Robin Dunbar

An unremitting and unforgiving piece of ecological writing, landing punch after punch in its detailing of poisons and toxins being used to kill plants and insects and their disastrous effects up and down the food chain. Told in clear, readable prose, with precision and force, it's a powerful, sobering, alarming essay.

There are so many things wrong about this book it's hard to know where to start... Dunbar is a Professor of evolutionary biology, so presumably he is no fool. But I note that he is also - apparently - famous as a populariser of science. He has succeeded here magnificently - if you assume his audience is about 8 years old. For my part I don't need a five page digression into to operation of the natural opiate system in the human body. Especially when the same simple point is explained by show more repetition rather than exposition. Perhaps there's not that much to be said about grooming, or more to the point, the author doesn't have much to say about it - at least not much that he considers suitable for 8 year old humans. His section on language is equally infantile. It occurs to me that if anything this resembles the pitch for a television series or special. I wouldn't be so annoyed, except that the author commits the cardinal sin for an intellectual (or one who purports to be) and that is quoting obviously spurious and misguided studies. To be told that the rate of homicide between non-related parties living together is 20 times higher than it is for related parties is simply saying (except that the author doesn't understand or doesn't choose to tell the reader) that spouses kill each other at a far higher rate than parents-children or siblings living in the same household. To suggest that this 'proves' that blood ties inhibit blood related individuals from killing each other (as the author claims') is to fail to take account of more issues pertaining to spousal abuse that I could enumerate in anything less than a book - without even touching upon the issue of opportunity and the question of household population profiles which will skew this statistic. As a so-called scientist, the author deserves to be pilloried for demeaning his profession. You can make adjustments in order to popularise science, but this book is unadulterated trash. It has gone in the fire (it's a cold winter here), but I'll keep it in my catalog so that this review can stand. By all means this is a fascinating subject, but read something by someone who understands primates (de Waal for instance), or language (Pinker). The half star indicates the book has a useful calorific value, when ignited. show less

At the core of the "Social Brain" hypothesis is the suggestion that social group size in primates is limited by the relative size of the neocortex. This posed a challenge for the early hominins who moved beyond the forest habitats occupied by their ancestors, as in open habitats, they would be more vulnerable to predators and their main defence would be that of a belonging to a larger group. At the same time, increased group size also makes direct contact between individuals more difficult. show more Physical grooming - a primary means of maintaining relationships in primate groups - must be replaced by other, more symbolic connections (such as language) if the group is to remain cohesive. In meeting these challenges, our ancestors embarked on a process of brain evolution which facilitated larger effective group sizes and the transmission of innovations over long distances and between widely scattered groups. This capacity to handle large, dispersed, social networks is the key to human evolution.

It's a persuasive thesis. However, it is significant that this book does not represent a balanced synthesis of all the disciplines which have contributed to the "Social Brain" hypothesis. Rather, it emphasises the work of the 7 year long "Lucy to Language" project which focused on the archaeological evidence. and the book reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this emphasis.

I tend to look for strong evidence and assess it objectively. I found the evidence for the rule of three and Dunbar's number, as presented, a little weak, given that humans tend to find patterns even in random numbers. More particularly, the aspect that I found most disconcerting is that, in places, the book asserted the social brain hypothesis as though it were established fact, thereby displaying a rather worrying bias, given that many, if not most, people do not accept that the hypothesis is well established. In other parts, the book was much more cautious about the speculation that group size drove brain size and hence human evolution. With the addition of more objective skepticism, the account made for more pleasant and indeed, for me as an outsider, very interesting reading.

It is relevant to add that, great apes aside, there is much less evidence for the social patterns of our hominid ancestors and one can well take the view that even wild speculation is better than nothing (provided that it is not taken too seriously). In Thinking Big, the speculation is mostly carefully explained. All in all, it seemed to me to be a valiant attempt to peer through the mists surrounding our prehistoric past, albeit that I did not always find the assertions about the glimpsed apparition convincing. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/friends-understanding-the-power-of-our-most-impo...

Robin Dunbar is famous for the “Dunbar number”, the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, which he says research has borne out as the average size of human communities from prehistory to the present day. This book looks at the nature of friendship, including its roots in primate behaviour and its future in the online world.

Dunbar is very big on his own research, though he show more does mention other researchers too (with occasional asides about the fate of his PhD and doctoral students). I found the prose a bit dry, to be honest, and no space is given to any critique of his findings, or alternative explanations. Maybe there isn’t any, but I recently also read Proto by Laura Spinney which does make space for alternative theories.

I also wondered about the people and societies at the ends of the bell curve. Dunbar is very pleased that all of the studies he cites find that people to have 5-ish close friends and an extended circle of 150-ish; but what’s the variation? What can we learn from and about super-connectors, or from people who are socially isolated? The dragging towards the mean got a bit tiring.

So, yes, lots of interesting stuff here, but it raised questions as well as answers. show less