chandler and monica are doing what?! monkeys and other primates spend up to a fifth of their day grooming each other. there are probably quite a few reasons for this. i'd like to think that monkeys prize cleanliness above all else, but that's probably just my own biases sneaking in there. another, more important, reason that primates groom each other is that through the grooming process they build social bonds. a pack can only get as big as its ability for every member to groom each other. once you get a group too big to groom together, fights and swear words break out. coconuts get thrown, bananas get tossed, frat boys show up, it gets ugly.

humans do not groom each other (although we probably should in some cases), but we have a similar socializing mechanic. this mechanic is gossiping. wait, gossip is good for something besides spreading juicy news? yes. gossip has been posited as the reason for the invention of language, not the other way around. if you're keeping score, that means language evolved as a means to transfer gossip, and gossip wasn't just some bastard step-child of language. gossip is good.

now, monkeys can only groom one monkey at a time, which is hardly very efficient. this one-on-one limitation explains why monkey groups can only reach a certain size -- about fifty at most. but gossip, gossip is infectious and can be spread far and wide with little to no effort. in fact, it's harder to keep gossip than it is to spread it -- as i'm sure most of you are aware of.

while gossip does hold several advantages over grooming as a means of social bonding, it still doesn't mean that we can maintain an infinitely large social group. first the advantages of gossip.

one, gossip doesn't have to be done during gossip time. you can gossip while cooking, gossip while driving, gossip during a movie, you can mulit-task with gossip. grooming can only be done during a dedicated, stationary, period.

two, gossip can be spread to more than one person at a time. the speed of gossip, as determined by illustrious researchers not named jon, is "3.4." that's the number that gossip groups consist of, based on the projection of the human voice. of course, these researchers are discounting email, blogs, texts and other mass modes of gossip, ones that don't involve face to face interaction. i accounted for mass gossip in my superior calculations, but i'll put ego aside for the moment.

so, let's look at that "3.4" number. most good conversations are only possible with three to five people. try it. sit down at dinner with a party of ten and see how many conversation groups break out. when you get too large of a group, people can't hear each other, people get bored, people are out of the gossip loop. most good DDTs consist of three or four people, with numbers increasing only when the subject is particularly juicy, or the locale extremely quiet. seen under this light, "3.4" seems like the perfect number to describe how fast gossip can be personally spread.

so if monkeys can maintain social groups of fifty through grooming, how big of a social group can humans maintain through gossip? try roughly: [the speed of gossip] x [the max social group size of monkeys]. so 3x50, what do you get? the magical 150.

who loves math?