Conversation

The first thing we found was that conversation groups are not infinitely large. In fact, there appears to be a decisive upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can be involved in a conversation. The next time you are at a social gathering such as a reception or a party, take a look around you. You will see that conversation begin when two or three individuals start talking to each other. In due course, other individuals will join them one by one. As each does so, the speaker and the listeners try to involve them in the conversation, directing comments to them or simply moving to allow them to join the circle. However, when the group reaches five people, things start to go wrong. The group becomes unstable: despite all efforts (and groups often do try),, it proves impossible to retain the attention of all the members. Instead, two individuals will start talking to each other, setting up a rival conversation within the group. Eventually, they will break away to start a new conversation group. This is a remarkably robust feature of humans conversational behaviour, and I guarantee that you will see it if you spend a few minutes watching people in social settings. ~ Page 121

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Dinesh ^club

The size of the hominid brains suggests that their group size reached 150 by 100,000 years ago, and at that point grooming became an impractical tool. “You simply cannot fit enough grooming (here refers to apes grooming in the group) into the working day,” says Dunbar. “If we had to bond our groups of 150 the way primates do, by grooming alone, we would have to spend about 40 to 45 percent of our total daytime in grooming. It would be just wonderful, because grooming makes you feel very warm and friendly toward the world, but it’s impractical. If you have to get out there and find food on the savannas, you don’t have that amount of time availabe.”

Hominids needed a better way to bond. Dunbar thinks that better way was language.

Working out the orivin of language remains one of the biggest challenges in evolutionary biology. Speech cannot turn to stone, so it leaves no direct record of its existence. Before the 1960s, most linguistics didn’t even think that language was, strictly speaking, a product of evolution. They thought that it was just a cultural artifact that humans invented at some point in thir history, just as they invented canoes or square dances. ~ Page 285

3 years ago.

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