Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (8 page)

Booee lived on an island with four other young chimpanzees, Thelma, Cindy, Bruno, and Washoe. When they were not engaged in signing lessons, these four chimps were taken, by boat, back to the island where they played and slept. Roger was attempting to determine if chimpanzees other than Washoe could learn sign language. Since it took a long time, and a great deal of practice for these chimpanzees to learn signs, Roger needed a lot of help. That was why he had brought Booee to class, to help solicit volunteers.

Roger explained to the class that in Nevada he had worked with Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who had initiated an ape-language project in 1966 with a wild-born female chimp called Washoe. By 1972 Washoe had become something of a simian celebrity, with an American Sign Language vocabulary of some 150 signs and an apparent ability to make up novel sentences, albeit short ones. Roger brought Washoe to Oklahoma with him in 1970 and began to teach ASL to three other young chimps, including Booee.

As I began to read the relevant literature, with guidance from Roger, I became even more keenly aware of the implications of human-ape communication. It seemed to offer an insight into the nature of language and even to the essence of humanity itself. There is a long history of this kind of fascination—and specifically in the notion of teaching language to apes. For instance, an entry in the diary of Samuel Pepys, dated 24 August 1661, records his reactions on seeing an ape in London, one of the first to have been brought back to the Western world. He describes the ape (probably a chimpanzee) as being “a great baboone” but notes how humanlike it was. He wrote: “I do believe it already understands much english; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.”

Such suggestions were subsequently to be made many times, often as a passing comment of this kind. The most influential proposal, however, was by the pioneering primatologist Robert Yerkes. In a book called
Almost Human
, published in 1925, he noted apes’ great intelligence, speculated on their
cognitive potential to form language, and recognized the anatomy of their vocal tract as a barrier to speech. “I am inclined to conclude from the various evidences that the great apes have plenty to talk about, but no gift for the use of sounds to represent individual, as contrasted with racial, feelings or ideas,” he wrote. “Perhaps they can be taught to use their fingers, somewhat as does the deaf and dumb person, and thus helped to acquire a simple, nonvocal, ‘sign language.’”
¹

Four decades later, the Gardners put Yerkes’ suggestion to the test. Washoe lived in a trailer in the Gardners’ backyard and experienced much of the life of a child, surrounded by playthings and language. The Gardners and their helpers taught Washoe a limited ASL by molding her hands into the appropriate sign in the presence of an object. She was often rewarded for success with some tidbit of food. It was a laborious business, requiring repeated presentation of the object and repeated molding of the hands. A single sign was taught at a time. Slowly she built a vocabulary, rising from four signs after seven months, to thirty after almost two years, and peaking at about 150 after four years. By that time, 1970, Washoe had become too large and boisterous to be easily handled in the Gardners’ trailer, so she was moved to the Institute for Primate Studies, in Oklahoma, where Roger continued working with her in the company of the other apes he was hoping would also learn to sign.

At least part of Yerkes’ instinct had been correct: An ape
could
be taught to make and use signs in a simple context. Typically, that context involved requesting some item of food or drink or initiating play—chimpanzees love to chase and tickle. The intuition that chimpanzees “have plenty to talk about” was, however, less substantiated by the Gardners’ experience with Washoe. True, food and play are important in chimps’ lives, particularly as youngsters. Using ASL in this context, therefore, may accurately reflect what is on the animal’s mind. But Washoe’s use of symbols did not give insight into what it is like to be a chimp, which was what many people longed for.

Nevertheless, Washoe’s acquisition of so extensive a vocabulary of signs was a great achievement, one that seemed to
indicate that a chimp could break the human language barrier. For linguists, however, the quintessence of language has become syntax, the underlying structure that orders the utterance of words and imposes overall meaning. The singular focus on syntax is the result of Noam Chomsky’s dominance in the field, and his position is simple: Without syntax, language, as we know it, cannot exist. In order genuinely to break the language barrier, chimpanzees therefore would have to demonstrate syntactical competence.

During the early 1970s several more ape-language projects were established, inspired by the apparent success with Washoe. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, David Premack taught a female chimpanzee, Sarah, to use plastic shapes as “words.” Sarah did not communicate with these shapes, but rather used them to answer specific questions. The questions aimed to determine whether she possessed the cognitive “functional prerequisites” of language competence. For example, Premack tried to determine if she could respond to such typical linguistic structures as negation, class concept, and characterizations of change of state.

Duane Rumbaugh, of Georgia State University in Atlanta, began the LANA (LANguage Analogue) Project at the Yerkes Primate Center. The project, which was closely tied to developing methods for teaching language to severely mentally retarded children, invented a computerized keyboard display of arbitrary signs, known as lexigrams.

Explicitly or implicitly, each of these projects accepted the challenge to demonstrate syntactical competence as a criterion of language competence. Although the details of the results of these projects differed in many ways, some of which were mutually contradictory, there developed a strong conviction during the early 1970s that not only could apes learn symbols, but they also could use them in innovative and structured ways. For instance, the Gardners said of Washoe that she “learned a natural human language and her early utterances were highly similar
to, perhaps indistinguishable from the early utterances of human children.”
²

Most of the utterances by the ASL-using apes involved single symbols, but there was a sufficient number of plausible two-and three-word combinations to encourage a sense of rudimentary language. And among these multisymbol utterances there was perceived to be a sufficient degree of structure—with appropriate order for verbs, nouns, and qualifiers, for instance—to encourage a sense of humanlike syntax. It was against this background of rising optimism that I entered Roger Fouts’s ape-language project at Oklahoma. After about six months Roger suggested I work with an adolescent female chimp called Lucy. Lucy, who was older than the chimps I’d been working with, lived with clinical psychologist Morris Temerlin and his wife, Jane, in their home not far from the institute. She was being raised in a human home, from birth, as a subject in Bill Lemmon’s cross-species rearing experiments. The purpose of these studies was to “determine whether or not maternal behavior was innate.” Lemmon, a clinical psychologist and Temerlin’s mentor, had become intrigued by the differences between the sexes. In his view, females were biologically programmed to fulfill deep-seated maternal urges. He was therefore interested in determining whether or not these urges were innate in man’s closest living relatives.

Lemmon approached this question by placing infant female apes in the homes of his patients and former students. He then instructed the patients to rear the ape as if it were their own child. When the apes reached adulthood, he intended to artificially inseminate them and observe how they cared for their infants; he wanted to see how these apes behaved as mothers, having been reared themselves by a “mother” who loved them, but did not behave as an ape. During the rearing of these female apes, he also used the apes’ behavior as a means of “evaluating” his patients, whom he saw on a regular basis.

Lucy was but the first of a number of such “human-reared” apes I was to meet at the Oklahoma Primate Institute. In order to obtain chimpanzees for his studies, Lemmon had developed his own breeding colony of apes. Thus there were many chimpanzees living in social groups who had minimal contact with
human beings, apart from the essentials of being fed and having their quarters cleaned. Infants who were born in and remained in these groups were quickly pointed out as being “less intelligent” and “retarded in their development,” as contrasted with those reared in human homes. At the time, I did not realize that nearly all my energies for the next years would be poured into trying to understand the differences in behavior and development of these group-reared infants and their human-reared counterparts. The differences were remarkable, but “intelligence,” I was soon to learn, is probably the most elusive and detrimental concept prevalent in the conceptual toolkit of modern psychology.

When I first met Lucy she seemed to be more attentive to social interactions with humans and to give crisper signs than the apes in the institute’s colony. When Roger introduced me, Lucy retrieved a plastic flower from her box of playthings and offered it to me, just as human children of one or two years do. Object offering passes through a preliminary stage in human children in which the object is first offered and then withdrawn before it is actually taken by the other party. A few months later, the child clearly seeks to transfer objects from his or her possession to that of another.

When I reached out to accept the plastic flower from Lucy, thinking how nice it was of her to offer, she deftly sank her teeth into the back of my hand. Chimpanzee offers, it seemed, were not quite like human offers. I was only later to realize that rather than attempting to give me the flower, Lucy was daring me to take it, albeit in a rather deceptive manner. I would fall for that trick again many times in my ape career, as chimpanzees are of sufficient intelligence to disguise the trick in many ways.

Why should Lucy want to bite me? Obviously I had not tried to bite or hurt her in any way. I just wanted to learn about her. Little did I understand how my presumption in entering her home with no proper greeting or explanation of my mission had been rude from her perspective. Nor did I realize that extending the object without the appropriate facial expressions and vocalizations was a way of determining how well I could judge her intentions. It reminded me of going into other
cultures, or even distinct subcultures in the United States, where attempts are made to size up what you know by seeing if you fall for the oldest trick in the book. I flunked the test.

Despite the tenor of our introduction, Lucy and I went on to develop a good relationship. That was because Roger advised me that the best way to make friends with chimps was simply to spend time alone with them. Lucy at the time weighed about seventy pounds and was rather intimidating. I wasn’t quite sure what she might do to me when we were alone, as pound for pound, apes are five times as strong as a human male in excellent physical condition. Moreover, their teeth are large and their jaws are able to exert enormous pressure. Since I had already had the end of my finger bitten off by a chimpanzee at the institute, I was a little hesitant to be left alone with Lucy. Yet Roger assured me that this was the best method and that Lucy was far less likely to harm me if I was alone with her than if someone she knew were also there. I did not understand this, as it seemed to go against all reason. Why would a chimpanzee be more likely to hurt a stranger such as myself when someone that it already knew and liked was present? Nonetheless, I accepted the advice and agreed to take Lucy out of her cage, bring her into the main portion of the house, and begin to teach her signs.

It was not as difficult as I had expected. Soon I was even taking Lucy for rides in my two-seater MG all over Norman, Oklahoma. Lucy would point in a certain direction and we would go that way. Sometimes, if I refused to go to a place she really wanted to see, she would take the steering wheel away from me and turn the corner herself. Of course, this could be dangerous, so every moment Lucy was in the car I was always fully prepared to stop immediately in case she decided to drive. She was not permitted to get out of the car, except when we drove to a sixty-acre plot of land outside of Norman, which was owned by the Temerlins. There Lucy could bound out and run free.

I continued to work with Lucy for two years, while also beginning a behavioral project in which I observed four mothers and their infants. I was interested in infant development—the stages of maturation through which youngsters pass. The
language project fascinated me, but I recognized that I could not understand what chimpanzees were doing with signs until I first understood chimpanzees far better. What kinds of things did they communicate spontaneously to each other and how did they do so? Were their nonverbal communications simply unconscious emotional expressions as all the literature at the time maintained? If so, why were their signs suddenly “expressions of conscious willed intent?”