Feb 25, 2025 – Andy is in OurLittleCorner today

Born to Gossip – Nitpicking and The Tittle-Tattle of Life

If being human is all about talking, it’s the tittle-tattle of life that makes the world go around, not the pearls of wisdom that fall from the lips of the Aristotles and the Einsteins. — Robin Dunbar 1996

Recently on NPR’s All Things Considered I heard an interview with Kelsey McKinney, former host of the podcast Normal Gossip and author of recent book entitled “You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.” I learned things about gossip that I had never considered and I decided then and there (I was driving home from Healdsburg) that gossip would be the topic for my next blog. I wasn’t sure where that topic would take me, but I was pretty sure it would be a fun ride.

And indeed it has been a fun ride. For starters, although I would never say this out loud, I always appreciate bit of good gossip. McKinney puts it well, “What I crave is a phone call that starts with, ‘You’re never going to believe this.’” I’m sure many of us share that sentiment whether or not we admit it.

But what piqued my interest even more than our proclivity to relish good gossip was McKinney’s claim that gossip played a key role in human evolution. Supposedly, gossip allowed us to morph from small isolated clans of nitpickers (my term) to the large social communities we know today.

Before discussing what nitpicking has to do with gossip, let me clarify what I mean by these terms. I’m using “nitpicking” in its literal sense which Wikipedia claims “originates from the common act of manually removing nits (the eggs of lice, generally head lice) from another person’s hair.” Why I chose to use this term should become clear later.

Regarding the term”gossip,” I’m sticking with McKinney’s basic definition – “(G)ossip is just one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present.” Hence, gossip is not inherently negative, although most of what I found on line focuses on the negative. Take for example “The Poisonous Power of Gossip” posted on Medium.com which begins claims that gossip is toxic and “we all need to grow up.” However, despite the preponderance of such grumpy, self-righteous articles, most of the more scholarly discussions I’ve come across emphasize a more positive side to gossip.

Probably the most thoroughly researched approach to gossip can be found in Robin Dunbar’s 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (a source that McKinney leans on for much of her discussion of the origins and functions of gossip). Dunbar, a professor emeritus at Oxford, is a biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behavior. Despite his hefty academic credentials, his book is relatively light-hearted and just plain fun to read; I’m having difficulty putting it aside long enough to write this blog.

Essentially, Dunbar claims that the ability to talk separates Homo sapiens from other species and is the cornerstone of human society. And the kind of talk that is the most important is not the lofty proclamations of philosophers and moralists but rather, as he says, the “tittle-tattle” of everyday life. More to the point, Dunbar sees gossip as the glue that keeps human groups cohesive. He sums up his position quite succinctly: “In a nutshell I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.” Dunbar draws on his extensive knowledge of primate grooming behavior to help explain all of this.

Dunbar contends that monkeys and apes are just as social as we are and just as intensely interested in the “social whirl around them.” And grooming is a major part of this primate sociability. Removing parasites, dirt, dead skin, and tangled fur from one another not only contributes to group hygiene, it takes on the form of a type of social reciprocity, as in “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” This reciprocity creates social bonds and reflects the hierarchical structure of the group. But there are limits to this mutual grooming behavior: once a primate group’s population reaches a critical number mutual grooming can no longer adequately sustain cohesion, causing the group to splinter into smaller cliques (or “troops” as groups of monkeys are called).

Now here’s the kicker — Dunbar hypothesizes that with the development of language (along with larger brains) humans were able to replace the physical grooming function with a verbal equivalent – gossip. Such “verbal grooming” (as he calls gossip) takes much less energy and time than physical grooming while at the same time providing the social bonding benefits of physical grooming. This explains how our Homo sapiens populations were able to grow to be so much larger than those of their primate precursors.

Clearly, my brief layman foray into this complex topic can do little justice to Dunbar’s expansive argument. But, at the risk of seeming presumptuous, I do have some reservations about his claim that “verbal grooming” is an evolutionary improvement over physical grooming. This brings me back to the issue of lice and nitpicking.

As most of us know, lice are not restricted to primates roaming the jungles. According to the Lice Clinics of America web site (yes, there is such an organization), lice evolved right along with us when we humans separated from chimpanzee evolution. The oldest physical evidence of human lice was a nit found in the hair of a 10,000-year-old body somewhere in Brazil. Even Cleopatra supposedly had gold lice combs buried with her.

So my question is this: If verbal grooming was such an extraordinary improvement over physical grooming, why have so many lice combs been found in archeological sites? And come to think of it, why do we currently need organizations such as the Lice Clinics of America and Nitpickers Anonymous? It’s clear that the tittle-tattle of life is of little consequence for a louse.

One last thing – and you’re not going to believe this – I just learned that a friend’s kid had to be sent home from school because of head lice. You didn’t hear this from me.