Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (4 page)

From our modern perspective, the chain appears neither “great” nor accurate. Not surprisingly, the chain embodied an explicitly racist view of modern humans. “Ascending the line of gradation, we come at last to the white European; who being most removed from the brute creation, may, on that account, be considered as the most beautiful of the human race,” said Charles White, a British physician, in 1799.
¹
White’s clearly self-serving view was commonly held among scholars at the time and persisted well into the twentieth century.

Although European scholars were confident about the exalted place of “white races” in the Great Chain of Being, there was a problem. According to the theory, the chain should be physically continuous, with no gaps. But gaps there were: namely, between minerals and plants, between plants and animals, and, most embarrassingly of all, between humans and animals. That is, there appeared to be no half-animal half-human beast to fill the gap between ourselves and the other creatures of God’s planet.

So pressing was the need to fill this gap that in 1758, when Carolus Linnaeus established the basis of zoological classification with his
Systema Naturae
, he postulated the existence of a primitive form of human,
Homo troglodytes
, to fill the chasm. Explorations of Africa and other distant lands were beginning at this time, and tales of apes and primitive tribes filtered back to the scientific establishment. With only the flimsiest information to go on, scholars constructed descriptions of apes that were half-human and half-ape. Scientific illustrations of the time captured these conceptions, revealing more about the mind of the artist and the perceptions of the time than about the anatomy of the creatures they supposedly depicted. Thus was the physical
gap between humans and the rest of nature effectively closed, as demanded by the Great Chain of Being.

Despite the physical continuity among living forms that this sleight of mind achieved, it must be noted that Western tradition continued to hold humans distinct. From Plato to Aristotle to the Christian era, man set himself apart from the rest of the living world by virtue of being the single possessor of a “rational soul,” as embodied in the gift of speech. Physical continuity between man and other creatures was tolerated, but when it came to the realm of the mind, popular belief of the time held that the Great Chain had been irrevocably
dis
joined by a God who created man in his own image and then gave him dominion over all the beasts.

This conceit of mind-body disunion, passed down through the generations, imbued otherwise scholarly scientific efforts with a peculiarly myopic perspective as regards the mind. Veneration of the human soul became transformed into veneration of the human mind, the human brain, and all the products thereof: language, rational thought, music, art, and culture.

With the appearance of Darwin’s
The Origins of the Species
in 1859, this view began to shift a little. It became necessary to view the Great Chain of Being as alterable, not static and set for all time by the hand of a divine creator. Evolutionary theory revealed a dynamic image of historical change, of “descent with modification,” as Darwin put it.

To scientists of the day, the evolution of
Homo sapiens
became a virtual inevitability, a manifest destiny of gradation of form and function from ape to man that had to occur on the way to the production of the pinnacle of the natural world, the mind of man. Whether or not half-man half-ape creatures currently existed was irrelevant, for they surely existed in the relatively recent past. It was assumed that ancestral protohumans became more technological and more intelligent through time and that they were predestined to hold sway over all the earth. European man assumed that at some dim point in the past, the human mind had emerged into the light of awareness, forever distancing man from his younger brother, the African ape.

Thus, although evolutionary theory offered a view of the
Great Chain of Being as under continual construction, the theory itself became transformed to support the separatist view that the minds of men and animals were distinctly different. Along with this view traveled the equally self-serving perspective that evolutionary theory explained why some races had made more technological progress than others. For example, it was believed that European man had simply evolved higher in the evolutionary scale; non-European races were thought to be in a state of transition and therefore intellectually inferior.

Thus was evolutionary theory used, as are all scientific theories, to support the biases of the society that gave it birth. Both racism and speciesism were justified. For instance, Roy Chapman Andrews, a leading figure at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, wrote in 1948: “The progress of the different races was unequal. Some developed into masters of the world at an incredible speed. But the Tasmanians, who became extinct about 1870, and the existing Australian aborigines lagged far behind . . . not much advanced beyond the stages of Neanderthal man.”
²

Lest Andrews be perceived as peculiarly pompous, all one needed to do was attend the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. There, various races of people were on display as an illustration of the evolutionary stages of human beings from primitive man to white European society. According to Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, authors of
Ota Benga
, a book about “anthropological fashions,” the eminent anthropologist “Chief McGee,” the director of the anthropology section, dispatched special agents of the fair to the four corners of the earth to assemble “representatives of all the world’s races, ranging from the smallest pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites.”
³
Anthropology wanted to start with “the lowest known culture,” and work its way up to man’s “highest” culture symbolized by the exposition itself. Bradford and Blume write that

McGee regretted that it was impossible to exhibit examples of “all the world’s peoples on the Exposition grounds.” The Anthropology Department had to settle for being less definitive than Carl Hegenbeck’s Circus, also featured at
the fair, with its “largest representation of an animal paradise ever constructed.”
⁴

The human pygmies were kept in an “enclosure” and not permitted to roam the compound at will. They were fed very little and clothed not at all, for it was believed that they neither required nor cared for these amenities in their current state. The chimpanzees and monkeys on exhibit were housed with these people, as it was thought that since the pygmies were closer on the evolutionary ladder to such creatures than to Europeans, they could communicate with them more effectively.

According to the
Scala Natura
of the time, such individuals were viewed as genetically inferior, capable only of concrete, not abstract, thought. These people existed only in hunter-gatherer societies, it was said, because they had not evolved sufficiently to comprehend, much less create, the complex systems of laws and monetary exchange that characterized the modern human societies of northern climates.

Even though his theory was employed to justify such disreputable ends, Darwin himself posited no sharp watershed between man and ape, or between races of man. Indeed, Darwin recognized that the greatest potential contribution of evolutionary ideas regarding the
Scala Natura
could be to help man understand himself through the study of the behavior of his living kin, especially his younger brother in evolutionary time—the ape.

In a widely unread but penetrating book,
The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man
, Darwin made a spectacular first attempt at tackling the study of the continuity of the expression of emotion. He saw most, if not all, of our human emotions as extant, both physiologically and psychologically, in other mammals to some degree, and he attempted to trace the transformation of these expressions of emotion across a number of species.
⁵
His work in this area was careful and grounded to the greatest possible extent in the available knowledge of muscular function and anatomy.

However, unlike the physical samples that he collected for
The Origin of the Species
, examples of behavior were impossible to
collect and contrast, since at that time there was no way to record actions on videotape; even photographs were difficult to make and reproduce. Moreover, travel being what it was at the time, one could not observe most animals under natural circumstances in the field. For these reasons Darwin requested and relied on the accounts of a variety of other parties who had witnessed examples of communication in animals and who recognized similarities between the communicative behaviors of animals and those of man.

Darwin recognized the shortcomings of such accounts and took considerable pains to focus on directly observable behaviors and to seek out reports from multiple parties. When he noted disagreements, he attempted to verify observations for himself. For example, when he found reports of tears in monkeys as an expression of emotion similar to grief, he attempted to observe this phenomenon for himself; he could not verify it.

Whereas Darwin, in 1872, focused on the continuity of the expression of emotion, Georges Romanes set out in 1886 to expand the area of behavioral continuity between man and animal by including mind and intellect. Taking Darwin’s work on the continuity of emotion as a starting point, Romanes observed:

The expression of fear or affection by a dog involves quite as distinctive and complex a series of neuro-muscular actions as does the expression of similar emotions by a human being: and therefore, if the evidence of corresponding mental states is held to be inadequate [for the existence of mind] in the one case, it must in consistency be held similarly inadequate in the other. And likewise, of course, with all other exhibitions of mental life.
⁶

Starting with mollusk, then working his way through ants, bees, wasps, termites, spiders, scorpions, fish, reptiles, birds, marsupials, bison, horses, rodents, bats, seals, beavers, elephants, cats, dogs, monkeys, and apes, Romanes took on the much too monumental task of attempting to assess the degree to which each possessed the powers of reason. Like Darwin, he had to rely on the observations of others and, like Darwin, he took pains to attempt to cross-validate these observations. Many were undoubtedly valid.
For example, as foxes became familiar with traps, they could no longer be caught; consequently, trappers were often forced to seek new methods, a sort of natural experiment in a sense, though one that certainly would not pass the shield of an IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) in this day and time.

Romanes reports the account of one trapper who accordingly

set a kind of trap with which the foxes in that part of the country were not acquainted. This consisted of a loaded gun set upon a stand pointing at the bait, so that when the fox seized the bait he discharged the gun and thus committed suicide. In this arrangement the gun was separated from the bait by a distance of about 30 yards, and the string which connected the trigger with the bait was concealed throughout nearly its whole distance in the snow. The gun-trap thus set was successful in killing one fox, but never in killing a second; for the foxes afterwards adapted either of two devices whereby to secure the bait without injuring themselves. One of the devices was to bite through the string at its exposed part near the trigger, and the other device was to burrow up to the bait through the snow at right angles to the line of fire.
⁷

Unfortunately, observations such as these never resulted in further serious scientific study, which was an intellectual tragedy, for it placed the real impact of evolutionary thought outside our collective awareness. There were two reasons for this sad state of affairs. First, some of the sources Romanes depended on proved unreliable. Some reports were made by people unfamiliar with the general habits of the animals they observed, and behaviors that were attributed to reason were later shown not to require causal understanding. Second, the few psychologists who did undertake the experimental study of these issues did not fully grasp the nature of the problem they were studying.

The most famous example of such work was that by Edward Thorndike, who placed a cat in a puzzle box and carefully watched how it learned to unlatch the handle and escape. He found that it was only by accident, not by power of reason, that the cat became able to unhinge the door. He quickly concluded
that most other expressions of animal intelligence were similarly the result of “trial and error” learning. In this example, locking a cat in a box is certain to result in a great many attempts to paw at the door, and some of these attempts are likely to be successful without intent. The cat then simply repeats them once their success is demonstrated.

What Thorndike did not do was to study how the cat might have been able to use the knowledge gained accidentally in one situation insightfully in a different, albeit similar situation. He also did not investigate situations in which the animal itself selected its course of action and the time of execution, as was the case in the previous example given for foxes. Surely, even in man, the powers of reason are most evident when we are permitted to elect both the time and course of our action. Even children locked in a room will engage in an apparently random series of actions in an attempt to escape. On the basis of all too little data, in very restricted settings, psychologists in these early days hastily determined that there was no basis for Romanes or Darwin to conclude that animals could think.

Darwin’s work on animal emotions was never disputed nor soundly condemned as was that of Romanes on animal intellect. Instead it suffered the more ignoble fate of simply being ignored. People could not realistically maintain that animals did not manifest emotions as easily as they could maintain that they did not manifest powers of reason. Nonetheless, the continuity of emotional experience was denied. Man was said to experience emotion differently from animals, although it was granted that animals and humans displayed some emotions similarly.