Monkey Justice

When I'm feeling blue, I always reach for my copy of Scientific American. Inside this magazine is something I find increasingly rare: optimism.Science is an inherently progressive phenomenon. Sure, it gets things wrong sometimes, but today's science is always better than yesterday's and tomorrow's will be better still. That's the way it works.This month's issue gives us good news on 2 counts.1) Our sense of justice may be hard-wired. According to this study, when capuchin monkeys were trained to swap tokens for cucumber slices, they became agitated if one monkey was getting more than its fair share, even sacrificing its own slices as an expression of outrage. Such "irrational" behavior has been observed in humans too, of course, but only recently have we found samples of it among our primate relatives, thus suggesting that justice is our birthright. Kind of beautiful, no?2) Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has donated like a kajillion dollars to establish a world-class graduate university in Saudia Arabia in an effort to restore the formerly great Islamic tradition of science. What's incredibly cool about KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is that it will admit men and women, offer full scholarships, and allow women unheard of freedoms on campus. It's an ingenious idea. Not only will it offer this doomed country (oil revenues ain't going to last forever) a path to the modern world, but it will provide a contained and hopefully not too controversial experiment in female liberation. I never thought I'd utter such words, but, go King Abdullah.