Yesterday, I wrote about nerds having an advantage over traditional investors. But let’s face it, we live in a world where nerds are rapidly taking control of the world – and in many cases – are ruining it in the process.

Clearly, nerds have an advantage in life. Ok, not necessarily with the women or in high school, but it seems that life is such that being a nerd does make you a better monkey. Researchers from the University of Oxford analysed 25 years of video footage of 21 chimpanzees in Guinea and classified how adept the different primates were at cracking palm nuts.

They ranked the chimps on four skills:

• Bout duration: How long does an individual chimpanzee strike a nut to crack it open?

• Strikes per nut: How many strikes does an individual chimpanzee need to open a nut?

• Success rate: How successful is an individual chimpanzee in getting the nut out of the shell and eating it?

• Displacement rate: How often does the chimpanzee strike the nut and inadvertently displace the nut in the process?

When the 21 chimpanzees were ranked, they showed a remarkable consistency among the five skills. Every primate got better with age at opening nuts, showing that experience matters. But the nerd chimps, with better technical skills in using tools and striking a nut effectively were always more efficient at getting food than the ones that were too cool for school and just hit the nuts with whatever…

Chimpanzees ranked on five skills

Source: Berdugo et al. (2025)

In the long run, the nerd chimps used less time and energy to get their food and thus had more time to do other things that increased their chances of survival and mating. They had more time to care for potential mates and collect twigs and leaves to make necklaces and tiaras for them. And once they put a ring on it, they had more children and time to teach the children how to crack open other nuts or do basic calculus. Then they send them to chimp university where they could study engineering to design industrial scale nutcrackers. They used these technologies to pay other chimpanzees to work in factories full of industrial nut crackers so they could produce nuts for export and become nut billionaires.

Eventually, the nerd chimps funded the campaign of the neighbouring silver back gorilla and convinced him that the chimpanzee government was inefficient. In their efforts to increase the efficiency of chimpanzee government, the nerd chimp then made sure he had access to all the necessary data to move as many nuts as possible into his warehouse while other chimpanzees lost their jobs and suffered starvation. All that so that the nut billionaire nerd chimp could become the world’s first nut trillionaire.