Short bio
Tamás Dávid-Barrett is an evolutionary behaviour scientist, whose research asks what traits allow humans to live in large and culturally complex societies. He is especially interested in the architecture and regulation of social networks, and the evolutionary origins of social network building traits. His current focus is the Structural Microfoundations theory that shows how the structure of the society changes due to demographic processes.
Tamás teaches at Trinity College, University of Oxford, and is affiliated with the Väestöliitto Population Studies Institute in Helsinki, Finland. He was educated in London, Cambridge, and Budapest. Before becoming an academic, he ran a research consultancy focusing on emerging economies. Tamás recently finished his manuscript on why gender norms vary across cultures and through time, and is currently working on a new book on the knowledge as a human superpower.
See further down for masters and co-thinkers and even further down for a long bio.
Masters
Vilmos Csanyi
Vilmos is one of the pre-eminent behavioural scientists of the second half of the 20th century. He moved from chemistry to cell biology to evolutionary systems to ethology. His work originated the multi-level thinking in evolutionary biology, and he founded the world’s first ethology group focused on dog behaviour. Vilmos had turned Tamás into a thinker and a scientist.
Robin Dunbar
Robin is a leading evolutionary anthropologists. His work spanned a large range of topics, from the social brain hypothesis to the endocrinological-basis of social bonding in primates, including humans, and to complex behaviours like the evolution of language and religion. Robin had brought Tamás into evolutionary behavioural science.
RenÉe Hirschon
Renée was a leading figure in the early women’s anthropologist movement. In 1984 she brought together the seminal book “Women and Property, Women as Property”, a precursor to much of the anthropology of women. She did pioneering work in urban anthropology in the refugee settlement of Piraeus. Renée had brought Tamás into anthropology proper gifting him many concepts, most importantly: space and territory.
Frontiers
Anna Rotkirch
Anna is the head of the Helsinki-based Populations Studies Institute, and a collaborator of Tamás in any topic that contains evolutionary demography, such as human social behaviour through the life-course, baby-fever, and behaviour towards kin and non-kin.
JÁNOS KERTÉSZ
János is the head of the network data science department at CEU, and is one of the founders of network science per se. He and Tamás work together on theoretical social network models, and empirical tests using big data.
James Carney
James is a unicorn of behavioural science: he is as much at home in literature as in the disciplines of human evolution. He and Tamás work together on theories about the origins of religiosity, and structural properties of the narratives humans tell each other.
Thinking together
Nusrat Durrani
Nusrat is frontier-less media executive who, several times throughout his life, was ready to throw away his past creation so that he can dive into new, deeper waters. He is the founder of MTV World, an award-winning film maker, and an outstanding photographer. He and Tamás like to have morning coffee together and talk for hours.
Paul Benney
Paul is a deep-thinking painter, with a method of painting portraits based on building real human relationship with his subjects. He also creates soul-awakening psychological landscapes. He and Tamás have been having one long conversation through many years, mostly about cognitive load in visual arts, and the concept of truth.
BalÁZS TURAY
Balázs is a photographer of the downtrodden. As he lifts up his camera, his subjects seem to forget being migrants who lost their home, dignity, and livelihood, or that they are discriminated minorities in their own country. As Balázs puts his eyes to the view finder and constructs the image, they stand tall, human.
Science friendship
Loreto Bravo
Loreto is the head of the Data Science Institute at UDD in Santiago de Chile, and a leading female data scientist. She is as much as at home with theoretical data science as with the nitty-gritty of empirics. Loreto has been an inspiration to Tamás, as well as, his occasional teacher in matters of big data.
Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert
Carlos is the head of the Social Complexity Centre at UDD in Santiago de Chile, and a brave experimental economist. His work focuses on how complex social behaviour emerges, and what tricks humanity could invent to reduce the chance of the meltdown of socio-ecological systems. He and Tamás work together on a wide range of topics, including bonobo play networks, art genre shifts, and emergent political polarisation.
max van Duijn
Max is an evolutionary behavioural scientist who studies where the human ability to read others’ minds comes from, and how this trait is manifested in natural language and narratives. Max works on both theoretical models and empirical experiments. With Tamás, they think about how different social networks structures are represented in language.
Diving deep
Beata Oborny
Bea is a biology superhero. She works on how species go extinct, especially what happens when climate change fragments the ecosystem, on how self-organised patterns emerge in ecological systems, and the origins of clonal organisms. She and Tamás work on models about how kin-recognition affects the network structure in plants.
Ulrichi Schmidt
Ulli is the head of the research area "Social and Behavioral Approaches to Global Problems" at the Kiel Institute in northern Germany. He is one of the leading experimental economists of the world, working on the interaction between the propensity to take risk and social factors.
Susana Eyheramendy
Susana is a leading statistician of genetics. She was part of the teams that mapped the human genome, and had proven that positive selection takes place on genomic level in humans. She and Tamás work on models that predicts social behaviour backwards using large genetic datasets.
New thoughts
Roberto Flore
Roberto is one of the leading food innovators of our time. He was the founding head of the Nordic Food Lab, the research arm of the restaurant Noma. He recently founded the FoodLab of DTU Skylab, with a free licence the cook the Anything the Any way. Think braided octopus, cricket taco, bee larva soy sauce. He and Tamás like to mess about with ideas linking food experiences and human evolution.
Susanne Shultz
Susanne is a leading evolutionary behavioural scientist with a focus on the interaction of evolution, brain size and structure, social complexity in non-human animals, especially equids, and alternative models of social evolution.
Klint Janulis
Klint is an experimental archaeologist who works on how technologies to exploit the environment emerged through human evolution, and how that might have interacted with cognition. At the moment, he focuses on the subquestion of how middle stone age trapping technologies may have shaped human cognition. He and Tamás like to think together about the social technology face of large group hunting.
Inspiration
Balazs Szendröi
Balázs is a mathematician, and a lover of classical music. Apart from his research work, he is also deeply engaged in his help to build capacity for higher mathematics in Sub-Saharan Africa. In many ways, Balázs is the scientific conscience of Tamás.
Siamak hariri
Siamak is one of the leading architects of our time. Among the many celebrated buildings he built, he was the architect of the Bahá’í Temple of South America. The experience of building this masterpiece led him to new insights about creating sacred spaces. He and Tamás bonded over their debates turned conversations turned friendship, and their shared enthusiasm for the music of Mozart.
Mickey McManus
Mickey is the god of design. As simple as that. Currently, he a senior advisor to BCG and a visiting research fellow at Autodesk’s Office of the CTO. He is a pioneer in pervasive computing, collaborative human/machine innovation, human-centered design and education. In his current work, he focuses on future challenges of humanity. Lucky, we are.
Thank you to all of you!
A long bio
Tamás Dávid-Barrett was born in Budapest 1970. He grew up in the Hungarian capital thin, unremarkable, nerdy. He liked maths and history, played with lego, and enjoyed being in or on top of water. In 1982 he got his first computer, a ZX Spectrum 48; he started to code in basic. Since then the computer changed, the computer language changed — his primary tool has been Mathematica since 1995 —, but he still does essentially the same: he sits at the computer and calculates stuff, intercepted by a swim, a day of kayaking, a week of sailing, or time-off on a real-world anthropology journey.
Tamás’s first serious brush with science had come when, at age 16, he had acquired an age-appropriate crush on a classmate who was a member of the grammar school’s biology club. Tamás figured that joining the club would yield benefits, so he did. To achieve his goal, he also showed adequate enthusiasm, for instance by reading and reporting a book on why some mammals have large brains. This is funny for some 25 years later he ended up figuring out the mathematical model that explained the phenomenon.
At school he liked the idea of travelling, but under the communist regime, that was impossible. Unless, as he was told, he becomes an “international trader”. For this, he needed to become an economist, the advice had come. So he studied hard, and got in the country’s main economics university. He was still a by-the-book nerd. At university he read mathematical economics and international relations. This he liked a lot, but wanted to know why people were behaving the way he saw them. His exact question was: why does everybody always want more, even when they already have a lot.
Crucially, the country’s pre-eminent behavioural scientist, Vilmos Csányi, took interest in this young man with weird questions, and started a weekly conversation with him. These were tutorials with dinner, and Vilmos taught Tamás biology, systems science, and ethology. And thinking. And humanity. They loved each other, and became very close. This was in part due to the warmth that radiated from Évi, Vilmos’s wife, as well as, their shared enthusiasm about crafted plates of food.
In 1995 Tamás finished his studies in Budapest, and had gone to Cambridge for two years. He studied economics, and found another way of being on top of a river: punting. In fact, as Darwin College’s Admiral of Punts (note the fact that an admiral has two stars), he probably reached his peak.
In 1997 Tamás was to move to Chicago to write a doctoral thesis on endogenous growth theory, i.e., the long-term behaviour of economies. It never happened. In a fateful decision, he decided that he wanted to see an economy before he builds models of them. If economies were individuals of a species, no self-respecting behaviour scientist would model them without first observing the behaviour, no? At least this was his argument. He also thought that in Chicago there might be nowhere to hike.
A year later, 1998, Tamás had a boutique research company, based in Budapest, later also in Frankfurt, Dubai, and Oxford. The company forecast the future of emerging market economies. It was a medium-size, international team of analysts, which focused on macroeconomics, politics, and government finance. The company ended up covering 11 countries real time, but also another two dozen occasionally. Tamás loved doing this, especially that as the head of the company he could do what he always wanted: travelling around the world and thinking about the long-term behaviour of societies. He did this a lot.
For a few years during this period, Tamás had also involved himself with policy making. Although he advised several governments about their policies, the only deep involvement was in his birth country, Hungary. He had become the writer of the election program for the liberal party. Tax system, infrastructure reform, health care reform, anti-corruption. Standard stuff. The learning was more about the way policy happens, or rather how it does not. To his running around the world work, the policy making was the perfect accompaniment. It was all very interesting, exciting, and he kept learning.
However, there was a fly in the ointment (or in the soup — in the Hungarian version). He and his team saw the seeds of a global crisis coming. This was winter 2005. But despite the team’s forecasting awards, and his personal reputation, nobody believed him. He was rather disappointed by this. Finally, in 2007 he organised one of his annual investment conferences around the themes of the coming crisis. And with that, he left the financial markets altogether. By then he had been planning to return to academia for many years, he had observed enough of the behaviour of this weird species of macroeconomies.
The plan was great, but the re-entry point into academic research was less than obvious. The solution came via two friends. A few years back, around 2002, two of his good friends took Tamás aside for a week to teach him network science. Gábor Csányi and Balázs Szendröi were wise enough to see the importance of, that time still emerging, network science, and they wanted to share their knowledge. It was very generous of them. It was also crucial for Tamás, for in his science he ended up working on the evolutionary origins of behaviour that builds social networks.
At first Tamás thought that he would write his thesis on financial networks of emerging markets. But, after the first few models, in 2008, a fatal invitation came. A friend of his invited him to be a development economist on a World Bank mission to the western side of the island of New Guinea, a huge territory that belongs to Indonesia. Their task was to figure out a plan that develops the economy, something that the local population, understandably, wanted, while at the same time not to mess up the exceptional ecological and cultural treasure that the island was, the interest of all humanity. It was a pretty impossible task, and they indeed failed at it. To this day, Tamás hates looking at the satellite image of the island, where, on his part, where he could have had an impact, the deforested patches grow by the day.
He returned depressed but with a brand new observation: although culture obviously matters, humanity is surprisingly uniform in basic social behaviour. That can be only for one reason: people must inherit the dominant part of their behavioural repertoire’s fundaments. If this is true, then to understand all societies, we need to understand how the inherited behaviour comes about, that is, human evolution. So, in 2010, he gave up his idea of writing a thesis in macroeconomics, and he turned to anthropology. Lucky for him, another giant of science, Robin Dunbar, was willing to tolerate his presence. They ended up friends, co-authors, and, thanks to Robin’s patience, they even shared a university office for a few years.
While still doctoral student at the economics department of Birkbeck, but sitting in Oxford, and collaborating with Robin, Tamás had started to write papers: on the evolutionary origins of behavioural synchrony, on the origins of social stratification, inequality regulation, the mathematical version of the social brain hypothesis (foreshadowed by his teenage self trying to impress his first love by his knowledge of large brained mammals). These were all mathematical models, followed by many more on the evolution of religiosity, origins of ideologies, the ability to speak, and even hairloss and bipedality. It was all rather miraculously lucky, really.
Yet, he was suddenly doing the same mistake all over again: he was building models and crafting theories, without real world observations. To mend this, even if a bit late, he started empirical work on actual people’s actual behaviour, resulting in insights about friendship, kinship, and mate choice. Observations about regulating the structure of social networks, designing macro-scale social network architecture, and how societies come up with norms for the behaviour between women and men.
Somehow, miraculously, many of his past models and data started fall into shape, into an image of something larger. A few science friends called it a theory and asked for a name, so Tamás came up with the accurate but clumsy ‘structural microfoundations theory’. Building this theory and finding collaborators around the world is what take most of his focus and time now.
“I love changing my mind. It is the ultimate intellectual pleasure. The trouble is that it’s damn difficult to do so.”
And this is where he is now in his life.
The family base of Tamás is a many century-old stone cottage in Wytham, a tiny village just north of Oxford. His ex-wife, Liz David-Barrett is a world renown researcher of political corruption lives in Vienna. Their two sons, Artúr and Leó are into music, geography, sleeping in, and being teenagers.
“When we will look back to our time, there will be only one measure that will matter. It is not how much money we earned, it is not how many citations we had, and it is not even how much our friends liked us. It will be whether we, you and I, had halted the collapse of the socio-ecological system we live in.”
