Gareth’s Blog

I was fortunate enough to have my trip to the UK followed rather quickly by a visit from an old university buddy whose wife is doing a stint at Harvard. Their kids, Ailish and Kieran, were even better behaved that Bill and Aedin, and we had a couple of delightful days. In addition to reacquainting myself with the old college card game of Piquet, Bill and I surprised Aedin by using evolutionary anthropology to explain to Aedin that all those guys at conferences really did want to … well, you know, and that this makes complete sense. There Moral Animal is a wonderful book by Robert Wright that explains all of this as well as anything I’ve ever read, but the punch line is that men are driven to have as many kids as possible, because their “expenditure” is quick and repeatable, and women to find the best homes to optimize the chances of success for their longer term efforts in gene propogation.

So to language. The day after Bill and Aedin left, a business colleague (Doug “SilverBulleits” Bulleit) mentioned that he had heard language evolved not for the usually offered reasons of coordinating the hunt, etc., but for gossip. A light bulb went on - why would it not have evolved around sex, the same way so much else did? Would language not be the perfect way for women to coordinate safe homes for their kids, for men to stop another aggressive male from getting too much of the action (a particular problem as man evolved to skillful tool use etc.) Without language sex could have gone completely awry. And of course the side effect that we recognize is morality and social behavior.

That, as John Cleese once said, “Is my theory, and it’s mine.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.