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By Bob Cook
Still waiting for the Ferret Day Parade
Since the dawn of the Neolithic period, humankind has been befuddled over the nature of two concepts: language and sperm. Fortunately, researchers have taken time off from investigating how to create fresher, crunchier Doritos to dear up these matters.
It has long been held (a phrase meaning "we don't know why we believe this, but we do") that language evolved so men could talk while hunting. When Grog and Og went spearing for brontosaurus, Grog had no way to alert Og of the pterodactyl swooping down upon him. So the theory goes, Grog thought, "Language! That's what I need to save Og!" Of course, by that time Og had become a Ken doll for a baby pterodactyl, but the seeds of language were sown.
As with any long-held theory, someone has emerged to tell us that, frankly, we are all full of shit. In the Nov. 21 British weekly New Scientist, a man named Robin Dunbar - who has to lug around the title professor of biological anthropology at University College London - says language evolved so women could gossip.
"This would explain our fascination for social gossip in the newspapers and why gossip about relationships accounts for an overwhelming proportion of human conversations," Dunbar says. It should be noted that Dunbar's theory was disseminated by news organizations that don't prominently display the words, "alien," "werewolf baby" and "Elizabeth Taylor." Now when a researcher posits a theory like this, it usually is backed up by hemia-inducing mounds of research. Not Dunbar. He listened to conversations in a university coffee room, heard a lot of gossip there and figured cave women started the whole thing (though not necessarily in a university coffee room):
Grok: That Og sure cute.
Rok: Too bad big bird swoop him up.
Dunbar says out of such conversations came language. He says it is more efficient than the pre-evolutionary favorite, fur grooming:
Grok: Comb comb comb
Rok: Comb comb comb
Grok: Comb comb
Some might say Dunbar has made an incredible leap of logic, while others might say women developed language by talking about how discourteous Og was for not calling to say he would be late returning from the hunt. This much is clear: You can't prove Dunbar's theory, but you can't disprove it either.
Now about that other thorny subject, sperm. In another story that appeared in heretofore respectable publications that would never use the word "heretofore," a researcher has found that producing tiny, bacteria-eating worm sperm actually shortens the lifespan of the tiny, bacteria-eating worms producing the sperm. For those who say, "Aren't they all tiny, bacteria-eating worms?" I submit that this researcher studied Caenor habditis clegans, and not the average Sports Bar beer-bonger.
The researcher, Wayne Van Voorheis of the University of Arizona, didn't make a direct connection to humans, but his study is a tidy explanation for why women outlive men. The suggestion that sperm production takes energy that could be used to live longer explains a lot. Some days I can barely move, I'm producing so much sperm. "I'd love to fix your stereo," I tell my girlfriend, "but I must save the energy sperm production zaps from me."
If Robin Dunbar is right, my girlfriend will then call a friend to gossip.
"Too bad pterodactyl swoop Bob up," she might say.