Monkeys Pay for Monkey Porn

An anonymous reader writes "Give a monkey some spending money, and he'll blow it on pictures of women monkeys. He'll also pay to see dominant monkeys. But you'll have to pay him to look at inferior monkeys. That's the upshot of a study out of Duke that was designed to explore the 'social machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism patients.' Next up -- seriously -- the researchers want to run the same test on Joe Sixpack (sans the monkey business)."

Comments

Do they - ?

[Black Parrot]

Do they spank the monkey as part of the experiment?

Re:Do they - ?

[Bazman]

I think they call it 'Spanking the human'....

Re:Do they - ?

[plover]

If a million monkeys at a million internet terminals downloaded porn...

And how is this different from the internet today?

So...

[jtbauki]

....the next time you get caught looking at porn, you can point to this article and say, "Hey it's not me, it's evolution, baby."

Oooh ooh Aaah Aaah! Oooh ooh aaah aaah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Grunt, grunt, grunt ...Screeeeeeeeeeech!

So...

[mattiwatti]

Where can I download this monkey porn?

err...

[Heem]

FTA:

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts

Anyone else get a completely different meaning out of that then they intended?

Missing Option:

[raehl]

Crack.

Oh, wait, this wasn't a poll?

Hahaha dumb monkeys

[wileycoyoteacme]

i stopped paying for porn the day i discovered a web browser!

experiment

[BorgCopyeditor]

Give a monkey some spending money, and he'll blow it on pictures of women monkeys.

Would there be anything wrong with this sentence: give a human some spending money and he'll blow it on pictures of female humans?

I guess I'm objecting to the notion that being male is the norm.

Re:experiment

[Feztaa]

I guess I'm objecting to the notion that being male is the norm.

Don't be silly. Women only exist on the computer screen.

Re:experiment

[Skinny Rav]

Why are there way more women on magazine covers than men? Because in general, men like looking at pretty women... and woman like looking at pretty women too, albeit for reasons other than sexual attraction in most cases.

Well, women look at pretty women as at dominant females. It is the same as posters of Jordans and Beckhams and who else in male teenagers' rooms.

But true, this is weird. While guys like to watch sportsmen and actors (dominant males) and women like to watch actors and models (for sexual reasons), magazines with female photos on the cover sell better - and AFAIK it has been proven. Men are allowed on covers only if accompanied by a woman or with a baby or, seldom, if they are really, really mega celebrities.

Raf

some spending money

[cgenman]

Give a monkey some spending money, and he'll blow it on pictures of women monkeys.

I wish they would stop referring to the students at Duke like that.

sorry, no dice

[Anonymous Coward]

My boss doesn't like it when I call him "baby".

Re:Humans already do this

[lachlan76]

Well you can get naked chicks on the internet for free. Why pay for another cable channel? ;)

Re:Humans already do this

[joke_dst]

This is just homophobia driven to the extreme...

Watching sports is not a sexual behaviour, but rather a herd behaviour. It strengthens the bond to the "herd", in this case the followers of the same team. It also appeals to the competitive side of humans, since sports (usually? always?) are a competition. It's hardly a display of gay sexuality.

Oh, great

[andreMA]

Just when the AOLers finally got booted from USENET, we'll have (another) group of primates arriving to endlessly post "MEEEE TOOO!!!!!"

Or perhaps the change will raise the overall level of discourse. Hard to say.

So, HOW can monkeys tell who is dominant

[Anonymous Coward]

In a very un-Slashdot-like manner, I have actually read the article (It was on Fark.com before Slashdot picked it up). I find the following part interesting:

Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.

"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.

So, the question is: How are the monkeys able to see who is dominant and who is not?

And how do researchers spend money?

[adityapk]

>Give a monkey some spending money, and he'll blow it on pictures of women monkeys

Give researchers some money, and they'll spend it on monkey porn

Bestiality

[britneys 9th husband]

Ok, silly question...

If a male monkey gets off on looking at pictures of naked (human) women, is that considered bestiality?

Re:Ig Noble Prize Material

[johnlcallaway]

I must disagree. I have read several books that attempt to show coorelation between primate behavior and many human behaviors. These studies are important in the nature/nurture arguments and important in learning how to treat social and mental disorders.

Besides, anything that strengthens the argument that watching p0rn is natural gets my vote for futher funding.

Re:Humans already do this

[famebait]

There's a subtle sexualisation of contact

The sexualisation happens in your head, dude. Physical contact is not inherently sexual, it's just christianity's fucked up relationship with sexuality that makes it so.

In many cultures it is perfectly natural to take someone by the hand to show them the way somewhere, even if both parties are adult males. Most americans would consider it "gay". Now what sort of mental condition and view of sexuality does that require?

Not that many other cultures don't have their own serious hangups, of course.

Hot ot not, eh?

[Ceriel Nosforit]

http://www.hotornot.com/r/?eid=BRG8K8H&key=EUB
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry...
*GG*

Missing the point: A cure is not needed

[Johnny Fusion]

From the article: "One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," Platt said.

This is an attitude of what those comfortable with Autism call a "curebie". I am the parent of a wonderful boy who happens to have autsim, and I can tell you, he is no need of a "cure".

Autism is categorized as a system-wide neurological disorder. A "disorder" because the system of an autistic individual deviates from what is considered "normal". These are most likely inherited traits. To "cure" autism would pretty much be a system of eugenics. Once born with these traits, there is no cure. Just as there would be no cure for left-handedness or red hair. This is not an acquired disease, this is who these people are.

Not being comfortable with looking at someone in the face is not the end of the world. I hope to teach my son coping mechanisms to live in a world that does not make sense to him, there is no need for him to pretend to not be autistic and fit in with the Neurotypical folk.

As cool as it is that monkeys like porn as much as the average slashdotter, this research in my opinion is misguided.

Re:Missing the point: A cure is not needed

[Hacksaw]

Lovely. Listen, is your boy high functioning, or low? Is he the next Temple Grandin, or is he one of the ones that rocks incessantly and can't dress himself at the age of ten?

Just because you find your boy easy to deal with doesn't mean everyone else's kid is the same. Some autistics can survive in the world, many can't. For them amelioration of the effects means not having a "normal" life, but having a shot at any kind of independence.

Re:Humans already do this

[Skinny Rav]

Physical contact is not inherently sexual, it's just christianity's fucked up relationship with sexuality that makes it so.ty's fucked up relationship with sexuality that makes it so.

I'd say that rather your view of Christianity is rather fucked up. Somehow in Eastern, Orthodox Europe it is OK for males to kiss for greeting in the lips, somehow in Poland, supposedly extreme-Catholic country, it is OK for males to walk and talk hugging each other. OK, maybe walking hand in hand would be considered gay, or rather "feminine", not even gay, but many other physical contacts between males are really OK, without any homesexual undertones.

AFAIK it is the same (or even more) in Italy, Spain, Greece. I don't know...

So, have you considered, that this fuck-up happened rather in Anglosaxon culture than in "christianity"? OK, it might be something protestant in the background, but I don't know enough about Protestants to draw any conclusions.

And Christian (well, at least Catholic and Orthodox) view of sexuality, while it might seem restrictive from the outside, is coherent and based on viable basis. Of course, there are some devots who still think it is much worse to show a tit in TV than to show dead bodies of terrorist bombing victims, but I don't think it has much to do with Christianity either.

So before you rant, please do some investigation in the subject.

Raf

Re:Humans already do this

[MrByte420]

I'm a gay man who likes to watch sports and found the joke to be rather whimsical.

Whats halrious is that Queen, headed by the flamboyantly gay Freddy Mercury, wrote lots of the songs that you hear at football games e.g. "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions..."