Monkeyshines at U Penn

You’ve got to wonder about “science” that puts its weight behind an experiment to determine if monkeys looking at pictures of candidates can predict an election’s outcome.

A story carried in the Daily Mail says the idea may seem ludicrous, but . . . No, stop right there. It is ludicrous even if it is being carried out at our beloved University of Pennsylvania. You can read the moronic story here.

The hypothesis is that three monkeys looking at pictures of Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris will be able to determine the outcome of the election. Ridiculous, right?

If you read the story, you will see it says “the findings suggest otherwise.”

The findings “suggest otherwise” to anyone who has never heard the term correlation versus causation. Here is an explanation that might make your head hurt.  

Here’s a less complicated example: If the number of bananas sold in the supermarket and the number of carjackings both increase in Philadelphia, that is a correlation.

But if the number of times your car breaks down follows the occasions you ignore the “oil” warning light on your dashboard, that is causation.

Put another way, the rooster thinks his crowing causes the dawn. It does not.

It doesn’t matter if  the three macaques stare at the losers’ faces longer than the winners’, the outcome would be no more than coincidence.

The two idiots researchers believe the monkeys are “detecting something purely based on the picture,” said one of the addled researchers, but failing to connect the monkeys’ eye movements with the outcome of an election that has not happened yet.

With logic like this, the researchers should have been out on the quad waving “from the river to the sea” pro-Hamas banners.

At least this experiment did not cause the monkeys much pain, unlike other revolting “experiments” on our closest relatives who can experience pain and fear. Laboratories often are torture chambers for moneys, beagles, mice, and rabbits. Often without scientific need.

In past trials of presidential elections, the monkeys were right 50% of the time, the same outcome you would get by flipping a coin. This year,  Harris vs Trump — it was again a toss-up.

The experiment is Stupid, with a Capital S, but did have one predictable outcome — it pissed off PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It is looking for grounds to bring suit, not because of the outcome, but because “U Penn’s Michael Platt strapped monkeys into restraint chairs and deprived them of water,” as part of the nonsensical experiment, PETA asserted.

Platt “denied the scared primates liquid, so they’d cooperate for a tiny sip of juice, strapped them down into a restraint chair for hours, and forced them to stare at images of faces that mean nothing to them,” PETA said.

“It’s a sign of how removed from actual science experimentation has become when a scientific journal might publish this cruel nonsense and deeply disturbing that scientists and journalists are discussing it like it has some meaning.”

Well, not this journalist.