How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks - Hardcover

Dunbar, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674057163 ISBN 13: 9780674057166

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Why do men talk and women gossip, and which is better for you? Why is monogamy a drain on the brain? And why should you be suspicious of someone who has more than 150 friends on Facebook?

We are the product of our evolutionary history, and this history colors our everyday lives—from why we joke to the depth of our religious beliefs. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar uses groundbreaking experiments that have forever changed the way evolutionary biologists explain how the distant past underpins our current ­behavior.

We know so much more now than Darwin ever did, but the core of modern evolutionary theory lies firmly in Darwin’s elegantly simple idea: organisms behave in ways that enhance the frequency with which genes are passed on to future generations. This idea is at the heart of Dunbar’s book, which seeks to explain why humans behave as they do. Stimulating, provocative, and immensely enjoyable, his book invites you to explore the number of friends you have, whether you have your father’s brain or your mother’s, whether morning sickness might actually be good for you, why Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was a foregone conclusion, what Gaelic has to do with frankincense, and why we laugh. In the process, Dunbar examines the role of religion in human evolution, the fact that most of us have unexpectedly famous ancestors, and why men and women never seem able to see eye to eye on color.

About this title

About the Author

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

Review

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 this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0674057163
• ISBN 13: 9780674057166
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312