Robin Dunbar

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Maintaining friendships is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, according to Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar. So why do we bother? Robin has spent his life trying to answer this deceptively simple question. For most of his twenties, he lived with a herd of five hundred gelada monkeys in the Ethiopian highlands. He studied their social behaviour and concluded that an ability to get on with each other was just as important as finding food, for the survival of the species. Animals that live in large groups are less likely to get eaten by predators. When funding for animal studies dried up in the 1980s, he turned his attention to humans. and discovered there’s an upper limit to the number of real friends we can have, both in the real world and on social media.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know, I also know that comedy is really
0:24.3	subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from
0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	This is Discovery from the BBC. I'm Jim Alkulele and today I'm talking to a leading scientist about their life and work.
0:47.0	Welcome to the Life Scientific.
0:49.0	Robin Dunbar has spent most of his life trying to answer a deceptively simple question.
0:55.3	Why do humans and other primates invest quite so much time and mental effort on their social lives? How and why did we evolve to be such a
1:04.3	sociable species? He spent six years together with his wife living with 500
1:09.7	Gilada monkeys in a remote region of the Ethiopian highlands. Observing their social life
1:15.2	was like watching the most exciting soap opera, he says. When funding for field work dried up,
1:20.8	he turned his attention to humans who could be studied in the local park.
1:25.3	He's perhaps best known for Dunbar's number, the idea that there's an upper limit to the number
1:30.7	of meaningful social relationships we can maintain.
1:34.0	An idea which seems to hold true on social media as well.
1:37.5	Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University,
1:41.0	welcome to the Life Scientific.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.