Humans could be defined as the only species that worries about how it is different from other species. Our trepidation about human uniqueness especially focuses on our evolutionary cousins — or, as the creationists would have it, those who most closely resemble us — the great apes.
One index of how much anxiety the resemblance between ourselves and the great apes arouses is how easy it is for apes to tickle the human funny bone. I once saw a Johnny Carson show which featured a diapered baby gorilla sitting on someone’s lap. The audience roared with laughter whenever the infant gorilla merely put a piece of banana into his mouth.
Many attempts have been made to point to a difference of kind — rather than degree — between humans and other primates. Stephen Jay Gould writes that in the mid-nineteenth century Richard Owen “sought to establish our uniqueness by arguing that a small convolution of the human brain, the hippocampus minor, was absent in chimps and gorillas (and all other creatures), but present in Homo sapiens alone. [Thomas Henry] Huxley . . . showed conclusively that all apes had a hippocampus.” Since Huxley’s decisive victory over Owen, Gould elaborates, the search for a uniquely human quality has shifted from the morphological to the conceptual where “defenders of human uniqueness have posited an unbridgeable chasm between the mental abilities of humans and chimps.”
For quite a few years, a claim of human uniqueness lay in the notion that we are the only species to use — or at least create — tools. Then Jane Goodall observed a chimp who, “not only used bits of straw to fish for termites but actually stripped leaves from a stem and thus made a tool.”
Nothing has done more to challenge the hubris of the human species than the ape language experiments. Their history is common knowledge. The earliest attempt to teach a chimpanzee named Viki to speak failed. After several years of teaching, Viki was able only to rasp a few words. However, it was concluded that her failure to learn was not due to a cognitive deficit but to a lack of certain complex mechanisms in the vocal chords.
Thus, efforts began to teach chimps to talk through non-verbal means such as American Sign Language and computer board lexigrams. The early reports were extremely encouraging.
After the initial euphoria, however, a wave of criticism followed about whether the apes could really be said to be “talking.” Much of this focused not on their understanding the meaning of individual words, but on such aspects of language as word order or syntax. Noam Chomsky is a proponent of the thesis that all human languages are characterized by a “deep structure” because the human species is “genetically equipped with a set of syntactic instructions which permit the generation of all languages.” He “sees no more evidence of language in ape use of symbol systems that he sees in a child waving its arms evidence of incipient flight.”
Joining Chomsky in skepticism is Herb Terrace, who wrote a book about his work with a chimp Terrace dubbed Nim Chimpsky. Terrace at first believed that his work with Nim was successful; later he decided that he had been fooling himself. In his book on the experiment, he concluded that Nim did not actually understand language. In a detailed analysis of a video of Nim supposedly conversing, Terrace decided that “Nim’s statements were most often repetitions of words he had just seen his instructors make” and the he “interrupted a great deal and did not seem to understand the interactive nature of conversation.” He was also troubled by the lack of spontaneity and of complexity in Nim’s utterances. Terrace concluded that the chimp was merely “running on with its hands until it got what it wants.”
There are several problems with Terrace’s conclusions. For one thing, if Nim failed to learn language, it would not mean that the claims for other language-using apes are bogus. It could indicate that Nim’s teachers were not good or that Nim, as an individual ape, is not as bright as his fellows. While Terrace asserted that Nim cannot “understand the interactive nature of language,” it is possible that Terrace did not take into consideration the difference between nature of sign and spoken languages. Simultaneous signing does not cause the confusion that speaking at the same time does so, as a group of psychologists argued in a critique of Terrace’s work, “interruption must be determined by such variables as eye contact, hand position, body orientation, signing motion, and content.” When they analyzed the supposedly damning film of Nim according to these criteria, they found that the chimp was less likely to interrupt his human companions than vice versa, and therefore more competent at the interactive aspect of American Sign Language.
It is my opinion that the bulk of data suggests that our ape cousins have, in a limited manner, learned to talk. For one thing, the signing apes have invented names for things that were unfamiliar to them, combining words they already knew to get novel meanings — a sure sign they are not merely imitating. Washoe, the first chimp to be taught ASL and the adopted daughter of her teacher Roger Fouts, “referred to her toilet as DIRTY GOOD and the refrigerator as OPEN FOOD DRINK even though we referred to them as the POTTY CHAIR and the COLD BOX.” Koko has called a ring a “finger bracelet” and described a mask as an “eye hat.” The signing apes have been observed talking to themselves and to each other — which could hardly be the result of human cueing.
Koko the gorilla may be the most famous of all the signing apes. She has a certain star quality — perhaps because of the contrast between her tender personality and her great size and physical strength. Additionally, the gorilla and her lovely, blonde-haired teacher and adoptive human mother, Dr. Penny Patterson, make an especially photogenic pair.
The gorilla has acquired a Sign Language vocabulary similar to that of a Deaf human child at age five. She once doubled as both model and photographer when she snapped her own picture in a mirror for the cover of National Geographic. Both she and Michael [her Sign Language using adoptive brother; now deceased] paint, and some of their works are representational. I have seen a small photograph of a painting of a dog by Michael; it is quite recognizable, not only as a dog but as the specific dog it is meant to depict. Koko has learned to recognize letters and read simple words. She has even been caught lying. After Kokko was asked who broke a sink in her room, she said, “Kate bad there,” blaming it on a young woman who worked at the Gorilla Foundation.
There are, of course, severe limits to Koko’s learning relative to the learning possible for intellectually normal humans. As Patterson notes, “if an ape is to use sign language, that desire must actively compete with the other activities for which ape hands were designed.” As a result she is, in general, a notably pithy Signer. This was made especially clear in a recent attempt at inter-species Internet communication. Koko did not respond to questions quickly, and never at any length. Her teacher, Penny Patterson, sometimes padded behind her to “explain” her puzzling answers. For example, Koko was asked if she “had hair or is it like fur”? and she replied, “fine.” Patterson explained, “she has fine hair.”
Ironically, even as we nervously desire to establish a firm, unbridgeable line between ourselves and other primates, we can easily lose sight of the real and important gap that is there.
A Discover magazine article entitled “Sex and the Single Gorilla,” concerned attempts to get Koko to mate with Michael. Matchmaking was frustrated, apparently, by the gorilla incest taboo and Koko’s perception that Mike is her brother. Another factor was Koko’s attraction to a human male who worked on the project. A good example of just how easy it is to forget where one species leaves off and the other begins was a faux pas made by the writer and overlooked by Discover’s editors.
The article appeared in print with the following sentence: “Koko is having a hard time understanding that human men are unobtainable.”
Human men? As opposed to what — gorilla men?
Inevitably, there is tendency to regard “educated” apes as similar to human children. Gorilla journal often reads reminds one of proud parents showing off the family album. The confusion as to where one species leaves off and the other begins has had tragic consequences.
In March 1988, The Atlantic Monthly ran an article about an attempt to repatriate a “humanized” chimpanzee to the wild. The subtitle read, “once admired for her skill with sign language, a laboratory-bred chimp must now adapt to the jungle — or die.”
The chimpanzee in question was Lucy, the heroine of a non-fiction book called Growing Up Human. She had been part of an experiment designed to help sort out the old nature/nurture conundrum by seeing how chimpanzees raised by human families would develop. Jane Goodall gave a vivid description of the creature into which Lucy matured.
Lucy, having grown up as a human child, was like a changeling, her essential chimpanzeeness overlaid by the various human behaviors she had acquired over the years. No longer purely chimp yet eons away from humanity, she was man-made, some other kind of being. I watched, amazed, as she opened the refrigerator and various cupboards, found bottles and a glass, then poured herself a gin and tonic. She took the drink to the TV, turned the set on, flipped from one channel to another then, as though in disgust, turned it off again. She selected a glossy magazine from the table and, still carrying her drink, settled in a comfortable chair. Occasionally, as she leafed through the magazine she identified something she saw, using the signs of ASL.
However, Lucy was not a human child. She grew up to be a chimpanzee, a special chimp with many human skills and traits, but the physical strength and energy characteristic of her species. The adult Lucy was completely unsuited for life in an American suburb, as were the other chimps in the cross fostering experiment. Inevitably destructive of the property surrounding them, increasingly dangerous to people, their adoptive parents could no longer have them in their families. Some of these chimps were consigned to zoos, other to laboratories. It was decided that Lucy, along with a group of other chimps who had spent time in captivity, should be “repatriated” to the wild, where she would taught to act like a normal chimp and live out the rest of her life in the jungle.
The report in The Atlantic Monthly was not promising. Janis Carter, the woman who is aiding the chimps, stopped talking to Lucy in Sign language. How bewildering it must have seemed to Lucy when the same species that used to reward her for Signing, suddenly and arbitrarily ignored her Signs! At the time the article was written, Lucy was eating grass and leaves but, unlike wild chimps, she would not fish through wood for termites or ants. Pitifully, she never nested confidently up in the trees like her fellows but always made her “bed” by the trunk.
The real-life story ended — tragically — several years after this article was published. Lucy’s dead body was found: shot, skinned, and with hands and feet amputated. The hands that had asked for hugs and poured tea had been cut off to make ashtrays.
Unlike a wild chimp, Lucy had no fear of humans. This might have contributed to her death because she would not have avoided her hunter. Her early experience in a human family could not lead to a human adulthood but it had doomed her as a wild chimpanzee.
Other cross-fostered chimpanzees suffered fates which were, if not tragic, certainly dispiriting. Several ended up in laboratories, living in small cages and suddenly bereft of the affection and stimulation that had so enriched their formative years.
First-hand experience with the intellectual and emotional capacities of the great apes, together with outrage at human mistreatment of them, has led Roger Fouts, Jane Gooddall, Penny Patterson, and others who have participated in The Great Ape Project to believe that it is time to bring our cousins into our “moral universe” by extending the concept of “rights” to them. Fouts thinks that the apes “should be entitled to certain basic rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and freedom from torture.” He and others in the project seek an end to medical experimentation with great apes.
However, it seems to me that non-human animals do not fit into “our moral community” because they cannot be held to the responsibilities that are a necessary corollary of rights. Anticipating this problem, Fouts acknowledges, “rights would not make Washoe and others full-fledged members of our society. We cannot expect apes to obey laws, serve on juries, and vote for president. But we don’t expect children and mentally disabled adults to bear these responsibilities either, and yet we still protect them from imprisonment, torture, and wrongful death.”
The analogy is compelling yet, in my opinion, ultimately flawed. While children and the mentally disabled do not bear all the responsibilities of normal adult humans, the normal adult world freely interferes in their activities and enforces morality upon them. Indeed, in some ways a stricter morality is enforced upon children than adults since the former may be disciplined for teasing and making fun of their fellows. Humans may be so mentally disabled that they cannot be “punished” for crimes but they are regularly restrained from committing robbery, assault, rape, murder, and the like.
If we bring the great apes into “our moral community,” we must logically interfere to a far greater extent in their lives than we already do. The great apes attack and kill other great apes.
Are we to prevent these atrocities? We certainly would if they were being committed among humans of any age or mental level. In my opinion, other animals fit into “our moral community” about as well as the adult Lucy fit into suburbia — or the jungle.
Rather than speaking of animal rights, it is more appropriate to speak of human responsibilities to other animals. In the case of the great apes, these responsibilities are especially compelling because of our closeness to them and their sensitivity and intelligence.
I believe that we walk a moral tightrope in our dealings with those who are so close yet so far away. Finding the right balance between our responsibilities to them and, yes, our even greater responsibilities to our own species, will always be a struggle.
It is a struggle we should make partly because of an emotion that evolved long before Homo Sapiens. When Koko was asked how she and a human “are the same,” one of her answers was “love.” No one could have given a better one.
