The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 7
The origins of language
Why do we talk so much?
This might not be a question you have agonised over, but once I started to
think about it I found it more and more interesting. How much time and energy
does an average person spend on talking every day? I doubt it has been
measured but the answer must be several hours. A typical human form of
entertainment is to sit over a meal or a few drinks and talk to a lot of other
people – what about? Well, about football, or sex, or who has got off with
whom, or what he said to her or she said to him, or the latest trouble at work, or
the iniquities of the latest government proposals on health care, and so on and on
and on. According to some estimates about two-thirds of all conversation is
taken up with social matters (Dunbar 1996). It is rare for any group of people to
sit in companionable silence.
Then there is work. Some jobs are silent but most are not. In shops and
offices, on the buses and trains, in factories and restaurants, people talk. And if
they do not talk they often have the radio on with voices and music coming at
them from somewhere else. And then there are other forms of communication
that use language – the letters, magazines and newspapers arrive on the doormat,
the phone rings, the fax starts up, the email messages flood in. The use of time
and energy is phenomenal. What is it all for?
There are at least three issues here. One is why we talk at all – in other
words, why human beings acquired language in the first place. The second is
how we acquired language – how the human brain became structured the way it
did. The third is why, having acquired language, we use it so much. I am going
to tackle the last question first, partly because it is easier, and partly because the
answer will help us with the much more controversial questions of how and why
language evolved.
Why do we talk so much?
Talking all the time must cost energy – and a lot of it. Thinking uses some
energy, but talking uses a lot more. Not only are several brain areas necessarily