Monkeys of the World Unite!

A bit slow in picking up on this article in the New York Times magazine of several weeks ago, which reports on lab tests attempting to discover whether monkeys can be trained to understand the concept and use of money:

" . . . in a clean and spacious laboratory at Yale-New Haven Hospital, seven capuchin monkeys have been taught to use money, and a comparison of capuchin behavior and human behavior will either surprise you very much or not at all, depending on your view of humans."

Indeed, one of my opinions of humans was confirmed by the very existence of this experiment. Nevertheless, the monkeys gave us all reason for cheer. Efforts had been made to train the monkeys to budget by assigning each of them a limited amount of money, a process that deliberately atomises the community, dividing them into individuals a la homo economicus. However,

"(one) capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing."

Can't allow communism, can we?

Sadly, the commodity relationship is all too rapidly comprehended, even by monkeys:

"Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. 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.)"

The sex of the partners is not recorded.