The Dunbar number: the reason my family consists of just one hundred and fifty people

I was at a marvellous family event in Bangalore recently: an uncle and aunt's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a evening of laughter, music and food, brimming over with emotion, triggered in part by family photographs assembled from the past seventy-five years. When I came home, I started to explain to my daughters how all the people at that evening are related to us, and struggled. I still need to call my mother to clarify exactly how I'm related to my relatives.

I know exactly how I'm related to my first cousins, and for most part, to my second cousins. I'm hazy about genealogical links beyond that. Regardless, there are several members of my family, important people who I know and care about, who are in that hazy-genealogical-link zone. There are also several people who operate as members of the family despite not being specifically related either by blood or by marriage.

While my family is large and colourful, it is not unique. I know other Indian families which operate the same way. Mediterranean (and therefore Latino) cultures have a similarly capacious, rambling sense of family. Maybe family is the wrong word: clan, kinsfolk or the Welsh cymri might be closer to the mark. But what is it, this circle of kindred spirits? If it is not delineated by ancestry or marriage, is it infinitely large?

Professor Robin Dunbar thinks my clan isn't infinitely large, it consists of no more than one hundred and fifty people.

Dunbar's theory is that a stable social group is one in which "an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person". Keeping track of this complex web of relationships is cognitively difficult, and gets ever more so as the size of the group increases. Dunbar's observation is that this web of relationships gets unmanageably complex, or too computationally intensive for the human brain, when the group size approaches one hundred and fifty. Empirically, we've lived through most of recorded history in settlements of about one hundred and fifty people.

This is sometimes mis-interpreted as "you can't have more than one hundred and fifty friends". I don't think Dunbar's number makes any such claim.

For instance, I play tennis with an Oxford-educated Asian-Brit landscape-architect called Jason. I know Jason as a tennis buddy, and in that limited context, he is a good buddy. I don't know anything about the other spheres of Jason's life - his Oxonian tribe, or his landscape-architect tribe - and therefore my friendship with Jason is not computationally intensive. It is one dimensional, rather than a matrix. I don't think Dunbar's concept in any way limits the number of simple, or one-dimensional, friendships I can have. The Dunbar number is about the number of people in a self-regulating matrix of relationships, not about simple one-to-one friendships.

I also don't think the Dunbar number limits the number of distinct tribes I can belong to. I belong to Dunbar-tribes from family, school, college and from work. Each tribe is manageable because it is no more than one hundred and fifty people. If it were all one network, it would be overwhelming. Facebook's new "smart lists" feature is an attempt to capture this reality.

Understood this way, my family is a constantly shifting network of about one hundred and fifty, with people, or entire branches, coming in and peeling off as time passes and circumstances evolve. At one time, say one hundred and fifty years ago, a large family like mine would have operated to strict command-and-control protocols. Family would have defined every aspect of identity. Now, the family, or the clan, operates as an opt-in network, in which location on the family tree is not irrelevant but is not defining either. Welcome to the brave new world of open source kinship.

Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.

  

Would Captain Haddock have had a Scottish accent?

Blistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! Ostrogoths! Bashi bazouks! Why has Steven Spielberg given Captain Haddock a Scottish accent?

Pithecanthropus! Lily livered landlubbers! Troglodytes!

I caught the Tintin movie on a flight recently, and it was a mixed bag. I loved the look. The motion capture technique works well. It strikes a  nice balance between maintaining the texture of the original comic and creating something contemporary. But the movie takes a bunch of arbitrary, and entirely unnecessary, liberties with the story and characterization, which grates on committed, long-term Tintin fans like me.

Like, for example, Captain Haddock's Scottish accent. There is no indication in any of Herge's comics that the Captain is Scottish. One doesn't have to be a Scot to love Scotch. Sure, Captain Haddock still is endearing even with his accent, but why introduce this Scottish distraction? 

Scottish identity is especially distinctive and pungent right now, with a referendum looming on Scotland's independence. A Scottish accent also communicates class. The Scottish upper classes - the kind of people who trace their lineage to colonial naval captains, are heirs to stately homes, and are christened Archibald - typically speak with upper-class English accents. Even The Scotsman is not sure how to react to this Scottish Haddock. Embrace him, because he is cool and Scottish? Or cringe, because he reinforces the stereotype of the Scot as a drunken grouch with a heart-of-gold? I don't think Spielberg is trying to stir these ghosts, but by treading on this ground, he inevitably does so.  

Fortunately, Spielberg's Tintin hasn't been saturated with a specific identity. He remains the Tintin we grew up with - the Tintin of indeterminate age, social class, nationality, sexuality and politics - which is the genius of Tintin. His ambiguity is his strength. Tintin is neutral. So, it is easy to project any self, any identity, into Tintin. As a Tam Bram boy in Madras, I didn't have to make an effort to locate myself in Tintin's skin, and go exploring the world of the Incas, Tibet, Al Capone's Chicago, Syldavia or the moon. I would have had a harder time getting myself into a Scottish, or even an explicitly Belgian, Tintin.

Another grouse: they don't sail to the Caribbean in search of Red Rackham's Treasure. Surely, they can't edit out that sequence! Exploring the wreck of the Unicorn in Professor Calculus' anti-shark submarine would make for some wonderful cinema.

I blame Steven Spielberg for these grating deviations from Herge's script, rather than his co-producer Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg first heard about Tintin when his Indiana Jones character was likened to Tintin. Peter Jackson grew up as a Tintin devotee. He also grew up as a Lord of the Rings devotee, and he struck that delicate balance between fidelity and re-interpretation perfectly when he made the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Peter Jackson will be directing the next Tintin film, so I'm optimistic that the next film will show a more refined instinct for what is, and is not, sacred about Tintin.

Peter Jackson could do worse than to cast himself as a Kiwi Captain Haddock. He looks the part. Check out the featurette below...

Che Guevara: Fidel Castro :: Jesus: Christ

Che Guevara is an iconic hero, universally beloved and revered. Fidel Castro is often seen as a villain, hated and reviled as one of the world's last Stalinist thugs. But, are they really all that different? Or, did Che just have the advantage of dying young and therefore remaining pure, while Fidel lived on, grappling with and being tainted by an imperfect world?

This thought was triggered by the book I reviewed in my last blog post, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. Pullman's intent was to contrast noble, idealistic Jesus with his cynical fictional twin brother, Christ. Pullman conceived Christ as a metaphor for the institutional church. I understood Christ even more broadly, as a general metaphor for institutional life. The tension between an organization's ideals and its reality is universal. The only way to be genuinely Jesus-like is to die young, and to therefore avoid the failures and compromises that inevitably come from engaging with the messy real world.

To further strengthen the analogy, Che and Fidel have really cool beards, like Jesus and Christ. Though I don't think either Jesus or Christ smoked cigars...

Che smoking a cigar

Fidel smoking a cigar

Che and Fidel