“Do you think that history professors chat about the reasons for the First World War when they meet for lunch, or that nuclear physicists spend their coffee breaks at scientific conferences talking about quarks?” Yuval Noah Harari raises the question in his fascinating book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . His answer: “Sometimes. But more often, they gossip about the professor who caught her husband cheating, or the quarrel between the head of the department and the dean, or the rumours that a colleague used his research funds to buy a Lexus.” Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar argues that human language evolved for gossip. Harari says that “The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end.” There is no human life without plenty of gossiping. Gossip, among other things, makes the human beings quite different from other animals. When a monkey sees ...
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