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On this show before we’ve seriously looked at how entertainment and art of various kinds have been inspired over the years by the work of astronomers and biologists and technologists – all kinds of scientists.
But it’s really pretty rare that it works the other way -- that some new scientific study, hard data, gives us any real insight into how the culture happens. The experimental methods and ethical guidelines of science generally aren’t up to that, and probably cultural phenomena are just too complicated and ineffable to be pinned down easily in the lab.
Which is why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the news just out of the Duke University Medical Center.
A team of scientists at Duke – two neurobiologists and a biological anthropologist – performed an experiment on rhesus monkeys that produced an absolutely wonderful result.
No, they didn’t lo ck the monkeys in a room and force them to tap away at keyboards until they finally reproduced a Shakespeare play.
No. What they did is take 12 monkeys, males and females, some socially prestigious within the colony and some…well…losers. And they let all of them get very thirsty.
Then they showed each one photos of individual fellow monkeys on a TV screen.
And they let each monkey control the pictures shown to them – by allowing them to “pay,” in the standard monkey-lab currency of cherry juice, to watch a particular monkey, or not.
The results?
Across the board, the animals agreed sacrifice juice – to “pay” in monkey terms -- to get a look at the faces of the prestigious monkeys – the celebrities and stars of their little world.
Furthermore, the male monkeys would also pay juice in order to look at the hindquarters of female monkeys.
And finally, all the monkeys insisted on being given extra juice to deign to look at the faces of ordinary, low-status monkeys, the hoi polloi.
Now monkeys are primates…and, yes, so are we. So I find this study hilarious and sobering to think that a preference for looking at Johnny Depp or Halle Berry or – good Lord – Donald Trump is somehow actually hard-wired into our primate brains. Not to mention that proven interest in monkey pornography.
As New York University neuroscientist Paul Glimcher said to the Wall Street Journal about the findings, "People are willing to pay money to look at pictures of high-ranking human primates. You're doing exactly what the monkeys are doing when you buy a celebrity magazine. The difference between the study and People magazine,” the professor added, “is that the monkeys actually know the individuals in the pictures."
Which makes the monkeys seem a little saner than we are. And also leads me to conclude furthermore that reality shows and daytime TV like Jerry Springer, all filled with low-status human primates, would never get good ratings on The Planet of the Apes.
I’m Kurt Andersen …(and by the way, before you email me -- I *know* that rhesus monkeys aren’t actually technically “apes”.)
