Monkey Business
Yesterday afternoon I read the hands-down best article ever in Time. Its actually a few years old and I stumbled upon it from another site, but it was excellent. Let me summarize. Researchers at Yale taught monkeys the value of money by giving them tokens that they could trade in for Jell-O or grapes. Eventually one monkey stole a bunch of the “money” and threw it into the main monkey cage. While the researchers were frantically picking up all the stolen loot, one of them noticed that a particular monkey had taken one of the hot coins and used it to buy sex from another monkey, who it turn used the coin to buy a single grape. What can we learn from this? I guess obviously that monkeys are capable of understanding currency. But more importantly, we can see that there are such things as monkey prostitutes, and they are incredibly cheap.
