|Busted for Prostitution| Researchers at Yale did a study on
teaching monkeys to use money to buy things like grapes, jello
and other things. It turns out once the monkeys learned they
could buy things with the money they started paying females
monkeys for sex, who in turn immediately bought some sweets with
it. Regular readers will remember my entry "Monkeys Will Pay For
Monkey Porn" New York Times It is sometimes unclear, even to
Chen himself, exactly what he is working on. When he and Santos,
his psychologist collaborator, began to teach the Yale capuchins
to use money, he had no pressing research theme. The essential
idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it.
The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in
diameter, with a hole in the middle -- "kind of like Chinese
money," he says. It took several months of rudimentary
repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable
as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly
valuable the next day. Having gai