Grooming gossip and the evolution of language pdf download

Despite a few contradictory outcomes, the consensus on these results is fairly uncontroversial. Chimpanzees readily solve mirror problems of this kind; orang-utans and gorillas seem to be reasonably competent though many fewer of them have been tested ; b ut no monkey has yet passed a mirror test. The obvious conclusion everyone has reached is that great apes are self-aware, but that other members of the Primate Order and that appears to include the gibbons, the so-called lesser apes are not.

Although many have been tempted to conclude that the great apes have theory of mind and monkeys do not, some lingering doubts a bout Gallup's experimental design niggle at the back of one's mind. Why on earth should the ability to use a mirror be a Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language The Ghost in the Machine convincing test of self-awareness? Just what, in fact, do the results of the mirror tests tell us? One obvious answer is that they merely tell us whether a species is smart enough to understand the physics of mirrors.

Gallup's mirror test is certainly telling us something, but it j ust isn't clear what. We need something that is more diagnostic of mentalizing a bilities. One idea proposed by the psychologists Dick Byrne and Andrew Whiten is tactical deception. This is the name. One example would be the j uvenile baboon Paul manipulating its mother in order to take Mel's tu ber; another would be Hans Kummer's young female hamadryas baboon inching her way to sit grooming with the young male of her choice behind a rock without arousing her harem male's suspicions see page 2 3.

Gelada also form tightly bonded harems, and male harem-holders are as unhappy as hamadryas males a bout their females straying too far from them. Kummer noticed that when they did so, the male and the female both suppressed the raucous calls that gelada normally give at the climax of mating - calls that can normally be heard at distances of 1 00 yards or more. Kummer referred to this as 'acoustic hiding'. S imi lar behaviour has been reported from captive chimpanzees.

In both cases, the offending couples seemed to be trying not to give the game away by vocalisations that would be clearly audible over the fence. Another form of tactical deception was described by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Sherman was inclined to bully Austin, much to Austin's distress. One day, Austin discovered that Sherman was afraid of noises from outside their sleeping quarters, especially at night. Thereafter, whenever Sherman's bullying got too much to bear, Austin would race into the outdoor part of their accommodation, bang vigorously on doors and other objects, then rush back in whimpering and doing his best to look terrified.

Sherman invariably responded with panic and would ask to cuddle Austin for comfort. In order to engage in tactical deception, an animal has to be capable of appreciating that its opponent believes something to be the case. And that obviously involves holding a false belief of the kind we discussed earlier.

Their most Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language The Ghost in the Machine interesting finding for us is that instances of tactical deception are virtually absent from the Prosimians lemurs, galagos, etc. They are common among the socially advanced Old World monkeys baboons, macaques , but most of the instances reported to them come from chimpanzees with a handful from the other, much less intensely studied great apes. In fact, Dick Byrne later compared an index of the frequency with which tactical deception was reported among the species on their database with my index of relative neocortex size and found a very good fit.

It seems that a minimum of computing power is necessary to think through the complications involved in tactical deception. Pawlowski and I reasoned that, if low-ranking males with big brains could exploit loopholes in the system, we should find that the relationship between male rank and reproductive s uccess becomes less strict as neocortex size increases.

This is exactly what happened. Byrne's findings o n tactical deception and ours o n male mating strategies provide strong behavioural evidence to support the M achiavellian Intelligence hypothesis. These findings do not tell us, however, how the differences we see between species relate to differences in levels of i ntensionality.

All we know is that chimps can do better than baboons, and baboons can do better than howler monkeys. But where do they all stand in terms of their a bility to think reflexively about the contents of other individuals' minds? No one has so far been able to relate levels of intensionality to particular behaviour patterns in any detail. We do, however, have some clues that at least point us in the direction of the likely outcome.

They are mostly anecdotal observations, but they are interesting for all that. Vicki, the chimpanzee who was raised by the Hayes family al ongside their own child during the 1 9 5 0S, was once observed to walk along pulling a piece of string behind her. At first sight, this seems innocent enough. But when the end of the string reached a step between two floor levels, she stopped and exhibited signs of consternation.

Her behaviour was exactly what you might expect from a child who was pulling a toy car on a piece of string when it got j ammed. She went back to the end of the string and lifted it carefully over the step, as though freeing it from the obstruction. That done, she went on her way again. This has all the hallmarks of fictional play, of the kind Alan Leslie has identified as a key feature associated with theory of mind, and which is absent in autistic children. To prevent things getting completely out of hand , the researchers built a concrete box half-buried in the ground.

The box had a lid which the researchers could release from a short distance away by means of a cable. In this way, the researchers hoped to ensure that low-ranking animals gained a fair share of bananas, and wouldn't be discouraged from coming to the camp by the fact that more dominant animals prevented them from getting any of the food on offer.

One day, one of the lower-ranking males arrived alone at the. The catch was released with an audible click to allow him to open the lid of the box and feed on the bananas inside. The first male at once pretended to show no interest in the food box. This was a reasonable ploy: because the catch was only released when a specific individual was present, it often remained locked even when chimpanzees were in the feeding area. Presumably, the male in this particular instance wanted to give the impression that the box was still locked and hence that there was little point in the other male hanging around.

But the fascinating point about this incident was the behaviour of the dominant male. Rather than investigating the banana box for himself which would have been a pointless task a nyway , he turned and walked away again; but when he came to the edge of the clearing, he slipped behind a tree and peered back to see whether the male at the feeding box tried to lift the lid a fter he had gone. If my interpretation of the behaviour of these chimps is correct, The Ghost in the Machine I the do minant male was behaving in a way that clearly implies at least third-order intensionality.

Something like this must have been going through his mind: I think [ I ] that Jim is trying to deceive [2] me into believing [ 3 ] that the lid is locked. Or had he simply learned that if he made a lot of noise outside, Sherman would cuddle him instead of bullying him - even though he didn't really know why Sherman preferred to cuddle rather than bully in these particular circumstances?

Did the male at the food box really intend to deceive his rival - in effect saying to himself, 'If I behave in a nonchalant way, I think [ I ] this male will believe [2] that I think [ 3 ] the box is still locked' - or had he merely learned that by behaving in this way, rivals would eventually go away, for some reason completely beyond his powers to fathom?

After all, the chimps may not have worked out why the lid would open on some occasions but not on others; rather, they may have learned that patience was eventually rewarded by food if you returned to the box often enough. It is nonetheless interesting that observations of this kind have come only from chimpanzees. Despite the hundreds of thousands of hours scientists have spent studying Old and New World Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language monkeys in the wild and in captivity, events that can be interpreted at high levels of intensionality have never been reported although this could, of course, si mply mean that observers have not noticed such instances because they have not expected to see them.

I n the last few years there have been several studies which attempted to circumvent this difficulty by focusing more clearly on experimental designs that mirror the kinds of tests used to esta blish whether children ha ve ToM.

The earliest tests were carried out on a language-trained chimp named Sarah by the psychologist David Premack in the early 1 9 80s. Premack and his colleague Guy Woodruff showed Sarah clips of film of someone trying unsuccessfully to do something: for example, reach a banana suspended from the ceiling.

An appropriate solution might be a set of boxes piled up one on top of the other below the banana, while an inappropriate solution might be the same boxes lying scattered on the floor.

Two more recent: series of tests have tried to compare apes with monkeys to see whether there are any differences between these closely related members of the Primate Order. Among the tests he gave chimpanzees, for example, was one in which the animal had to choose between two humans in order to get a reward it could not reach: a glass of juice to drink.

The chimp was shown pictures of two assistants, and had to choose between them by pushing over the appropriate holder in which the photographs were held. The difference between the two - 98 - The Ghost in the Machine h u mans was that one of them always deliberately poured the j uice on to the floor, whereas the other one did so accidentally, for exa mple by dropping the cup when picking it up or by tripping when handing it to the chimp.

Could the chimp distinguish between deliberate and accidental behaviour? The answer seemed to be a clear yes: the chimp soon learned to choose the human that a ccidentally spilled its j uice. In another series of experiments, the chimp was given the opportunity to obtain a food reward from a baited box that was out of its reach.

In order to get the reward, the chimp had to choose a human assistant to open the box and hand it the food. Two assistants pointed at different boxes, and the chimp had to decide on which assistant it thought was most likely to be right. The first assistant knew where the reward was, but the second obviously did not. So the correct answer was to choose the box which the knowledgeable assistant pointed to. Most but not all of Povinelli's chimpanzees managed to solve this problem reasonably competently, but none of the monkeys did.

However, even though they outshone the monkeys, the chimps do not seem to be as competent at these tasks as human children are. This was borne out by another series of tests, carried out by Sanj ida O'Connell, one of my students.

She designed a mechanical version of a false belief test which aimed to meet the standards of the Sally-and-Ann test used on children. Once again, the animal was presented with a choice of four boxes. The experimenter placed a peg a bove one of the boxes; then she placed a morsel of food in the box she had previously marked with a peg. The chimp was then free to open the box of its choice and collect the reward if it chose the right box.

Once the chimp had learned to respond correctly to the basic procedure, a glitch was introduced. The boxes were so designed that O 'Connell could not see the front of them when she was baiting the selected box from the back.

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language The Ghost in the Machine Having first put the peg in place from the chimpanzee's side of the apparatus, she then went round the back to bait the box, j ust as she had done dozens of times before.

Only this time, while she was on the other side, the peg moved - apparently of its own accord, but really by means of a lever she surreptitiously operated and came to rest above another box. This is about as close to the Sally-ami-Ann test as cognitive levels reached by three and four-year-old children j ust before they finally develop ToM. D orothy Cheney a n d Robert Seyfarth have commented that monkeys are good ethologists but bad psychologists: they are good at reading another individual's behaviour but bad at reading its mind.

One day, a strange male appeared in a grove of trees not far from the troop they were studying. Lone males of this kind are invariably intent on j oining a group, and are usually able to displace the group's dominant male when they do so. For the incumbent male this is not a happy occasion, because he stands to lose his monopoly over the females. Naturally, they resist intruders by every means they can.

In this case, the incumbent was positively inspired. As the intruder stepped down from his tree to cross the open ground to the trees the group was feeding in, the troop male gave a leopard alarm call. The intruder shot back into the safety of his tree. Unfortunately, the troop male eventually gave the game away by giving his leopard call while he h imself was walking across the open ground.

The chimpanzees certainly learned to solve the problem, but they weren't as competent as one might have expected had they had full ToM. There is, however, one final caveat. When it came to 'Put the bunch of keys in the refrigerator', you can sense in his momentary hesitation the puzzlement that must have been in his mind: ' What is she up to now?

O h well, I suppose I had better humour her, poor thing! Even though monkeys are more advanced in these respects than other animals, they certainly do not have full ToM. Rather, they probably have the kind of - 1 00 - Into the Mind and Beyond Theory of mind is, beyond question, our most important asset.

It is a remarkable skill. Yet even ToM pales into insignificance by comparison with where this skill has taken us. ToM has given us the crucial ability to step back from ourselves and look at the rest of the world with an element of disinterest.

The starting point of all this was probably our ability to reflect back on the contents of our own minds. Why do I feel the way I do? Why am I a ngry now? Why do I feel sadness or happiness? Understanding our own feelings is crucial to understanding those o f other people. Without recognizing what we are seemg m - - Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language The Ghost in the Machine others, we have no hope of delving into their minds sufficiently far to appreciate their mental reactions to the things they experience.

The real breakthrough is where fully developed third-order ToM allows us to imagine how someone who does not actually exist might respond to particular situations. In other words, we can begin to create literature, to write stories that go beyond a simple description of events as they occurred to delve more and more deeply into why the hero should behave in the way he does, into the feelings that drive him ever onwards in his quest. I think I'm on safe ground in arguing that no living species will ever aspire to producing literature as we have it.

This is not simply because no other species has a language capacity that would enable it to do this, but because no other species has a sufficiently well-developed theory of mind to be able to explore the mental worlds of others.

To write fiction is to conceive of imaginary worlds that do not exist. I am not convinced that even the ToM abilities of chimpanzees are good enough to be a ble to do that. Chimps seem to be limited at most to third-order intensionality ' I believe that y o u want m e t o think that the food b o x i s locked'. Humans seem t o b e capable o f following arguments through to fourth-order intensionality without too much difficulty, though they do not very often run to such lengths in everyday contexts.

But they do become necessary when writing stories whose plots involve both the writer and the reader understanding [ I ] what one character thinks [ 2 ] another character wants [ 3 ] the first character to believe [4 ].

Since both writer and reader become part of the chain of intensionality, they must be able to go one order beyond what the characters actually do. To keep track of that through the sequence of events in a novel is obviously very demanding. The writer has to be able to assume that his readers can achieve the same levels of intensionality as he can; if the reader was incapable of that, there would be little point in trying to sell the novel to a publisher.

Some of my scientific colleagues notably the embryologist Lewis Wolpert are, however, inclined to suffer apoplexy when an yone suggests that science and religion are similar phenomena. I n o n e sense, of course, these colleagues are right: science and reli gion use radically different methods for making their claims about the world. One is a matter of belief, in which revealed truth holds centre stage as the final arbiter of all disputes, whereas to the other, individual scepticism and the rigorous testing of hypotheses based on logical deduction and reference to empirical evidence are all-important.

Both are attempts to explain the world in which we live. Both serve to give the phenomenal world as we experience it sufficient coherence to enable us to steer a reasonably sensible path through the vagaries of everyday life. Religions the world over provide security and comfort, a crutch that helps us through the difficult and often dangerous business of daily life.

They give us a sense that all is not completely beyond our frail control, that via prayer and ritual we have recourse to mechanisms that will allow us to ensure that life will proceed in a tolerably benign way.

In traditional societies, where flood, famine and marauding animals and humans are a constant threat to life and peace, resort to the supernatural may make the difference between sanity and insanity. Having carried out all the necessary rituals, we at least have sufficient sense of certainty to be a ble to proceed; religion may not entirely prevent the worst from befalling, but it probably provides us with enough confidence and courage to brush off the lesser inconveniences of life that might otherwise have overwhelmed us.

Science too provides us with a framework for existence and allows us to control the world. But the way it does so is, of course, completely different. Science's dramatic success rests not as some - I02 - - 1 03 - Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language The Ghost in the Machine wishfully hope on arbitrary constructions of reality, but on the carefu l deduction of hypotheses and their rigorous testing again st the events of the real world. Short of a grand conspiracy theory of science - which would be hard to sustain - it is difficult to imagine how anyone could force the world to produce results that happen to suit the convenience of scientific theories.

The real world is simply not that kind of place: it is unyielding, and very unforgiving of incompetents. The common origins of science and religion lie in a hesitant questioning of why the world is as we find it. The answers they provide may be as different as chalk and cheese, but their function remains the same.

And they both depend on the same questioning attitude towards the world. Why is the world as it is? Even to ask that question requires you to be willing to imagine that the world could be other than as it seems. It requires ToM. As such, it is spun off the deep reflexivity of our social behaviour, our ability to understand how an individual's mind can influence his or her actions and how I, in turn, can influence that individual's mind. It requires third-order intensionality at the very least, and quite possibly something beyond that.

If science and religion require fourth-order intensionality, then it is clear why only humans have produced them. But a question mark remains over the great apes.

If fourth-order intensionality is essential, then they almost certainly cannot aspire to science or religion. However, if the apes do have some form of science or religion, it cannot be very sophisticated.

Nor will it be a unifying force in their social lives. This is because they do not have language. Language allows us to communicate ideas to each other with an efficiency that is otherwise impossible to match. We can see and copy tools or someone else's wheel, but religion and science belong to the world of ideas, and we cannot see and copy ideas or concepts in quite the same sense. Without language, we each live in our own separate mental world. We can discover that other peoples' worlds are not quite the same as ours; that in turn will prompt us to realize that the world can be other than we suppose it to be.

Premack's view seems to be based on the common claim among social linguists and anthropologists that language determines how we think, that without language we cannot have thoughts. In fact, this flies in the face of a great deal of evidence showing that animals do think, that they can develop concepts and all the phenomena we associate with language. It seems more likely that language is parasitic on thought, that it has the kind of grammatical structure we give it the subject-verb-object form because that is how we naturally think.

I am not so convinced that Sarah's mind was upgraded merely by the learning of a language: the language did not suddenly create concepts or knowledge that her mind did not previously possess. Rather, Sarah's mind was upgraded by language because language provided her with access to Premack's mind.

He was able to pass on to her concepts and wa ys of looking at things that she might never have thought of on her own. And the emphasis here is very much on the 'might' rather than the 'never'. Language is thus a crucial factor in the history of ideas. It allows us to build on the knowledge of earlier generations. But it also allows us to exchange knowledge amongst ourselves so that the whole community becomes wrapped up in the same set of beliefs. If chimpanzees have religion, they must have as many religions as there are individual chimpanzees.

The sunlight dapples the floor of the ancient forest, while the monkeys chatter as they tumble through the treetops on the way from one tree loaded with wild figs to another. On the forest floor there are several species of great ape, not too dissimilar from the chimpanzees and gorillas of today.

They travel mostly along the ground, climbing into the trees to forage for fruits and other delicacies. But times are hard for them. More and more species are being crammed into a smaller and smaller space. To make matters worse, the monkeys have stolen a march on the apes and are able to outperform them in the ecological race see Chapter 2.

The apes, once the most abundant of the forest primates, are now in decline. One ape lineage, it seems, eventually began to make more use of the forest edge, venturing further and further out from the safety of the forest to search for food trees that had not already been cleaned out by monkeys.

You cannot travel, monkey-fashion, from one tree to another along intersecting branches. Instead, it is necessary to descend to the ground and travel overland from one tree to the next. Stand Tall to Stay Cool In the less heavily forested woodlands, animals travelling between trees are exposed to more heat from the sun.

His calculations show that an animal which walks upright receives up to a third less radiant heat from the sun, especially during the middle of the day when the sun is at its hottest. This is si m ply because less of the body s urface is exposed to the direct rays of the sun when standing upright than when walking on all fours. It is a point intuitively obvious to sunbathers: they always lie down to expose as much of the body surface as possible. You'll never get brown quickly standing up.

Moreover, on two legs you benefit from the slight increase in wind speed that occurs above the surface of the earth. Friction from the vegetation and even the ground itself slows the wind down close to the earth's s urface in much the same way that a brake acts on a wheel. The increase in wind speed has a significant cooling effect from about three feet a bove the ground.

Animals about the size of chimpanzees are in the narrow range of budy size where standing upright is worthwhile. Smaller species like baboons are not tall enough for standing on two legs to make any difference. So by standing tall these apes kept cool, which enabled them to travel further into more open habitats in search of food. In the process, another device came into play. With less body surface exposed to the direct rays of the sun, there is less need of the fur that normally serves to keep animals' skin cool.

The upright ape's body was protected from the worst of the sun's rays by its vertical position; consequently, the cooling effect of the wind above the ground-layer vegetation, combined with the cooling effect of evaporation brought on by sweating, made hairlessness a distinct a dvantage. So we lost our fur coats, retaining them only - 1 07 - Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language Up Through the Mists of Time on those surfaces still exposed to the sun at midday, namely the top of the head and shoulders.

We do not, of course, know exactly when our ancestors lost their fur, because soft tissues and fur are almost never preserved in the fossil record.

But we do know that they began to walk bipedally at a very early stage. One is the shape of the hips and leg-bones of the earliest fossil hominids. We can tell this from the shape of the pelvis and from the way the knee and hip j oints articulate; modern humans have a bowl-shaped pelvis which provides a more stable platform to brace the legs against during walking, whereas apes have a long thin pelvis designed to give more support when climbing.

It is clear from the shape of her bones that Lucy's style of walking was not yet fully human: she would have waddled somewhat, rather than walking with the balanced stride so characteristic of modern humans. Moreover, her fingers were longer and more curved than ours and her chest and arms were more strongly built, suggesting that she was still well-adapted to clambering about in trees. Faber and Faber, Skip to content. Primates differ from other animals by the intensity of their social relationships, by the amount of time they spend grooming one another.

Not just a matter of hygiene, grooming is all about cementing bonds, making friends and influencing your fellow ape.

It seems there is nothing idle about idle chatter. Having a good gossip ensures that a dynamic group - of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, workmates - remains cohesive. Men and women 'gossip' equally, but men tend to talk about themselves, while women talk more about other people, working to strengthen the female-female relationships that underpin both human and primate societies. Until now, most anthropologists have assumed that language developed in male-male relationships, during activities such as hunting.

Dunbar's intriguing research suggests that, to the contrary, language evolved among women. The author believes that, on the contrary, language evolved among women, and contends that, although men are just as likely to natter as women, women gossip more about other people, thus strengthening the female-female relationships that underpin society.

Dunbar focuses on an aspect of evolution that has typically been overshadowed by the archaeological record: the biological, neurological, and genetic changes that occurred with each "transition" in the evolutionary narrative" In essence, the number and quality of our friendships may have a bigger influence on our happiness, health and mortality risk than anything else in life save for giving up smoking' Guardian, Book of the Day Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think.

The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.

Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.

For scientists studying evolution, the past decade has seen astonishing advances across many disciplines - discoveries which have revolutionised scientific thinking and turned upside down our understanding of who we are. Robin Dunbar looks in particular at how the human mind has evolved, and draws on his own research during the last five years into the deep psychological and biological bases of music and religion. The virus is social media, unleashed on the entire population of the planet.

We dismiss it as mostly innocuous because we do not yet have a good understanding of what it means to be a social animal. The reason that social media is so alarmingly effective at spreading disinformation is because it has unwittingly hacked into an innate, biological mechanism of human social processing. Humans are a hyper-social species, despite the dreams of libertarians, and we have evolved to have instinctual mechanisms for managing our social milieu. Our instinct for language acquisition is the best known, but by no means the only such mechanism.

Another is the behaviour that is colloquially known as gossiping. Although derided as a cant pleasure of busybodies who have nothing better to do, gossip is actually a fundamental mechanism for measuring and maintaining trust relationships within a group. An extension of grooming behaviour in apes, gossip involves intimate discussions between individuals about the behaviour of other group members who are not present.

It is the critical instrument for creating, maintaining, or destroying the social reputation of group members through a consensus that develops as various threads of gossip spread throughout a society. In order to develop and sustain cooperative efforts within a group, it is necessary to confront the dilemma of cooperation — that the interests of individuals are often at odds with the interests of the group, in the creation of public goods through cooperative efforts.

Ideally, each member of the group would spend enough time with each other member of the group to know them well enough to be able to predict exactly how well they could be trusted in any given situation. Gossip and reputation allows a shortcut so that a large group can still engage in cooperative ventures without the burden of free riders or saboteurs disruption of cooperation through jealousies and score-settling can be even worse than free-riding.

Those initiating sanctions through gossip risk their own reputation if they do so based on false information, so it is a very democratic mechanism for social evaluation. Although the purpose of gossip is to continually re-evaluate the reputation of others, one of the primary ways it is carried out is through the spreading of news: a re-telling what some individuals have been getting up to recently and the events that shaped their behaviour.

Humans are actually hard-wired to concentrate on the facts presented as gossip and commit them to memory since a situational awareness is so crucial to behavioural evaluation. Critically, though, gossip must be conveyed in face-to-face conversation, with all the unnoticed emotional clues that are also communicated in addition to raw speech, for that evaluation to be fair.

Social media co-opts the trust we instinctively give to those who provide gossip while bypassing the checks and balances that evolution has built in to prevent fraudulent or malevolent actors from misusing gossip for their own ends.

That misuse is compounded by the ability of social media to target particular messages to individuals in secret, so that there are no backstops where the passing of bad information can be flagged and countered through public rebuttal.

The whole social media ecosystem becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop for indoctrination, but one where the gods who run the system are able to stick their fingers in and manipulate the beliefs and convictions of people who genuinely believe themselves to be following their own free will. With language, we were able to form even larger groups, such that cooperation between individuals became the overwhelming strategy for human dominance.

The collective agreement on what words mean, on the social structures, institutions, and facts that we take to be objectively true, even though they only exist due to our collective belief.

It is a fascinating story, backed by convincing evidence, and Dunbar tells it extremely well. Feb 18, Gideon Maxim rated it really liked it. Brilliant theory. Well told. Definitely incomplete in terms of evolutionary mechanics sort of like theories of natural evolution before natural selection was added. Of the various theories on human language's evolution that I've read about , this one seems the most plausible to me. Still missing a key ingredient, but feels right which of course is a terrible metric for scientists; though as a layman, I'm okay with it.

This book is for a lay audience. I've tried reading his academic papers. Very tough going. In this book Dunbar has an easygoing, readable style. Reminds me a bit of The Selfish Gene. Oct 13, Ymar Solamo rated it liked it Shelves: This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I've been looking for something like this since I first read Morris's Naked Ape to dig deeper into the nature of language from an evolutionary perspective. This is an adequate first stop despite how dated it reads without many of the more recent insights into human behavior.

There is some discussion of the evolutionary development of the brain but no clear connection to language's uses and purposes. More time i I've been looking for something like this since I first read Morris's Naked Ape to dig deeper into the nature of language from an evolutionary perspective. More time is spent on a sociological analysis of language that though effective does not satisfy my need to understand language behaviorally.

Dunbar's extended analysis of the origins of language alone makes this worth the time and effort to read. Aug 30, Shiloh Cleofe rated it it was amazing. Fascinating subject that does a deep dive into how and why we use language.

Really makes you think about what we spend you time talking about with others and why. The correlations to other primate societies are very interesting and encourage you to look at language a different way. Sep 26, Meha Jadhav rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , popular-science.

Robin Dunbar essentially elaborates on his theories of how and why language developed. Initially he discusses the why question and in this he talks about many of the characteristics that make us human: from language, bipedalism and big brains to gossiping.

Initially humans had one language which then spilt into many others. He discusses why there is a high rate of dialect formation and how it is important in maintaining kinship. Finally, he uses the theories of lan Robin Dunbar essentially elaborates on his theories of how and why language developed. Finally, he uses the theories of language development to explain some of the phenomena we often encounter in our social life and even goes on to predict how the society may evolve in the coming years.

There are several points that make this book an excellent read. First of all, I found the ideas proposed in this book quite novel but at the same time quite plausible. Dunbar himself is an excellent writer. Using numerous examples, both from the social life of the primates he has extensively studied and those from circumstances we come across routinely, he effectively drives his point home. Overall, it is an fantastic book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in human evolution, psychology or sociology.

Aug 27, Dave rated it really liked it. I saw this book as one of the references in Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, and I became interested due to the claims it made with what, at the time, I believed to be little-to-no evidence. I must say I started reading it with a somewhat skeptical attitude, but I was immediately pleasantly surprised by how well the author presented his theories, methods, and conclusions.

Not only that, the second half of the book explores a wide array of topics that I simply hadn't thought about that way before. No I saw this book as one of the references in Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, and I became interested due to the claims it made with what, at the time, I believed to be little-to-no evidence.

Not to mention the impressive amount of references the author provides for further exploration. The book is comprehensively slightly outdated, given the fact that it was written well over 20 years ago, but still a great read.

I'll probably end up reading it again eventually. Aug 28, Leonardo marked it as to-keep-reference. Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish-—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size.

In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals. Dec 29, Jack rated it it was amazing. Amazing book! I find the book beautifully unbiased where the author gives even the studies which he does not agree with, as examples and try to develop the idea around it and then he suggests his own idea an on the topic. A perfect example of true science Apr 22, Pavel rated it it was amazing. Very insightful - may look a little bit outdated, but there is usually a need to start with the basics.

Recommended to all Org Development Consultants and Coaches. Jan 18, Peggy rated it it was amazing Shelves: social-studies. Usually when I read non-fiction, research type books like this I read the first chapter with interest but the quickly get bored by the details. Not this one. I read the whole thing and thought it was fascinating.

It's spring break and love is in the air. Or is that a blend of Chanel no. Is there a difference? Blair moves in with Serena and they're back to being best friends.

But will the love-fest last or will they end up tearing out one anothers newly highlighted hair? And speaking of new, Nate is on the straight and narrow, playing Nate-in-shining-armor to his crazy new girlfriend, Georgie.

But he will definitely get more than he bargained for when he, Georgie, Blair, and Serena end up hanging out together in Sun Valley, Idaho. Back in Manhattan, Jenny is spending time with a mysteriously nice new boyfriend and Dan is spending time crying in the office of the Red Letter literary journal. And Vanessa, wait, is that Vanessa shopping at Barneys with a guy in a Lacoste shirt? The long cold winter is over and the sun is finally shining along Fifth Avenue.

The trees are in bloom and NYC's most fabulous are ready for a truly outrageous vacation! The uptown girls are headed downtown as Serena and Jenny take on their new fabulous roles as rock-star model girlfriends of New York's hottest band, The Raves.

Meanwhile, Dan is to busy drowning his sorrows in empty bottles to notice a mysterious French beauty who has a penchant for dirty, Jim Morrison-wannabe lead singers.

Blair takes residence at the Plaza to think about her future. Will she become a gun-toting international spy or Manhattan's snobbiest society hostess? Decisions are so difficult!

Sounds like everyone needs a day off at the spa. And Senior Spa Day promises to serve up further doses of scandal for New York's busiest private-school vixens. It's a luxe life, but someone's got to live it. Skip to content. Idol Gossip. Idol Gossip Book Review:. Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language. The Gossip. The Gossip Book Review:. Gossip Book Review:. Gossip Girl. Gossip Girl Book Review:. Gossip from Thrush Green.

Gossip from Thrush Green Book Review:. Tales Rumors and Gossip.