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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From scratching to speaking, June 12, 2003
Many theories on the origin of language have been offered in recent years. They range from divine gift to something derived from hunting gestures. With no fossil evidence available, all are speculative and defensible only by logical derivation. Dunbar has offered the most likely scenario for human language. Using persuasive evolutionary roots, tied securely to observed practices of our primate cousins, he builds a coherent picture. While the foundation rests on primate grooming practices, Dunbar shows how this activity led humans developing social interactions to become language. Because we, alone among the primates, also evolved the necessary physical equipment for speech, we are the ones who produced complex languages. Dunbar's account is presented in lively style, showing his own language skills to the full. It may seem a twisted path from scratching in your neighbour's fur to the complexities of human speech, but Dunbar clearly shows us how evolution traversed it. Part of the story lies in our adapting an upright stance and bipedal locomotion. The enlarged human brain, already given a boost by primates having a proportionally larger brain than other animals, also contributed. Our needs drove us to greater mobility leaving less time for interactive grooming. The brain's demand for resources turned grooming into a waste of valuable food gathering time. Speech was the means of retaining contact and the grooming habit was lost. The most important food gathering wasn't the hunt for meat, but the gathering of vegetables. Meat supplied only a small portion of the nutritional bulk compared to the vegetables garnered by the community's females. From this reality, Dunbar proposes speech developed more rapidly in females than in males. Dunbar's analysis doesn't stop at the edge of the African forest, but probes into parties, pub conversations and business meetings. No facet of human verbal communication has been overlooked in this survey of our speech habits. One element of our social structure lies in the size of our personal "communities". Research shows that primate communities share a viable group size of about 150 individuals. Whatever your living circumstances, a careful count will show you probably interact closely with no more than that many other people. Dunbar shows that even in the urban environment, this figure holds. It isn't the number of neighbours we have, but how many people we communicate with personally. This figure derives from deep primate evolutionary conditions in which 150 was the likely group size in which we could develop effective social skills. "Gossip", in Dunbar's view is simply a synonym for social communication. We talk more about people than we do about philosophy - or anthropology. In conclusion, Dunbar views the current communication environment with some caution. He notes that the rise of electronic communication hasn't replaced the practices we developed on the African savanna. All the promises of closer ties with distant people don't seem to have brought us together. He notes that e-mail and "chat rooms" are rife with rage and hate messages. People insult one another with the impunity of distance. Our verbal communication is still limited to that 150 member-sized group. Dunbar vividly shows how old ideas of human evolution must be seriously reconsidered. We can't reconstruct the steps of evolution, but we can investigate the possible scenarios to draw the most logical conclusions. Dunbar does this with wit and fine scholarship. It's a thorough and effective analysis deserving close attention. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some Interesting Tidbits Along the Way, September 24, 2002
Besides the general argument that we needed to develop language to make more friends than we could make grooming, Dunbar has some interesting observations that illustrate the breadth of his work. Here are a few:1. Monkeys developed the ability to eat unripe fruit, dooming the ancestors of apes, chimps, and humans to starvation unless we came up with a response, since we depended on ripe fruit for survival. Our ancestors' response was to move out of the central forest and into the forest fringe, which made us more vulnerable to predators. We responded to THAT in three ways: selecting for a larger size, forming larger groups, and standing up (which allows better scanning for predators and less exposure to the heat of the sun). 2. There are lots of social species, but to truly form small-group alliances, a species must be able to imagine what other members are thinking--and thus whether a particular other is a reliable friend or likely foe in the intragroup competition for food, safety, ..., etc. Dunbar calls this a Theory of Mind, and says that only primates seem to display it regularly. Only a Theory of Mind allows for deception ("he thinks that I think, but actually I..."), and possible deception means that there must be a reliable way to build alliances. 3. Females of many species look for an expensive commitment from prospective mates--an elaborate nest, for example, that takes a long time to build. Their implied reasoning is that even if he's tempted to stray, he won't want to go through the hassle of building another big nest. Having to groom your closest friends and allies is the same kind of commitment. 4. Dunbar's grad students have done studies of overheard conversations and newspaper contents, and generally discover that approximately 2/3 of a human communication is gossip about oneself or others. 5. His theory was inspired by the correlation across primate species of group size, clique size, brain size relative to body size, and neocortex size relative to brain size. According to the graphs, the natural human group size is 150 people. (His arguments attempting to prove this hypothesis are interesting, but not among his most convincing.) This is a fun book, the kind of scientific speculation that lays out a broad theory and invites others to disprove it or come up with something better...
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Seminal Book, A Theory that Explains A Lot, August 16, 2005
This book belongs on the shelf along with "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", "The Moral Animal", "Non Zero", "The Third Chimpanzee" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". It is a brilliant theory of the origins of language, supported by statistical analysis of physiological data (relative cortex size of primates, including humans), sociological data (the size of human groups across societies ranging from hunter gatherers to modern armies) and current social psychology experiments by his grad students (spot checks of random conversations in malls and pubs). Well supported, and startling, you will look at your society and your use of language differently.
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