The Cocktail Party That Never Adjourned

Morris spends a chapter on what he calls grooming talk — the "nice weather we are having" chatter that primates evolved to replace mutual fur-picking once conversation became possible. He plots its rise and fall across an evening: dominant at the greeting, submerged during the meal, resurgent at the goodbyes, present even in a boardroom where "committee procedure" exists mainly to suppress the urge to keep making it. He was describing dinner parties in 1967. He was, without knowing it, writing the design brief for the like button, the group chat, the "u up" text that carries no information and asks for none. The mechanism he identified — non-aggressive vocal contact that substitutes for the primate hand run through another primate's fur — didn't disappear when face-to-face grooming talk got automated onto a screen. It scaled. Notification pings are lip-smacking with a battery. The unsettling part isn't that Morris predicted social media; ethologists don't predict technology. It's that he correctly identified the itch technology would eventually be built to scratch, fifty-nine years before anyone monetized the scratching.

The aggression chapter has aged worse, and more interestingly. Morris argues that ritualized combat exists to let a loser signal submission before real damage occurs — the whole apparatus of threat display, appeasement posture, controlled ret