How Baboons Spend Their Money

As this is being typed, at least a 100 people will die of malnutrition (one person dies of hunger every three seconds), 3 square meters of the Arctic Ice Cap will melt (An average of 400 square meters melt daily), at least 4 women will be married off against their will in either China, India or South East Asia, AIDS will spread to 27 more people, and innumerable other human rights violations, political misdemeanors and international offenses will occur.
Yet, never fear, because researchers are using their funds wisely to try and solve these problems. Take for example, this study on How Baboons Think. Although it is a most appreciable and fascinating topic to think about, I often wonder about the longer term purpose of researches such as this one. Every year, there is an estimated influx of 120 billion US dollars into research in major universities and research institutes worldwide. Even if you estimate that 95% of these grants are used for medical and chemical research that has important implications and may be used to discover cures to disease, plausible solutions to international problems, or other noble and noteworthy factors, that leaves a few hundred million lying around for us to study baboons, cheetahs, the Indus valley, the impact of walking on your feet, and other such ludicrous topics of research. This is not to undermine researchers or to say that their topics of study are completely unimportant or uninteresting. But judging their studies against the plight of a few million dying people, it is not difficult to decide who would triumph. Relative importance should be considered, and while there are numerous social problems to which few resources are being contributed, we continue to ponder things such as walnuts, baboons, ancient runes, and such topics that are important to a grand total of about 12 and a half people. So the next time the governments or colleges or whoever assigns the funds for these researches has to assign a grant, maybe they should think about some of the larger issues facing the world today.