Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the early 1990s, I turned my attention to what I thought at the time was a very trivial, albeit rather irritating, problem, namely why primates spend so much time grooming each other. The conventional view at the time was that grooming was simply about hygiene – removing burrs and other bits of vegetation from the fur and generally keeping the skin clean and healthy. Grooming certainly does that, but after many years watching monkeys in the wild I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes. It seemed obvious that grooming was intensely social and pleasurable.

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 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. You can get Friends here.