How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks [1st ed, custom P2P epub [UL] v1] 0674057163, 9780674057166

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 In the Beginning

Chapter 2 The Monogamous Brain
Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou... ?
Whose brain is it anyway?
Four eyes better than three

Chapter 3 Dunbar’s Number
To begin at the beginning
Dunbar’s Number
So social a brain
Counting your friends in threes

Chapter 4 Kith and Kin
In praise of nepotism
Thanks be to kin
And your name is...?

Chapter 5 The Ancestors that Still Haunt Us
Descended from the Khan?
Pity the poor Basques
My dad was a Phoenician
Slaves to the past

Chapter 6 Bonds that Bind
Touch me tender
In whom we trust...
Laughter, the best medicine
If music be the food of love...

Chapter 7 Why Gossip is Good for You
Men talk, women gossip...
Motherese has so much to answer for
The importance of a good gossip
Now tell me another story

Chapter 8 Scars of Evolution
Our love/hate relationship with milk
So how did this odd state of affairs come to be?
Skin deep
Why giving birth is such a pain
Just how complicated can sex get?

Chapter 9 Who’d Mess with Evolution?
Medicine isn’t always good for you
Curse morning sickness
A medical bridge too far?
Boys can be too much of a good thing

Chapter 10 The Darwin Wars
How intelligent is design?
The evolution wars
Genetics to the rescue?
So who owns your bones?

Chapter 11 So Near, and Yet So Far
A little lady and her long-lost family
To be, or not to be, an ancestor
Visions in stone
The mysterious Neanderthals

Chapter 12 Farewell, Cousins
Farewell, cousins...
Frankincense on hold
Who did for the mammoths?
Gaelically speaking
Should we worry?
Extinction and the ghost of Dr Malthus

Chapter 13 Stone Age Psychology
The good, the bad and the tall
Voting for the tall one
Politics? It’s just physiology, dummy
Twelve good men and true

Chapter 14 Natural Minds
What’s on your mind?
Natural minds
So limited a mind
What’s in a probability?

Chapter 15 How to Join the Culture Club
The ever-moving goalposts
Speak easy
Cogito ergo... ?
Why Shakespeare really was a genius

Chapter 16 Be Smart... Live Longer
Be smart... live longer
The intelligent butterfly
Mens sana in corpore sano
It still pays to learn

Chapter 17 Beautiful Science
Polymaths of science
Poets can be scientists too
Latin in the dumps, science in decline

Chapter 18 Are You Lonesome Tonight?
How to advertise and win friends
The mating game
So imperfect a world
Life’s little lessons

Chapter 19 Eskimos Rub Noses
Ae fond kiss?
Eskimos rub noses
Who dares, wins

Chapter 20 Your Cheating Heart
’Til death us do part
Monogamy on the rocks
Just check out his DNA, my dear

Chapter 21 Morality on the Brain
Morality on the brain
A very peculiar species of morality
Can apes be moral?

Chapter 22 How Evolution Found God
We believe...
Thanks be to God
Whence came the gods?

Index

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