Scientist says 150 is the most number of friends one can comfortably have

[Joe Carillo]

Modern research on human evolution strongly suggests that kin relations and social relations matter greatly to human survival, and that the wider kin and social network one has, the stronger will be one's competitive edge in the game of life. But in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Harvard University Press, 312 pages), Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist cum anthropologist, contends—among many other provocative ideas and groundbreaking findings in evolutionary theory—that there’s a point at which a further widening of one’s kin and social networks becomes counterproductive. Indeed, he has come with what he calls “Dunbar’s Number,” 150, which he says is the maximum number of acquaintances that the human mind can comfortably cope with in life—no matter what Facebook says about the great satisfaction to be derived from being able to collect several hundreds of friends online.

Says Dunbar of this magic number: “The number 150 really refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is reciprocal and based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity. If you asked them to do a favor, they would be more likely to say yes than those outside the 150.”

Dunbar explains that he came up with this number by extrapolating to humans from a relationship between brain size and social group size that he had discovered in monkeys and apes. “The number does not seem to change with social or ecological context,” he says, “but what does change is whether everyone in your circle lives in the same place (as in rural hilltop communities) or is dispersed across the whole country (as is now more typically the case for modern city dwellers).”

In a review of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? in the Los Angeles Review of Books,  Michele Pridmore-Brown, a history scholar at the University of California in Berkeley, says: “Dunbar shows that, if we go far enough back in our family trees, we are all the product of a tangled skein of heroes and villains, of conquering populations and conquered ones, of dominant and minority races, of in-groups and out-groups. Whether we as individuals call ourselves one or the other is often just a matter of how far back in time we set our stakes combined with the limits of our instruments for probing ourselves. Knowledge such as this may well be the only way out of the ancestral cave.”

Read Michele Pridmore-Brown’s “Social Darwinism” in the Los Angeles Review of Books now!

Read an interview of Robin Dunbar about his book in the University of Oxford website now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robin Dunbar is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His principal research interest is the evolution of sociality. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. His previous books include The Trouble with Science (1995), Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1998), and The Human Story (2004).

[Alek]

   
"Scientist says 150 is the most number of friends one can comfortably have"

"Most number" sounds decidedly odd.   What about "highest" or "greatest"?

Or simply drop "most"?

[Joe Carillo]

The adjective phrase “most number” may sound decidedly odd to some ears, but I daresay it’s grammatically correct in the sense of “maximum”—the sense intended for it in within the strict letter-count confines of that headline.

Now, as you suggested, let’s try substituting “highest” or “greatest” for “most number” in that headline and see what happens:

“Scientist says 150 is the highest number of friends one can comfortably have”

“Scientist says 150 is the greatest number of friends one can comfortably have”

My ear finds each of these two headlines odder than odd, and I think yours will, too.

As to your other question: Can we drop “most” from that headline?

Let’s also try doing that:

“Scientist says 150 is the number of friends one can comfortably have”

I must say it looks like a three-legged chair with one of the legs lopped off—and it’s also seriously flawed semantically. Without “most,” that sentence wrongly and absurdly implies that one can’t comfortably have any number of friends below 150.

The fact is that despite intermittent attacks on its grammatical legitimacy by both English-savvy and less-than-English-savvy people, “most number” is perfectly acceptable English.

For, really now, can we actually consider the following sentences using “most number” grammatically faulty?

“What is the most number of languages spoken by a single person?”

“Does English have the most number of irregular verbs among the world’s top 10 widest spoken languages?”

Whatever the answer to those two questions, I think their use of “most number” is beyond reproach grammatically, semantically, and idiomatically. But you don’t have to take my word for it, Alek. Take a look at this passage from an actual media release of the American Society of Magazine Editors announcing the nominations to its 2009 best magazine journalism awards:

“GQ was nominated for eight awards, including two nominations for Reporting. Eight is the most number of nominations GQ has ever received in any single year.” (italicizations mine)

With that, I rest my case for “most number.”

[Alek]

“GQ was nominated for eight awards, including two nominations for Reporting. Eight is the most nominations GQ has ever received in any single year” is even better.!

[Joe Carillo]

Well, that's one man's opinion from your neck of the woods. Suit yourself then. I'm willing to leave it at that.