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Fostering Innovation on Monkey Island

By Clark Nida

Financial meltdown imperils reactor
"Faced with a huge budget shortfall, Europe rethinks future of ITER fusion project."
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100528/full/465532a.html

Sarushima is an island inhabited by monkeys. Ever since the 1950s, scientists have been going to the island and studying them by controlled interventions in monkey society through what amounted to research grants. Direct hand-to-hand trade was not something to appeal to the troupe (would you take a banana from a mountain gorilla?)—but the investigators buried potatoes, which the monkeys dug up. The monkeys quickly evolved social structures to manage this new commodity and distribute its benefits.

One day, an otherwise unremarkable monkey discovered how much nicer a potato tasted if it was first washed in the sea. Other monkeys copied her, but not all. Her children copied her, naturally enough. Not because she made a point of telling them "now dears, you must always wash your potatoes before you eat them", but because from their perspective that was the way things were done. Gradually potato-washing permeated monkey society, though this wasn't via any observable mechanism of mass persuasion. The older generation continued to eat their potatoes unwashed, as they'd always done. The eating of dirty potatoes died out as this generation passed away, and not before.

The investigators tried a more spectacular experiment. They buried a large quantity of potatoes, but much deeper than usual. The event was filmed and it's the film that I recall. Deep in the potato hole, a young investigator lifted up two hands full of potatoes and let them trickle out. The monkeys, watching from a safe distance, all cried "oooh!"—from which an initially enthusiastic commitment to the goals promoted by the investigators could safely be inferred.

When the investigators retired, having filled in the hole, the troupe crept up and started digging. But the potatoes were a long way down. One by one the monkeys despaired of their task and slunk away, presumably to redirect their attention to more immediately rewarding activities. Soon there was just one little monkey left, digging away doggedly in what was by now quite a deep hole.

The lone monkey was known to be solitary by nature. It was a weakling and the others showed it little regard. They didn't let it join in their monkey games, so it had less incentive to abandon its hitherto fruitless task and follow the others back into the jungle.

Far into the night, the little monkey's patience was rewarded. It held up a potato with a shrill cry, the semantic burden of which was unmistakable: "ooh look, I've found a potato!" Instantly the whole troupe crowded back, pushed aside the persistent little researcher and took all the potatoes for themselves.

This experiment illustrates in encapsulated form not only the propagation of learnt behaviour, but the incentivisation of research, the allocation of research resources, the recruitment of able investigators and the equitable dissemination of results to benefit the whole community.

Many respectable theories have been propounded on the problem of how to instigate a culture of innovation. Were the monkey troupe able to access our scientific literature, would it benefit from the application of such theories? Or is it we ourselves that could benefit from our observation of simian pragmatism? Not perhaps to do anything different from what is done already, but to recognise that a policy of deliberately fostering creativity must balance the unquantifiable benefits of chance discovery against the squandering of precious public resources more urgently spent on shoring up an international banking system ordered on simian lines.