The scope of this work on human inevitably emerges

After plants, fungi and a few animals, the market economy won the primates. Two researchers from the IPHC in Strasbourg came to publish the results of more than three years of experiments on the Green apes in South Africa. Study of two wild individuals 15 groups each, in the reserve of Pumalanga, North of Pretoria, shows that their épouillage activities work according to the supply and demand.

Primatologists have long grooming of one monkey by another's social functions that go beyond hygiene, via the production of endomorphines including known. But in nature, this activity, which represents approximately 5 of the time of the day, at a cost because it is against hunting, rest, etc. This is why researchers have hypothesized that the épouillage represents a kind of currency: the amount of grooming that an individual is willing to give in exchange for a service depends on its rarity or abundance.

After a year of development of the Protocol to Strasbourg, the thésarde Cécile Fruteau spent two years in the field, including several months to get these small monkeys to human presence and the experimental equipment. Each group was subjected to a situation of competition around a wooden box containing apples and working remotely by remote control. "We wanted to show that these individuals are able to respond rapidly to situations of supply and demand, sign that they are accustomed," explains Céline Fruteau. Researchers first identified a female dominated, and then gave him in the eyes of others the power to open the box when it touches. In this artificial monopoly of access to the fruit, the usual situation is reversed: the dominated, which must normally more épouiller the dominant than not, found herself in a position to be longer sanitised.

But the most convincing result intervened after the establishment of a competitive market. A second wooden box containing an Apple was introduced and another female dominated was accustomed to open it by touching. At each manipulation, one ten minutes is enough to make the market work: the monkeys play competition and reduce by half time of each female to access Apple grooming. "It's a too rapid to be the result of an invention reaction." "The market is part of their repertoire", concludes Ronald Noah. "We thought necessary to achieve 100 tests for a talking statistics.". "Two dozen was enough", not in is always not Cécile Fruteau.

Political conclusions

Since then, other ethologists took following the experience and work on 6 groups of green monkeys. This is the minimum number that ethology accepts to generalize a comment to a case. But, for Ronald Noah, the theory of the organic market is already the strongest: more than twenty years that it is refining with the help of économistes as Peter Hammer-stein. "Our models often come from the theories of the games of economists", he said. The model the most fashionable among the ethologists remained that of reciprocal altruism. Individuals interact in a giving-giving akin to an exchange of good process. Another approach is based on célèbre theory of the dilemma of the prisoner, which models the interaction between two individuals as a control strategy reciprocal.

Ronald Noah, these models stem from observations of pairs of individuals, but they do not explain how individuals choose to interact together. In phase with Darwinism, which establishes the principle of competitiveness in the evolution of the generations, the organic market reflects this logic in the interaction of individuals. For Cécile Fruteau, the model also has the advantage to apply to human beings not staffed cognitive abilities. This theory is actually its best results from plant and animal espèces easy to manipulate because immobile or reportable in an aquarium for example. Experiments have shown that the interactions between plants and the soil fungi or ants work use supply and demand. In animals, Professor Redouan Bshary showed in Switzerland that the labrum cleaner fish manages the cleaning of its parasites as a market.

The scope of this work on human inevitably emerges. A publication of the results of the IPHC, some commentators flocked to infer political conclusions. Ronald Noah smiles: "it does step must see the organic market as a cold calculation but how to choose good friends, to find pleasant partnerships.". Like the ancient tribes who traded hunting taking against a helping hand by establishing very approximate prices. "The political debate can breathe, scientists are not prepared to kill him.