Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (50 page)

As a youngster, Kanzi liked to pretend that he was hiding imaginary food in his blankets or under some toys. Occasionally he would pretend to give Panbanisha or others bites of the imaginary food. If he elected to eat it, he did not do so the way Austin did, who consumed it very slowly while watching himself in the mirror. Instead, Kanzi pretended to gulp it down hurriedly, as if he had stolen it.

Panbanisha’s favorite pretend game was to act as though she had heard a monster in the next room. Going toward the door with her hair out, she would comment “monster” and invite others to search with her. Sometimes she would then put on a monster mask and pretend to chase her sister Tamuli. She also liked to pretend that she was taking bites out of pictures of food she saw in magazines, or even out of the peaches that are depicted on all the Georgia license plates at the laboratory.

But whether it is self-awareness, awareness of the minds of others, pretense, or deception—all of these cognitive activities
are manifest in language, for it is with language that Kanzi and Panbanisha and Sherman and Austin can tell us things that we would otherwise not know. Kanzi has told us where he left a ball the day before and reminded us of yesterday’s promise that we forgot. Panbanisha has told us that she wanted to watch an “ice TV” when it started snowing outside. Kanzi told us that he was looking for his mother, Matata, when asked why he was trying to crawl under the railroad ties. Panbanisha tore the “good” lexigram off the keyboard and gave it to us as a way of sealing her promise to be good. Sherman told me there was a “scare” outdoors when he saw a chimp being carried away in a transport cage, and Austin always tells me he wants Coke instead of the juice I am offering. Panbanisha tells me when it is raining outdoors. She also told me that the lady who visited has hair that looks like a mushroom—and she was really right. These are small things perhaps, but they offer a constant glimpse of other minds that I would not have without language.

Kanzi and Panbanisha tell me and others these things because they assume that I do not know them. Things we both know they never bother to state. Not only do they use language to present their thoughts, sometimes they use language to pretend and sometimes to lie. Kanzi, for example, knowing that he cannot have any more M&M’s, will ask to go play in the T-room and get some toys when he (but not I) knows that M&M’s have been placed in a T-room cabinet. Once in the T-room, he will quickly steal the M&M’s and run out. He does this so deftly and quickly, it is clear that it was his intent all along.

Kanzi’s naturalistic acquisition of words and his emergent comprehension of complex spoken sentences indicate that the chimpanzee has all the basic neurological machinery for a primitive language. Kanzi has not learned to speak, but this limitation appears to be one of the physical structure of vocal/respiratory circuitry and anatomy. His expression of a language facility through being steeped in language, as human children are, illuminates
the nature of the chimpanzee mind—and it puts the mind
of Homo sapiens
in proper biological perspective.

Kanzi’s linguistic capacities give us a clearer view of human language. First, they demonstrate the narrowness of the Chomskian assertion that spoken language is an evolutionary novelty that arose uniquely in humans. Second, they emphasize the interactional aspects of language acquisition, for both apes and humans. Steeped in a language-rich environment, human children first come to comprehend language, and then to produce it, a process requiring elaborate control over the vocal/respiratory tract and complex planning of muscle movement.

As language is learned, many general cognitive processes become shaped as a consequence. Language in humans, rather than being innate, is seen as the product of a plastic cognitive substrate interacting with environmental exposure to speech. In their natural state, chimpanzees do not develop the kind of language we see in captivity, but given the appropriate environmental exposure, an ability for symbolic language use becomes evident. At the same time other cognitive skills become honed. For instance, language-competent chimpanzees develop an ability to learn to use a joystick (connected to a computer monitor) through simple observation rather than through active teaching. Language-naive apes must be trained to do this bit by bit.

Clearly, exposure to speech in infancy shapes the developmental processes in the ape brain just as it does in the human brain. And it is more than likely that the neural networks influenced by a language-steeped environment in apes are evolutionary parallels to those involved in language acquisition in human children. Because chimpanzees are so closely related to humans in an evolutionary sense, it should not be surprising—except to a Chomskian—that they are sensitive to the same environments that foster cognitive competence in human children.

The ease with which Kanzi acquired a facility for symbolic communication not only tells us something about humans, and the assumed uniqueness of the human mind, but also something about apes and their cognitive competence in their natural state. We have yet to appreciate the intellectual challenge of the
natural lives of intensely social primate communities. One aspect of this is that the natural communicative skills of chimpanzees in the wild are almost certainly greatly underestimated.

The boundary wall between humans and apes has finally been breached. As a result, more and more biologists are bowing to the logic of the evidence of genetics, by suggesting a reclassification of humans and the great apes. At the very least, humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas should share the same family status, with orangutans in a separate family. If there is a line to be drawn in this evolutionary scheme of things, it will have to be one that places the African apes in our company, not one that excludes them. Humans are African apes, of an unusual kind. Similarly, if a mental Rubicon was crossed in our evolutionary history, humans are not the sole occupants of one bank; they are accompanied there by apes.

The distinctiveness that we have so assiduously ascribed to ourselves as humans is, in reality, an accident of history. Imagine, for instance, how much more distinct we could have claimed our species to be had all the great apes become extinct before we began pondering our position in the world of nature. If vervet monkeys were our closest relatives, humans would indeed appear to stand separate. Equally, if the species of hominid that links us to our common ancestor with the African apes had not become extinct, the gap between us and chimpanzees would be closed all the way. Gradations between human and ape would be present at every step, and our revered distinctiveness would vanish.

It is simply a contingent fact of history that certain species did become extinct during the past five million years, leaving us to compare ourselves with the African apes as our closest living relatives. And it is a sobering fact of current history that the comparison between humans and apes may soon become virtually artificial, as each species of ape faces extinction in its natural populations. If this happens, it means we will lose the opportunity to learn about ourselves from our nearest living relatives,
just at the time that we have indeed recognized them as our relatives. It also means that we will have frittered away our one remaining chance to allow our sibling species to live the way of life for which they, and we, co-evolved across the millennia.

Acceptance of our biological and cognitive intimacy with the great apes has profound consequences for the boundary wall that was erected between humans and the rest of the animal world. For the wall represented more than biological classification or righteous superiority. It was also a moral boundary. On one side—ours—important rights were conferred, rights to freedom and justice; on the other side—theirs—rights to freedom and justice were disallowed. It is, for instance, illegal to perform medical experimentation on a brain-dead human, while such activities are perfectly acceptable on a conscious chimpanzee. If we accede to the logic of what we now know about our self-aware, symbol-using biological relatives, then the boundary must be shifted to include the great apes on our side; and this includes a shift in the moral boundary, too. The moral boundary, artificially erected by us, is no longer defensible.

What if apes were granted something of a semi-human legal status? What if their emotions, intellect, and consciousness were to be widely judged at least morally equivalent to that of children who suffer cognitive impairments? All the data we have gathered over the past twenty years at the Language Research Center while working side by side with such children and with apes increasingly support this view.

What would be the implications of such a view? We certainly would not put these children in a zoo to be gawked at as examples of nature, nor would we permit medical experimentation to be conducted with them. Behavioral experimentation would be permitted only to the degree that it could be expected to enrich and aid their lives. Nor would we put them in a reserve where they could lead a natural life, doing just as they pleased. On the other hand, we can hardly argue for main-streaming apes as is currently popular to press for with such children. Apes would not quite fit in our society, as their physical prowess is far beyond that of our own.

The currently fashionable answer is to leave them alone on
reserves in the wild. At one time, this seemed like an ideal solution for Native Americans as well. Even if it works on a temporary basis, it does not address the problem of what to do with all the apes that have currently been brought up
in
the civilized world and do not now know how to make their way in the wild. It also does not tell us what to do when a reserve becomes over-populated with apes and what to do if they should decide to wander beyond its boundaries.

The future is full of dilemmas. As each one comes into clearer focus, it is easy to see why man has erected a barrier between himself and the other animals on the planet. This barrier has freed us from responsibilities that we, as a species, were not able to meet. I hope that now we are ready for the challenge, for if we meet it, we shall surely build a better world, one in which man and animals walk side by
side
with a new understanding, a new respect, and a new recognition that each is but a different physical manifestation of life forces, each seeking to make itself known and to live in harmony with the other.

1
. Cited in Stephen Jay Gould, “Bound by the Great Chain,”
Natural History
, November 1983, 20–24, p. 24.

2
. Roy Chapman Andrews,
Meet Your Ancestors
(New York: John Lang, 1948), 11.

3
. Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume,
Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 5.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Charles Darwin,
The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man
(London: John Murray, 1871), 7.

6
. George J. Romanes,
Animal Intelligence
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1886), 6.

7
. Ibid., 429.

8
. Alfred Russel Wallace,
Darwinism
(London: Macmillan, 1889), 469.

9
. Ibid., 463.

10
. Ibid.

11
. Leslie White,
The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization
(New York: Grove Press, 1949).

12
. Matt Cartmill, “Human Uniqueness and Theoretical Content in Paleoanthropology,”
International Journal of Primatology
11 (1990): 173–192, p. 178.

13
. Thomas Henry Huxley,
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900), 155–156.

14
.
Noam Chomsky,
Language and Problems of Knowledge
(Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1988), 34.

15
. Ibid.

16
. William McGrew, “The Intelligent Use of Tools,” in
Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution
, eds. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 151–170, p. 158.