Early in June, a group of
Yale behavioral economists published their observations on an experiment involving
Capuchin monkeys. Making headlines, of course, was their unexpected and almost inadvertent discovery that a monkey exchanged sex for money. Primary investigator
M. Keith Chen clearly lived up to his School of Management billing: "bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of Economics, Psychology, and Biology."
As we get beyond the prurient dimensions of the story, one powerful theme surfaces: our behavior is largely related to our genetic makeup; we are what we must be! This was underscored in a New York Times piece featuring the authors of the recent top selling, Freakanomics, "We can be much more confident that when we see common behaviors in capuchins and humans, it's due our common evolutionary heritage."
Chen, who experiments with many different kinds of primates, chose capuchins because they are relatively slower learners. This choice is made to reduce the possibility that the primates learn the observed behaviors from the folks with the lab coats. This, in turn, lays the basis for another inference: having reduced the possibility that the behaviors are learned, the experimentalists conclude that their observations reveal a genetic predisposition for the behaviors.
Of course, using chimps and other primates closely related to humans may introduce moral faculties and other variables that may intervene to produce other results (to which the order [i.e. primates] may be equally genetically predisposed). Other matters may also compromise the study, for example, the Freakonimists point out that "it is often the female capuchins who are more eager for sex — with the alpha male — as a means of maintaining their relationship with the alpha" (see the Times piece). The alleged prostitution, in this light, may have been influenced by another logic altogether: competition within the troupe's hierachy.
But the real value of the research for modern-day high priests of the market place is the idea — espoused by Adam Smith — that humans have a natural inclination to "truck and barter." This study seems to affirm that belief. Now, irrespective of the validity of Smith's claim (and there are strong, almost religiously held views on this), the study of capuchins' use of money does not present evidence of animals using stored wealth (aka capital) to exploit the labor of other animals. In the most talked about case, a female uses her own labor power and "tools" of production and not those of others. So until Chen introduces as us to a capuchin pimp or madam, I am not going to be convinced that the capuchin experiments are evidence of a natural division of labor based on wealth. Of course, other Yale graduates have shown us what a Yale education can produce...take for example the Commander-in-Chief...
