Robin Dunbar

Professor Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar portrait by Cirone-Musi via Festival della Scienza
Born Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
(1947-06-28) 28 June 1947[1]
Liverpool
Residence Oxford
Nationality British
Fields Anthropology
Evolutionary Psychology[2]
Institutions University of Bristol
Stockholm University
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
University College London
University of Liverpool
Alma mater University of Bristol (PhD)
Magdalen College, Oxford
(BA, MA)
Thesis The social organisation of the gelada baboon (Theropithecus gelada) (1974)
Known for Dunbar's number[3][4][5]
Baboon research[6][7][8]
Notable awards FBA (1998)
FRAI
PhD (1974)[9]
Spouse Eva Patricia Dunbar (née Melvin)[1][8]
Website
senrg.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/r_dunbar.html

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947)[10][11] is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour.[12][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Aalto University. 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".[21][22][23][24][25][26][27]

Education

Dunbar, son of an engineer, was educated at Magdalen College School, Brackley.[1] He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford,[1] where his teachers included Nico Tinbergen and 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 baboon Theropithecus gelada.[9]

He spent two years as a freelance science writer.[11]

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 University of Liverpool, but he left Liverpool in 2007 to take up the post of Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford.[10][28]

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 2014, 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 British Humanist Association Distinguished Supporter of Humanism.

Awards and honours

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "DUNBAR, Prof. Robin Ian MacDonald". Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. ↑ Opie, C.; Atkinson, Q. D.; Dunbar, R. I. M.; Shultz, S. (2013). "Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1307903110.
  3. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates". Journal of Human Evolution. 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J.
  4. ↑ Hill, R. A.; Dunbar, R. I. M. (2003). "Social network size in humans". Human Nature. 14: 53. doi:10.1007/s12110-003-1016-y.
  5. 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 0-571-25342-3.
  6. ↑ Barrett, L.; Dunbar, R. I. M.; Dunbar, P. (1995). "Mother-infant contact as contingent behaviour in gelada baboons". Animal Behaviour. 49 (3): 805. doi:10.1016/0003-3472(95)80211-8.
  7. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M. (1980). "Determinants and evolutionary consequences of dominance among female gelada baboons". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 7 (4): 253–265. doi:10.1007/BF00300665.
  8. 1 2 3 Dunbar, R. I. M.; Dunbar, E. P. (1977). "Dominance and reproductive success among female gelada baboons". Nature. 266 (5600): 351–352. doi:10.1038/266351a0. PMID 404565.
  9. 1 2 Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald (1974). The social organisation of the gelada baboon (Theropithecus gelada) (PhD thesis). University of Bristol.(subscription required)
  10. 1 2 "British Academy Fellows Archive". British Academy. Retrieved 2007-12-02.
  11. 1 2 3 "Professor Robin Dunbar FBA". British Humanist Association. Retrieved 2007-12-02. Archived 17 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
  12. 1 2 Shultz, S.; Dunbar, R. (2010). "Encephalization is not a universal macroevolutionary phenomenon in mammals but is associated with sociality". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (50): 21582–21586. doi:10.1073/pnas.1005246107. PMC 3003036Freely accessible. PMID 21098277.
  13. ↑ Hill, R. A.; Bentley, R. A.; Dunbar, R. I. M. (2008). "Network scaling reveals consistent fractal pattern in hierarchical mammalian societies". Biology Letters. 4 (6): 748–751. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2008.0393. PMC 2614163Freely accessible. PMID 18765349.
  14. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M. (2007). "Male and female brain evolution is subject to contrasting selection pressures in primates". BMC Biology. 5: 21. doi:10.1186/1741-7007-5-21. PMC 1876205Freely accessible. PMID 17493267.
  15. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M. (1995). "The price of being at the top". Nature. 373 (6509): 22–23. doi:10.1038/373022a0. PMID 7800033.
  16. ↑ Dunbar, R. (1997). "The monkeys' defence alliance". Nature. 386 (6625): 555–550. doi:10.1038/386555a0. PMID 9121575.
  17. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M.; Pawlowski, B.; Lipowicz, A. (2000). "Tall men have more reproductive success". Nature. 403 (6766): 156. doi:10.1038/35003107. PMID 10646589.
  18. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M. (2001). "Evolutionary biology: What's in a baboon's behind?". Nature. 410 (6825): 158. doi:10.1038/35065773. PMID 11258375.
  19. ↑ Dunbar, R. (2003). "PSYCHOLOGY: Evolution of the Social Brain". Science. 302 (5648): 1160–1161. doi:10.1126/science.1092116. PMID 14615522.
  20. ↑ Dunbar, R. I. M.; Shultz, S. (2007). "Evolution in the Social Brain". Science. 317 (5843): 1344–1347. doi:10.1126/science.1145463. PMID 17823343.
  21. ↑ Malcolm Gladwell (17 June 2007). "Dunbar's Number". scottweisbrod. Retrieved 2007-12-02.
  22. ↑ Robin Dunbar in Google Scholar
  23. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  24. ↑ Robin Dunbar's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier. (subscription required)
  25. ↑ Professor Robin Dunbar at the Internet Movie Database
  26. ↑ Dávid-Barrett, T.; Dunbar, R. I. M. (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. 280 (1765): 20131151. doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.1151. ISSN 0962-8452. PMC 3712454Freely accessible. PMID 23804623.
  27. ↑ Dunbar, Robin I. M. (2014-09-30). "How conversations around campfires came to be". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (39): 14013–14014. doi:10.1073/pnas.1416382111. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4191795Freely accessible. PMID 25246572.
  28. ↑ "Prof. Robin Dunbar FBA". liv.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2007-11-04. Retrieved 2007-12-02.
  29. ↑ "Faculty of Science" (PDF). liv.ac.uk. Retrieved 2007-12-02.

Published books

External links

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