We can get on with the other important activities of survival – travelling, hunting, gathering, preparing and eating food.If we started to use language to facilitate the bonding of larger groups, then we should be able to show that it has design features that will achieve this. But it seems that, at some point, they were built into the business of bonding We can now, quite literally, groom at a distance. Telling jokes allows us to stimulate opiate production in our grooming partners when we don’t have time to sit and do it physically. Sooner rather than later, you will hit a ceiling because the limited quantities of grooming cannot generate enough opiate production to maintain the bond.However, suppose that as language developed, signals associated with language themselves began to stimulate opiate production. Smiling and, particularly, laughing do just this, and this may well explain why smiling and laughing are such important components of conversation They may have begun as signals of submission.

The optimum size for us (beyond which cohesion breaks down) seems to be about 150.If the intensity of a relationship (and the willingness of one member to come to the aid of another) is related to the amount of grooming effort put in and hence to the quantities of opiates released, then our ancestors faced a serious problem when trying to push group sizes up beyond the levels observed in other primates. They needed to be able to keep “grooming” with a friend even while busy feeding at a distance from them.Vocal “grooming” is one answer. The problem is that vocalisations are just, well, vocalisations. They don’t have the same opiate-releasing properties as grooming and if opiates are a crucial part of the mechanism of bonding, vocal exchanges will only allow you to increase the size of the group by a limited amount.

The usual size for groups of primates is 40 to 50 with a mean upper limit of 55 for chimpanzees This is manageable for one-to-one grooming. Humans operate in larger networks, though they too have an upper limit. From the groomer’s point of view it is an investment of time which could be spent on personal gain, and therefore a display of loyalty. A study of vervet monkeys showed that an animal that has been groomed in the last two hours is more likely to go to his groomer’s defence. Grooming is a promise of future action in circumstances as yet unimagined.But all this attention to friends and relatives is incredibly time-consuming.

You might think this marks us out as the most social of species, but you would be wrong Monkeys and apes are just as social as we are. Without its friends and relatives, a monkey would no more be able to survive than a human being could The social life of primates is intense and all- consuming. They spend a great deal of the day engaged in social grooming with their special friends. Their alliances are established and maintained by grooming.Being groomed is very pleasant, addictive even It causes the brain to flood the body with opiates. You may happen upon an intense exchange about work or a book just read.

But listen on, and I’ll wager that, within five minutes at the most, the conversation will drift away, back to the natural rhythms of social life.
This intense interest in each other’s doings characterises the social lives of humans. We spend hours in each other’s company, stroking, touching, talking, murmuring, being attentive to every detail of who is doing what with whom. Yet what if gossip was the reason our ancestors spoke in the first place? What if it were the key to being human?

If you listen in to your neighbours in a cafe you will find that around two-thirds of their conversation is taken up with “gossip”: who is doing what to whom, and whether it’s a good or bad thing; who is in and who is out, and why; how to treat a lover, a child, or a colleague. Last week Stephen Dorrell condemned the gossip about BSE as a reckless substitute for proper scientific dialogue.