Make A Monkey Understand Money, Prostitution Becomes Inevitable

This story is too funny to pass up, even though it is three years old, it is new to me.

Seven capuchin lab monkeys at Yale-New Haven Hospital were taught the concept of money (these monkeys lived in a commune of 750 square feet).
The "currency" used was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle. It took months for the monkeys to learn that the discs had exchangeable value.

Since capuchins are all about food and sex, but mostly food. The discs were used in exchange for treats.

The capuchins showed that they were risky gamblers, and had no interest in saving disks.

I'll just copy the article for the really good part:

Once, a 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.

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.)

I guess it is really just similar to just taking a woman out to real cheap place to eat before doing the nasty, except maybe to make it more similar, you give the date the money to pay for her meal. I know, it is reverse order to what happened in the lab, but it is all the same, when you think about it:)

Sex is worth a grape to female monkeys, but it is at least worth at least a two drink minimum to humans, so how could monkeys and and humans possibly share the same common ancestor?

I wonder how much a monkey charges for a half and half:) I figure it has to be something like two grapes.

Next time I have sex with my wife, I'm going to give her a grape, but I'm not going to explain why.

Note: Monkey branched off from the human evolution tree around 25 million years ago. Chimps and other non human great apes branched off between 5 to 7 million years ago, for those keeping score.

The Creationist's Nightmare: The Frogfish

I watched Nature on PBS yesterday and I saw an animal I don't remember ever seeing before....at least not in the last 15-20 years since I've been interested in evolutionary heritage.

Luckily enough, Youtube's Nature channel had the exact clip I was intrigued by (it is less than 2 minutes long). Besides the more common frogfish, included in the video is the batfish (now that is one weird looking fish):


It is pretty obvious that the frogfish wipes out a few of the old creationist rhetoric like "lets see fins evolve into feet." Another few more evolutionary steps and the frogfish could easily turn into an amphibian. Just give them a few million years and a dried up ocean bottom in their case (unlikely to happen though).

The frogfish really slaughters the micro/macro argument.

It is pretty clear as to why the frogfish have modified their fins in such a way. The purpose of life is to make sure the next generation makes it (tell that to a creationist and watch them turn blue). These fish have evolved to hang by rocks and the ocean floor as they must have an abundant food source there and a lack of predators helped by the fact they have evolved to use camouflage, not only to hide from prey but also to hide from the fish they prey on. And since ocean rocks tend to stay put, the fish don't need to travel much.

Is it me, or doesn't it look like the frogfish has 7 or eight toes on each fin that touches the ground?

And that batfish sure makes it look like God was in one of his comical moods when he created them. Maybe he was in a jolly mood when he decided to flood the earth and killing almost every animal on this planet:

Oh wait, God created batfish when he created every animal on the earth less than 10,000 years ago. It still looks like he has a kinky side. He gave the fish Kim Basinger lips complete with lipstick.

Morgentaler Poll Shows Me A Couple Of Things

Two thirds of Canadians think that abortion doctor Henry Morgentaler has the right to receive the Order of Canada.

The poll results put to rest two myths. One is that Canada is a conservative Christian nation. The other one has to do with morality.

According to Stats Can (2001), almost 73% of Canadians considered themselves to be Christian. Recently a poll estimated that now 21% of Canadians are atheists, so there is no doubt that the 73% number has dropped in the last five years. Lets say it dropped by 5%. OK, now we have 68% of Canadians considering themselves to be Christian.

65% of Canadians were for Morgentaler getting the Order. That means that at least 1/2 of the Christian population of Canada were for Morgentaler getting the Order.

It isn't a far stretch to state that at least one half of Christians are OK with women having the right to choose.

Yet many Canadian (mainly bible thumping Christians) call Morgentaler and murderer and consider abortion to be against the will of God, in other words; immoral.

Here is the thing. This proves that morality is completely subjective. Though many bible thumpers will say that it is 100% objective. The reality is that at least half of those who accept Jesus as their savior, do not believe that abortion is immoral.
In other words, what the bible says is in the eye of the beholder as far as interpretations go.

As an aside, the Morgentaler decision is another great step towards a totally secular Canada. Amen.

How Atheists View Christianity:)

A 33 second quickie. It will make you at least smile, unless you are an uppity Christian:

"Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie that is his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humanity because a rib-woman was convinced to eat from a magical tree by an infinitely sadistic being disguised as a talking snake with legs."

Was Moses Really Hammurabi?

Every time I start looking into the history of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, I find things that make me more and more confident that real history and the OT and NT have barely met.

I always assumed Moses and Jesus were real people, and it was only around 5 years ago that I started to figure out they weren't. It was when Mel Gibson's Passion Of Christ was announced that I started innocently enough Googling for what Jesus looked like.

These searches led me to sites that questioned if a historical man named Jesus ever lived. I started looking into it deeper and basically found out that there was no contemporary evidence to prove Jesus' existence on this planet, and my current theory is that Paul or someone like Paul invented Jesus in a dream and over a few decades, Jesus evolved into a real living person with an actual human history. Scott Bidstrup has a great article on this subject, The Bible and Christianity: Historical Origins.

Shortly thereafter, I started to look into the Exodus. Of course, being an atheist I didn't buy into the plagues and miracles and talking bushes, but I always assumed there was historical evidence to substantiate Moses and a whole whack of Jews leaving Egypt.

The more I looked into it, the less evidence I found. What really opened my eyes to the history of Jews was the documentary on the book The Bible Unearthed. I've posted it here a few times, but here again is the link to the 10 part series (videos are around 9 minutes each).

No evidence of monotheism until around 700-800 BC, no evidence of a mass exodus, in fact there is evidence that nothing major happened and that Jews were an ethnicity long before they were a monotheistic religion. One could argue that Judaism did not begin until 450 BC.

Like Jesus Christ's story was based on myths like Dionysus, Moses' story had to be based on something too. Sure there were expulsions throughout the middle east, there were also many different beliefs in many different Gods and idols. But the idea of the 10 Commandments had to come from somewhere too.


A few days ago, I checked out the Blogging Tory Forum thread that led to my personal expulsion from the Forum, and someone had mentioned THE CODE OF HAMMURABI. Never heard of it before. I'm not a history scholar, I admit it. But if something interests me, I will put some time in to research it. This interested me.

I'm not going to get into a huge comparative discussion here, but I will provide links for those who wish to pursue the thoughts I have here.


One of the biggest arguments on the internet between atheist and theist is the idea that man has no basis to be moral without acknowledging God's laws. Of course, this is crap as we evolved "morality" and the idea of the social contract, and yes I admit that society also has an impact on human morality and a lot of that is based on societies who were led to believe they are acting in a way that was appealing to whatever God they believed in.

But if you look at the animal kingdom, you can see that social animals generally act "morally" at least within their own family or tribes. I've never seen a chimp read a bible, have you?

OK, sorry for going a little off tangent. Back to Hammurabi and his code/laws. To sum it up quickly, Hammurabi was a Babylonian King who lived around 1750 BC. He thought he had a direct line with his sun God.

He wrote down on tablets (that actually exist in the Louvre) over 200 laws. These laws, to me anyway resemble the 613 Mitzvohs that are followed in Judaism, especially the negative ones that don't involved worshiping God.

The Commandments/Code of Laws differ because they were written within different cultures. There is a much more hierarchical feeling in the Hammurabi code, because slaves were considered personal property back then and lesser human beings, if human at all. Not that it changed much by the time the 613 Mitvos were written (probably 1500 years plus later), it was just written by those who were more like slaves and according to their invented history, were slaves. I shouldn't say invented history, because there is evidence in many countries that semites were slaves.

In fact, the Hammurabi Code pretty much usurped the Sumerian Code which predated Hammurabi by at least 250 years. Interestingly, during that time the Sumerians were invaded by Semites, and even though Babylon became full of Semites, the culture really morphed into the same culture the Sumerians had.

I found this in my search. I figure I might as copy and paste it:

Mosaic Law and the Code of Hammurabi
This is not the only episode in the Moses chronicles that has been borrowed from Babylon. Everyone is familiar with Moses receiving the ten commandments in two stone tablets from God in Mount Sinai. However, this story is originally Babylonian.

One of the most well known ancient code of law was the Code of Hammurabi, so name after the Amorite king Hammurabi who lived around 1700 BC. On the great Babylonian stone monument, known as the stele of Hammurabi, a drawing inscribed on it shows the great Amorite King receiving the tablets of the law from the sun god, Shamash.

The similarity does not end here. On the stele too is inscribed the laws that made up the Code of Hammurabi. The general similarity between the code and The “Book of the Covenant” (Exodus chapters 21 to 23) and the legal codes of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy cannot be denied. The Mosaic laws were obviously written under the influence of the Babylonian code. [3] In some cases even the wordings are uncannily close to one another. For example take this one from the code on the principle of an-eye-for-an-eye:

If a citizen shall put out the eye of another, then let his own eye be put out.
If a citizen shall knock out the teeth of another who is higher in rank, then let his own teeth be knocked out.

This closely parallel’s one of the Lord’s commands in Exodus:

Exodus 21:23-24
And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,

Here is another example, the code gives the following principle:

If a citizen steals the son of another citizen, he shall be put to death.

The principle and wording is closely followed in the verse below from Deuteronomy:

Deuteronomy 24:7
If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel...then that thief shall die...
**********************************************
Moses was Egyptian royalty according to religious history myth. Instead, Moses is based on Babylonian royalty. Makes sense to me.

The other thing is that the Hammurabi tablets still physically exist. Moses' 10 Commandments don't physically exist, and probably never did.

And lets not forget that Israel was invaded by the Babylonian empire just before, according to my theory, that Judaism was invented. The indigenous people of Israel were really screwed with by Nebuchadnezzar and company. But the Babylonian folklore must have stuck by the time Ezra created monotheistic Judaism.

Is it coincidence that invader Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned in the bible as an evil insane idol worshiper and a polytheist. Don't be like him, he is a bad man, he screwed with the Jews. No more idols, only one God, you Jews got it? Good. We can't be like our conquerers.

To end off, when someone says the West is based on Judeo-Christian values, that is not the whole story. It is based on the laws of a King In Babylon who thinks the God of the Sun inspired him to jot down common sense (at that time) that he usurped from the Sumerians.