GROOMING, GOSSIP AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
Book ID/图书代码： 04560007B18134
English Summary/英文概要： Did mankind evolve unusually large brains simply in order to gossip? Primates differ from other animals by the intensity of their social relationships, by the amount of time they spend grooming one another. Not just a matter of hygiene, grooming is all about cementing bonds, making friends and influencing your fellow ape. Early humans, in their characteristic large groups of 150 or so, would have had to spend almost half their time in mutual grooming. Instead, Professor Robin Dunbar argues, they evolved a more efficient mechanism: language. It seems there is nothing idle about idle chatter. Having a good gossip ensures that a dynamic group - of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, workmates - remains cohesive.
Men and women ’gossip’ equally, but men tend to talk about themselves, while women talk more about other people, working to strengthen the female-female relationships that underpin both human and primate societies. Until now, most anthropologists have assumed that language developed in male-male relationships, during activities such as hunting. Dunbar’s intriguing research suggests that, to the contrary, language evolved among women.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 马尔科姆·格拉德威尔：《梳毛》是「大众科学的神作」。
本书探讨了人类语言能力的起源 ，讨论了语言的用途，以及更基本的问题: 我们为 什么拥有语言，它从哪来，何时产生。
本书将伴你走进奇妙的旅程，让我们一起与意想不到的各种生物学理论不期而遇，从 历史到生理，从猴子猩猩的公众行为到人类的亲密表现，一起漫步遨游其中。
本书将带领我们重回历史，回到我们还只是普通的猿猴，并无任何特别之处的时候。最早的语言听起来是怎样的?是哪些人使用这些语言交谈?为什么语言从其早期阶段发展演变到今天大概 5000 种无法相互理解的语言( 这还不包括在文字出现之前的几千年中就已经灭绝的语言)?
在咖啡馆或酒吧的时候，有没有花点时间听听你邻桌的谈话？ 如果有过的话，你会发现：他们三分之二的对话都是些生活琐事、爱恨情仇。
我们发明了「语言」这种神奇的东西，却为何又将它大材小用？
在《梳毛》这本书中，邓巴教授给出了解释：「语言进化是为了让我们更好地闲聊八卦。」
有了 社交软件，我们可以跟全世界各地的朋友随时随地进行沟通，我们的微信好友可以加到几千人之多。
但是，真正可以勉强称得上是「朋友」的，不会超过150人。是的，仅仅只有150人——这就是著名的「150定律」。
邓巴教授说：这是命中注定的，由你的脑容量决定的。
是什么让他得出如此神奇的观点？请看这本《梳毛》。(DB)
Awards/获奖情况：We’re chatterers and snoops, every one of us, according to this fresh, witty book, and there’s an evolutionary reason: gossip, like primate grooming, helps cement social ties.
YDunbar’s¨ is an intoxicating idea, somewhere between brilliant and loopy. On the way to fleshing out this bracing thesis, Dunbar gives us what he calls a ’magical mystery tour’ of scientific disciplines, including neurology, linguistics, evolution and more...YH¨is ideas and language can be delightful. -- John Schwartz "Washington Post Book World"
Fascinating theories and cogent insights into why and how we use language, as learned from our simian relatives. Dunbar is a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, but his lucid Darwinian forays into the evolution of language draw widely on the fields of anatomy, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology...An enjoyable romp through the past few hundred thousand years. Where else could you learn that it takes a village to grow a neocortex or that, to reproduce the best genes, women network and men advertise?
Dunbar has written provocative book about the sociology of language use...[A] fascinating study.
Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, is a highly enjoyable speculation, in Neo-Darwinian mode, of how and why humans came to have language. The argument of the book is the now not unfamiliar argument that the point of talking is being able to make small talk (the ’gossip’ of the title), and that small talk produces social cohesion and mitigates social conflict. In other words, it does what primatologists have long claimed grooming does for non-human primates...The book is frequently humorous and charming, always readable, and often modest in tone...The citations to his own and others’ original research and the review of the literature on non-human primate language and grooming practices, are part of what make this book well suited for a general readership, but also appropriate for a more specialized academic and student readership.
It may seem a stretch to connect the origin of speech with the grooming behavior of baboons, but Dunbar’s research has persuaded him of such a link. This intriguing book presents his thesis, which he formulated after noting a relationship between maximum group size and the ratio of neocortical tissue to total brain volume. Dunbar then extrapolates to humans, proposing 150 as the upper range of people any one person can personally maintain relationships with via our equivalent of grooming: gossipy chitchat...[H]e argues the case, in evolutionary biological terms, in an elucidating and entertaining manner. How language began fascinates most of us, and consistently delightful are Dunbar’s excursions into paleoanthropological anatomy, exigencies of nomadic living, philology of root languages, and the conversational styles at cocktail parties. A relaxed, concise presentation of an evolving theory of linguistic evolution.
At the heart of this fresh and witty book is the thesis that gossip is the human version of primate grooming..."Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" is in many ways a wonderful book, and its ideas deserve an airing. Mr. Dunbar is a clear thinker and a polymath, marshaling evidence for his thesis from such varied fields as primatology, linguistics, anthropology and genetics.--Natalie Angier "New York Times Book Review "
Dunbar asks interesting questions, provides a fresh perspective on an old problem and gives readers a zippy intellectual ride.--Jo Ann C. Gutin "The Nation "
About the Author/作者介绍： 罗宾·邓巴（Robin Dunbar），进化心理学家，牛津大学教授，莫德林学院研究员。他的主要研究领域是「社会遗传学」。 已经出版的图书包括《科学的烦恼》（TheTrouble with Science），《梳毛、八卦及语言的进化》（GROOMING GOSSIP AND the EvolutionofLanguage）和《人类的故事》（The Human Story），《你需要多少朋友》（How Many Friends does one Person Need?）。他的作品被媒体誉为「带着最新研究和新成果的热气」，「强劲有力，且发人深省」。
Robin Dunbar is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His principal research interest is the evolution of sociality. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. His books include The Trouble with Science (1995), ‘an eloquent riposte to the anti-science lobby’ (Sunday Times), and Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. His most recent book, The Human Story (2004), was described as ‘fizzing with recent research and new theories’ in the Sunday Times and ‘punchy and provocative’ by the New Scientist.
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