''Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language'' is a 1996 book by the anthropologist

Robin Dunbar Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuros ...

, in which the author argues that

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

evolved from

social grooming Social grooming is a behavior in which social animals, including humans, clean or maintain one another's bodies or appearances. A related term, allogrooming, indicates social grooming between members of the same species. Grooming is a major s ...

. He further suggests that a stage of this evolution was the telling of gossip, an argument supported by the observation that language is adapted for

storytelling Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing narrative, stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatre, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cul ...

Thesis

Dunbar argues that gossip does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other

primates Primates is an order of mammals, which is further divided into the strepsirrhines, which include lemurs, galagos, and lorisids; and the haplorhines, which include tarsiers and simians ( monkeys and apes). Primates arose 74–63 ...

—it allows individuals to service their relationships and thus maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: ''if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'' Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger

social Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives fro ...

groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable. In response to this problem, Dunbar argues that humans invented 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming'—''vocal grooming.'' To keep allies happy, one now needs only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language—initially in the form of 'gossip'. Dunbar's hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of

narration Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...

in general.

Criticism

The book has been criticised on the grounds that since words are so cheap, Dunbar's "vocal grooming" would fall short in amounting to an

honest signal Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals, both within species and across species. The central question is how organisms with conflicting interests, such as in se ...

. Further, the book provides no compelling story for how meaningless vocal grooming sounds might become syntactical

speech Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...

. Critics of Dunbar's theory point out that the very efficiency of "vocal grooming"—the fact that words are so cheap—would have undermined its capacity to signal honest commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.Power, C. 1998. Old wives' tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals. In J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert Kennedy and C. Knight (eds), ''Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111 29. https://www.academia.edu/24291677/Old_wives_tales_the_gossip_hypothesis_and_the_reliability_of_cheap_ A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming—the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds—to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.

References

{{reflist 1996 non-fiction books American non-fiction books Books by Robin Dunbar English-language non-fiction books Evolution of language Harvard University Press books Popular science books