Primates In Platform Boots
No sooner do you give a monkey currency than it's paying for sex. Yep, Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Leavitt write about Keith Chen's monkey research, and whaddya know:

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen's more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

Posted by aalkon at June 6, 2005 9:40 AM

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Posted by: Auntie M at June 6, 2005 12:59 AM

Posted by: Lena-doodle-doo at June 6, 2005 11:52 AM

Posted by: Richard Bennett at June 6, 2005 12:49 PM