Following on recent Nobel prizes for key breakthroughs in behavioral economics, a new Duke study meant to provide insight into autism accidentally provides the biological basis for the entire porn industry. As reported::

“A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey’s bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.”

The actual synopsis of the upcoming article in “Current Biology” reads a little more dryly:

“Here, we show that monkeys differentially value the opportunity to acquire visual information about particular classes of social images. Male rhesus macaques sacrificed fluid for the opportunity to view female perinea and the faces of high-status monkeys but required fluid overpayment to view the faces of low-status monkeys.”

(when they say the male monkeys “sacrificed fluid,” it’s not what you think! And “perinea”? As my five year old would say, “he said ‘butt!’”)

Duplicating the experiment on humans would be simple … sitting around with a bunch of guys in a room with free food and porn sounds just like freshman year.

Judging from the “boys side” of the local magazine store, “higher” primates also like pictures of bottoms … and a whole lot more. That’s when they’re not looking at pictures of computers, cars, and competitions. Do the boy monkeys spend all their juice on upgrading the WiFi network?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 11:59 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us, Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.