1. Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar was born on 28 June 1947 and is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour.
12 Facts About Robin Dunbar
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Robin Dunbar is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
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Robin Dunbar went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his teachers included Niko Tinbergen; he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy in 1969.
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Robin 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, Theropithecus gelada, a monkey that is a close relative to baboons.
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Robin Dunbar spent two years as a freelance science writer.
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Robin 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.
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In 1994, Robin 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.
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In 2012, Robin 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.
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Robin Dunbar was formerly co-director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project "From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain" and was involved in the BACRP "Identifying the Universal Religious Repertoire".
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Robin Dunbar's work is mentioned in The Big Bang Theory, Season 4, Episode 20, when Amy Farrah Fowler is talking with Sheldon Cooper while listening to a lecture by Brian Greene.
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Robin Dunbar is a featured character in the adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind into graphic novel.
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Robin Dunbar's work is described in the epilogue of Blake Crouch's novel Upgrade.