Robin Dunbar: “We can only learn in the sandbox of life”

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50 YEARS OF THE “POINT”. A specialist in the brain and social behavior of primates, the British anthropologist is professor emeritus at Oxford.

Interview by Peggy Sastre

RObin Dunbar, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford, is one of those scientists whose bonhomie clashes with the scope of the work. This specialist in behavioral biology, of whom Yuval Noah Harari made a character in the graphic adaptation of Sapiens, is most famous for the “number” that bears its name: 150, the maximum number of friends that anyone can roughly have and the typical size of a Paleolithic tribe. But his contribution to the knowledge of our humanity is far from stopping there. We owe him the prodigious hypothesis of the “social brain”, demonstrating the reciprocal links between the size of the brain of a species and that of its characteristic social network. Or the theory of language by gossip, that language has evolved…