Monkey Sphere

            In the book Writing on the Wall I found the first chapter very interesting. Learning about the research about monkeys and how they form social groups was almost mind blowing to me. I had heard of the “monkey sphere” before. I had no idea that within larger groups, that monkeys form even smaller grooming cohabitations and how complicated that they can be. Who the monkeys choose to groom and what smaller groups they choose to be in is extremely calculated. Everything they do is in relation to their social status to the rest of the group. I had no idea that monkey society was that complex. Baby monkeys will even trick the whole group into thinking that there is danger to get out of trouble with their mothers. It goes on to explain that humans behave in much the same way. Apparently, the larger the brain size, the more capable of handling social situations we are. That means we can have more people in our “monkey sphere”. If I am remembering correctly, that means about 150 people for humans. With social network I am going to assume that we all have more than 150 “friends”, but that’s the number it is thought that we can actually connect with. We even have smaller groups within our larger one. Look at any group of friends and you will see what I am talking about. For our grooming cohabitations, we no longer use grooming we use gossip. This is something else I found incredibly interesting. Gossip is a fundamental part of how we relate to each other as people and how we build relationships. Gossip is always looked at as a bad thing, but it is legitimately how we grow as a species. It is how we build trust with each other and warn others about people that could possibly hurt them or cause them pain. All of this makes a lot of sense to me. I was just so shocked at the similarities you can draw between the social groups between monkeys and people.