Why is facetime and going to the “office” so important? Intellectually we know that most of what happens at the office is a huge waste of time - all those meetings - all that posturing! Why can’t we mainly work remotely?

Maybe it’s because we are in truth Primates and that what the office really presents is lots of opportunity for that central primate social lubricant - Grooming.

A recent study on grooming shows its economics: (CTV)

SINGAPORE — Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.

“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.

“It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services,” Gumert said.

Gumert’s findings, reported in New Scientist last week, resulted from a 20-month observation of about 50 long-tailed macaques in a reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.

“And when the female supply is higher, the male spends less time on grooming … The mating actually becomes cheaper depending on the market,” Gumert said.

Other experts not involved in the study welcomed Gumert’s research, saying it was a major effort in systematically studying the interaction of organisms in ways in which an exchange of commodities or services can be observed — a theory known as biological markets.

This is where I see tools such as Twitter playing such an important role in facilitating us leaving the office and working more from home. Twitter supports Grooming. I think that that is what Twitter is all about. Without this Grooming, we can’t increase the distance and hence cannot escape the office.

This then raises another aha for me. We have been here before.

Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory (Grooming & Gossip & the Evolution of Language) about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light.

In short it is this. Grooming is central to social cohesion in all primates - that includes us. Traditional Grooming is socially very expensive. You and I have to stop everything else and focus on each other. We have to be very close physically. Dunbar’s theory is that we started to use vocalizations to groom each other instead of touch. This enabled us to extend the distance and also freed up our hands to do other things such as get food.

Earlier theories are based on the idea that language began as a response to complex hunting. But we all know that men don’t talk when hunting and wolves and lions who engage in complex hunting, don’t vocalize then either.

Intuitively Dunbar makes sense to me. So then Twitter might be a way of dramatically reducing the social costs of our essential need to Groom which now has to take place within the physical presence of our colleagues and our bosses.

Just as language broke the cost of touch, so Twittering can break the cost of going to the office.

Maybe, this simple little tool might be the most important breakthrough in how humans work and unleash the huge costs that we have embedded in having to go to the office to meet our primary social need as primates - Grooming!