Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (56 page)
Read Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Online
Authors: Carl Sagan,Ann Druyan
The chimpanzee’s interior monologue is doubtless not up to the standard of the average philosopher’s, but that they have some notion of themselves, what they look like, what their needs are, their past experiences, future expectations, and how they relate to others—enough for the purposes of a “social order”—seems beyond doubt.
——
“Language is our Rubicon,” declaimed the famous nineteenth-century linguist Max Müller, “and no brute will dare to cross it.” Language permits widely dispersed humans to communicate with one another. It allows us to sample the wisdom of the past and time-binds the generations. It is an essential tool in helping us to sharpen our mental acuity, to think more clearly. It is an unsurpassed aid to memory. With good reason we prize it. Long before the invention of writing, language played a major role in human success. This is the main reason that Huxley could reassuringly conclude, “Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance and structure, one with the brutes.”
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But does this mean that other animals must lack language, even simple language, even the capability for language? We are struck by Müller’s military, defensive metaphor, and the possibility he seems to raise that language is within the grasp of “brutes” and that only timidity restrains them.
A long tradition of similar confident assertions denying language to
the beasts dates from the start of the European Enlightenment, perhaps beginning with a 1649 letter by René Descartes:
The principal argument, to my mind, which may convince us that the brutes are devoid of reason, is that … it has never yet been observed that any animal has arrived at such a degree of perfection as to make use of a true language; that is to say, as to be able to indicate to us by the voice, or by other signs, anything which could be referred to thought alone, rather than to a movement of mere nature; for the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men, the most stupid and the most foolish, those even who are deprived of the organs of speech, make use of signs, whereas the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction between man and brute.
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That chimps and bonobos can engage in a rich flow of gestural and lexigraphic signs is beyond doubt. We have glimpsed the vigorous scientific debate about their ability to use language. The nervousness of some scientists about claims of chimp language is evident in many ways—including repeatedly changing the rules after the game has begun. For instance, some scientists denied that Ameslan-signing chimps have language because of an apparent absence of negations or interrogatives. As soon as the chimps began objecting and asking questions, the critics discovered some other aspect of language that the chimps presumably did not have while humans did, and
that
now became the
sine qua non
of language. To a surprising extent, scientists and philosophers have merely asserted, sometimes with extraordinary vehemence, that apes cannot use language, and then dismissed evidence to the contrary because it contradicted their assumption.
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Darwin’s view, in contrast, was that some animals have the power of language, “at least in a rude and incipient degree,” and that if “certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc., are peculiar to man,” they are “mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”
There is controversy over how many meaningful and non-redundant words chimps can routinely put into a sentence. But there is no dispute that chimps (and bonobos) can manipulate hundreds of signs
or ideograms taught to them by humans; and that they use these words to communicate their wishes. As we’ve discussed, the words can stand for objects, actions, people, other animals, or the chimp itself. There are common and proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Chimps and bonobos can request, and therefore are clearly thinking about, things or actions not now present—food, for example, or grooming. There is evidence that—like the Ameslan-literate Lucy and the lexigram-literate Kanzi—they can put words together in new combinations to make a novel kind of sense. Some of them invent and tend to abide by at least a few simple grammatical rules. They can label and categorize inanimate objects, animals, and people using not just the things themselves, but arbitrary words
representing
the things. They are capable of abstraction. They seem sometimes to use language and gesture to lie and deceive, and to reflect an elementary understanding of cause and effect. They can be self-reflexive, not just in action, as with their mirror images, but also in language, as when a chimp named Elizabeth was cutting an artificial apple with a knife and signed, in a special token language in which she was fluent, “Elizabeth apple cut.”
They know at best only about 10% the number of words in “basic English” or other minimal vocabularies adequate for everyday human life. This difference has been exaggerated—as by one distinguished linguist who argues that a finite number of human words can be combined to generate an “infinite” number of sentences, and an “infinite” number of communicable subjects, while chimps are stuck in their finitude.
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In fact, of course, the entire range of human words and ideas is, as for apes, resolutely finite. The laboratory linguistic accomplishments of chimps and bonobos are in addition to their own repertoire of signals—in gesture, sound, and smell—of which we understand, probably, very little. “The word,” the “use of signs” which Descartes denied to “brutes,” is plainly present in chimps and bonobos.
No ape has ever shown linguistic abilities approaching those of a normal child entering kindergarten. Nevertheless they seem to have a clear-cut, although elementary, ability to use language. Many of us would grant that a child of two or three who has a vocabulary and verbal dexterity comparable to that of the most accomplished chimps or bonobos—no matter how glaring their deficits in grammar and
syntax—has language.
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It has been conventional wisdom in the social sciences that culture presupposes language and language presupposes a sense of self. Whether this is true or not, chimps and bonobos evidently have, at least in a rudimentary form, all three: consciousness, language, and culture. They may be much less repressed than we are and not as bright, but they, also, can think.
Most of us have a memory like this: You’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars! These powerful emotions are preverbal—as are much of our adult anticipations, passions, forebodings, and fears. Our feelings are present before they can be parsed into neat grammatical packages, to be dealt with and subdued. In those dimly remembered feelings and associations, we may glimpse something of the consciousness and emotional lives of chimps, bonobos and our immediate prehuman ancestors.
*
Many of them would not have included the word “other,” and even today there are those who bristle at being called—even by scientists speaking generically and without affect—“animals.”
*
On July 14, 1858, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to Karl Marx: “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond economic forms of the animal world.”
*
For example, water buffalo in Southeast Asia, which are routinely castrated by crushing their testicles between two rocks.
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*
Watching themselves in the mirror wearing hats is also a wildly popular and apparently gripping experience.
THE ANIMAL WITHIN[T]he human brain is an imperfect instrument
built up through long geological periods. Some
of its levels of operation are more primitive and
archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has
learned, may contain weird and irrational
shadows out of the subhuman past—shadows
that under stress can sometimes elongate
and fall darkly across the threshold of our
rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the
eighteenth century in the enlightening power of
pure reason, for he has come to know that he is
not a consistently reasoning animal. We have
frightened ourselves with our own black nature
and instead of thinking “We are men now, not
beasts, and must live like men,” we have eyed
each other with wary suspicion and whispered
in our hearts, “We will trust no one. Man is
evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the
dark wood and the caves.”
LOREN EISELEY
Darwin’s Century
1
W
e have now brought our story—our fragmentary effort to reconstruct some of the entries in the orphan’s file, to cast a little light into the shadows—to the threshold of the appearance of humans on Earth. It is time to take stock.
Many of the protective ditches, moats, and minefields painstakingly dug to separate us from the other animals have now been bridged or flanked. Those driven to preserve for us some unique, unambiguous, defining characteristic are tempted to shift the definitions once again and erect a final line of defense around our thoughts. If chimpanzee and bonobo language is limited, we cannot tell much about what they think or feel, what meaning, if any, they give to their lives. They have authored, at least so far, no autobiographies, reflective essays, confessions, self-analyses, or philosophical memoirs. If we can choose particular ideas and feelings to define ourselves, no chimp can contradict us. For example, we might point to our knowledge that all of us will someday die, or that sex is the cause of babies—matters widely understood among humans, although sometimes denied. Perhaps no ape has ever glimpsed these important truths. Perhaps some have. We do not know.
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But standing alone on such homiletic pinnacles is a hollow victory for the human species. These occasional insights are minor matters compared to the vaunted distinctions of humanity that have crumbled into dust as we have learned more about the other animals. At so fine a level of detail, the motives of those who would define us by this or that idea seem suspect, the human chauvinism manifest.
To compare humans with other animals in regard to behavior amenable to observation is just; but unfavorable comparisons on the basis of first-person accounts emanating from within the animals themselves, their reports of their thoughts and insights, are unfair if no channel of communication into their internal lives has yet been opened. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Were we better able to enter into the mind of the ape, might we not find much
more there than we guess?—a point made almost three centuries ago by Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke:
Man is connected by his nature … with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and their … appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.
3
An oft-cited difference purported to exist between human beings and other animals is religion. Only humans, it is said, have religion, and that settles the matter. But what is religion? How could we know whether animals have it? In
The Descent of Man
, Darwin cites the comment, “a dog looks on his master as a god.” Ambrose Bierce
4
defined reverence as “the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.” The omega looks on the alpha as something like a god, and the depths of his submission and self-abasement are reached in few extant religions. It is hard to know how profoundly dogs or apes feel reverence, how tinged with awe their attitudes are toward a stern “master” or a well-established alpha, whether they have a sense of the sacred, pray for forgiveness, and otherwise seek to placate and influence forces more powerful than they. Animals raised, educated, and disciplined by much stronger and wiser parents, animals spring-loaded to fit into a dominance hierarchy, animals moreover faced with the daunting presence of human beings armed with life-and-death powers and meting out rewards and punishment—such animals may well have feelings akin to what we call religious. Many mammals and all primates satisfy these conditions.