Dunbar
FRAI
Dunbar at Festival della Scienza
in Italy, 2011
Born
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

(1947-06-28) 28 June 1947 (age 76)[2]
Liverpool, Lancashire, England
Alma mater
Known forDunbar's number[3][4][5]

social brain hypothesis gossip hypothesis

Baboon research[6][7][8]
Spouse
Eva Patricia Melvin
​
(m. 1971)​
[2][8]
AwardsForeign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (2021)
Huxley Memorial Medal (2015)
Evolutionary Psychology[1]
InstitutionsUniversity of Bristol
Stockholm University
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
University College London
University of Liverpool
ThesisThe social organisation of the gelada baboon (Theropithecus gelada) (1974)
Websitewww.psy.ox.ac.uk/team/robin-dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number,[5] a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".[20][21]

Education

Dunbar, the son of an engineer, was educated at

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,[8] 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

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

References

  1. PMID 23898180
    .
  2. ^ a b c d e "DUNBAR, Prof. Robin Ian MacDonald". Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press.
  3. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
    .
  4. S2CID 11036621
    .
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-0-571-25342-5
    .
  6. S2CID 53152282
    .
  7. S2CID 28369135
    .
  8. ^
    S2CID 4159540
    .
  9. ^ a b "British Academy Fellows Archive". British Academy. Archived from the original on 2 February 2008. Retrieved 2 December 2007.
  10. ^
    British Humanist Association. Archived from the original
    on 17 July 2012. Retrieved 2 December 2007.
  11. PMID 21098277
    .
  12. PMID 18765349
    .
  13. PMID 17493267
    .
  14. S2CID 4310682
    .
  15. S2CID 2064690
    .
  16. S2CID 7722496
    .
  17. S2CID 31256568
    .
  18. S2CID 144329128
    .
  19. S2CID 1516792
    .
  20. PMID 23804623
    .
  21. 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.
  24. ^ "Prof. Robin Dunbar FBA". liv.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 4 November 2007. Retrieved 2 December 2007.
  25. ^ "Faculty of Science". liv.ac.uk. Retrieved 2 December 2007.[permanent dead link]

External links

Scholia has a profile for Robin Dunbar (Q1935522).
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