The Primordial Schmooze

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Dunbar argues that our hominid ancestors survived among bigger and faster predators by forming clans. As these groups grew, more alliances were needed, so more time was spent on grooming. But our primate predecessors could not live on grooming alone: There were other necessities to attend to, such as hunting and mating. And so, he argues, 'language evolved among humans to replace social grooming because the grooming time required by our large groups made impossible demands on our time.'

Or, as Lingua Franca's Zalewski puts it: 'You can stroke only one friend at a time, but you can verbally massage a crowd. Schmoozing came first, musing second.'

This is an 'ingenious and original proposal,' says Derek Bickerton, a professor in the linguistics department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. But as he writes in Nature (March 28, 1996), it also happens to be way off base.

Bickerton, echoing the views of some other critics, argues that Dunbar's contention that humans were born to gossip falls into the category of 'the fallacy of most frequent use. By this reasoning, computers were invented [so that we could] play video games or surf the Net.' He notes, for example, that insects evolved wings as a cooling device -- not as a means of flying. 'In evolution, faculties often appear with one function, then get co-opted for something completely different,' he writes. The same might be true of language.

Bickerton -- who himself maintains that the circuitry for language was established in a single 'catastrophic' mutation -- chides Dunbar for 'blithely ignoring the many arguments against continuity between language and animal communication systems.' Dunbar's book, he concludes, does little to alter 'the current landscape of language evolution studies: isolated mesas of fact separated by yawning canyons of speculation.'

But what's wrong with a little speculation? We humans, after all, love to talk. Or, as Zalewsky puts it: Whether Dunbar is right or wrong, his theory 'has certainly got the linguists chatting.'

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