Who Is The World's Richest Primatologist?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. See Zuckerberg: The World's Richest Primatologist: People want to know about this town and that other town too. It's their nature by LIONEL TIGER in the WSJ. Excerpts:

"Primates always want to know what is going on. If it's over the hill where you can't see for sure what's up, that's even more stimulating and important to secure long-range survival."

"...in some ground-living species, members of the group glanced at the lead primate every 20 or 30 seconds. Think Louis Quatorze or Mick Jagger."

"The human who has most adroitly—if at first innocently, and in the next weeks most profitably—capitalized on this is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg."

"We know that many users' first and classical impulse was acquiring convivial acquaintance with young women. Facebook married that ancient Darwinian urgency to a cheap, brilliantly lucid, and endlessly replicable technology."

"Nearly one-sixth of homo sapiens are on Facebook. Half of Americans over age 12 are on it."

"His product costs him virtually nothing to produce—it is simply us. We enter his shop, display ourselves as attractively or interestingly as we can,..."

"And why? Just because we're primates with endlessly deep interest in each other, with a knack and need to groom each other..."

"There is much to transmit between towns and between people."

"...the consumer is not someone who wants something necessary, but rather one who seeks to assert simply what he is."

"The technology is new but the passion for connection isn't. In Paris a hundred years ago pneumatic tubes ran all the through the parts of town that could afford them so messages could be written and sent as if by courier."

"Mr. Zuckerberg became the richest primatologist in the world because he gave his customers nothing new, except the chance to be their old ape selves."