The Meme Machine

96 THE MEME MACHINE
Intelligence, p. 74) lies in the complexity of our social lives. Our hominid
ancestors were presumably social animals like their early primate predecessors
and, like modern monkeys, we may assume that they could recognise and
compare different social relationships and respond appropriately without having
verbal labels such as ‘friend’ or ‘sister’ (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). Social
primates need to understand matters such as alliances, familial relationships,
dominance hierarchies and the trustworthiness of individual members of the
group. They also need to communicate. If you are maintaining a complex
dominance hierarchy then you need to be able to show (or hide, or pretend to
show) fear and aggression, submission and pleasure, desire to be groomed and a
willingness to have sex. But emotions are notoriously difficult to talk about.
Modern primates get on very well at these complex tasks by means of facial
expressions, calls, gestures and other behaviours, and our language does not
seem to have been designed to do that job especially well.
The function of language is gossip, says British psychologist Robin Dunbar
(1996) – and gossip is a substitute for grooming. He asks the same question I
have asked – only rather more poetically ‘Why on earth is so much time devoted
by so many to the discussion of so little?’ In many studies he and his colleagues
at Liverpool University have shown that most of our talking is gossip. We
discuss each other, who is having what relationship with whom and why; we
approve and disapprove, take sides, and generally chat about the social world we
live in. Why?
The real function of both grooming and gossip, says Dunbar, is to keep social
groups together, and this gets harder and harder as the groups get larger. Many
other primates live in social groups and much of their time is taken up with
maintaining them. It matters very much who is in an alliance with whom. You
chase away your enemies and groom your friends. You share food with your
allies and hope they will help you if you are in trouble. You come to your
friends’ aid – or not, and risk their letting you down next time. Social
interactions of this kind demand big brains because so much has to be
remembered. You need to remember who did what to whom, when, and how
strong or shaky every alliance is at the moment. You will not want to try to steal
food from even a low-ranking male if he is in alliance with a stronger one. And
you will not risk sex with a receptive female if another stronger male has
priority. Also, as group size increases, freeholders and cheats can more easily
escape detection.
How are these complex relationships maintained? For many primates the
answer is grooming, but there is a natural limit. As groups get larger the