Unpopular girl monkeys lose sex drive

. . . in so doing, lose any chance of becoming popular.

newscientist.com's got monkeys! God have they got monkeys. Monkeys galore. These monkeys, though, they're not just show monkeys, these monkeys tell us things, possibly about ourselves. Shocking things. Perhaps even genetically normative things.

See, these are science monkeys.

The science monkeys [through their language-using handlers] have interesting things to say about possible correlatives between popularity and a host of infirmities. For instance, we already know that, for humans, being a social outcast causes depression, which can lead to heart disease and potentially death. Brits in menial jobs with no friends die young, sounds almost intuitive. This new study of cynomolgus monkeys, published in The Journal of Biological Psychology, notes the same health affects as their human counterparts, along with something else that I find very interesting. These monkeys, like most primates, show a high level of social sophistication and stratification. Like their cubicle-sitting, upright-walking cousins, the farther down the social strata you go, the more likely you are to be emaciated [probably the opposite is true of humans] and have heart disease, owing to depression. But more bizarre is the effect on sexually mature females. The study noted that, as in close knit groups of human ladies, the monkeys tended to menstruate at the same time, in the unpopular ones, "levels of oestrogen and progesterone both dipped, indicating impaired ovarian function."

What does this say about our own species? Could socialization have been helped along by some sort of gene that shuts off the baby factory in those who aren't socially adept?

Read the full thing here.