5 - THE ABSTRACTION OF BEASTS
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic
character ... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself
most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to
me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have
fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a
naturalist I ought to have done so.
CARL LINNAEUS,
the founder of taxonomy, 1788
BEASTS ABSTRACT NOT,” announced John Locke, expressing mankind’s
prevailing opinion throughout recorded history. Bishop Berkeley had,
however, a sardonic rejoinder:
“If the fact that brutes abstract not
be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a
great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their
number.”
Abstract thought, at least in its more subtle varieties, is
not an invariable accompaniment of everyday life for the average
man. Could abstract thought be a matter not of kind but of degree?
Could other animals be capable of abstract thought but more rarely
or less deeply than humans?
We have the impression that other animals are not very intelligent.
But have we examined the possibility of animal intelligence
carefully enough, or, as in Francois Truffaut’s poignant film
The
Wild Child, do we simply equate the absence of our style of
expression of intelligence with the absence of intelligence? In
discussing communication with the animals, the French philosopher Montaigne remarked,
“The defect that hinders communication between
them and us, why may it not be on our part as well as theirs?”
*
* Our difficulties in understanding or effectuating communication
with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar
ways of dealing with the world. For example, dolphins and whales,
who sense their surrounding with a quite elaborate sonar echo
location technique, also communicate with each other by a rich and
elaborate set of clicks, whose interpretation has so far eluded
human attempts to understand it. One very clever recent suggestion,
which is now being investigated, is that dolphin/dolphin
communication involves a re-creation of the sonar reflection
characteristics of the objects being described. In this view a
dolphin does not “say” a single word for shark, but rather transmits
a set of clicks corresponding to the audio reflection spectrum it
would obtain on irradiating a shark with sound waves in the
dolphin’s sonar mode. The basic form of dolphin/dolphin
communication in this view would be a sort of aural onomatopoeia, a
drawing of audio frequency pictures- in this case, caricatures of a
shark. We could well imagine the extension of such a language from
concrete to abstract ideas, and by the use of a kind of audio
rebus-both analogous to the development in Mesopotamia and Egypt of
human written languages. It would also be possible, then, for
dolphins to create extraordinary audio images out of their
imaginations rather than their experience.
There is, of course, a
considerable body of anecdotal information suggesting chimpanzee
intelligence. The first serious study of the behavior of
simians-including their behavior in the wild-was made in Indonesia
by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution by natural
selection.
Wallace concluded that a baby orangutan he studied behaved
“exactly like a human child in similar circumstances.” In fact,
“orangutan” is a Malay phrase meaning not ape but “man of the
woods.” Teuber recounted many stories told by his parents,
pioneer German ethnologists who founded and operated the
first research station devoted to chimpanzee behavior on
Tenerife in the Canary Islands early in the second decade of
this century. It was here that Wolfgang Kohler performed his
famous studies of Sultan, a chimpanzee “genius” who was able
to connect two rods in order to reach an otherwise inaccessible
banana.
On Tenerife, also, two chimpanzees were observed maltreating
a chicken: One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to
approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of
wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but
soon allow itself to approach once again-and be beaten once again.
Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be
uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action,
deception and cruelty. It also reveals that chickens have a very low
capacity for avoidance learning.
Until a few years ago, the most extensive attempt to communicate
with chimpanzees went something like this: A newborn chimp was taken
into a household with a newborn baby, and both would be raised
together-twin cribs, twin bassinets, twin high chairs, twin potties,
twin diaper pails, twin baby powder cans. At the end of three years,
the young chimp had, of course, far outstripped the young human in
manual dexterity, running, leaping, climbing and other motor skills.
But while the child was happily babbling away, the chimp could say
only, and with enormous difficulty, “Mama,” “Papa,” and “cup.” From
this it was widely concluded that in language, reasoning and other
higher mental functions, chimpanzees were only minimally competent:
“Beasts abstract not.”
But in thinking over these experiments, two psychologists,
Beatrice and Robert Gardner, at the University of Nevada
realized that the pharynx and larynx of the chimp are not suited
for human speech. Human beings exhibit a curious multiple use
of the mouth for eating, breathing and communicating. In
insects such as crickets, which call to one another by rubbing
their legs, these three functions are performed by completely
separate organ systems. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious.
The exploitation of organ systems with other
functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the
comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. It
might be, the Gardner’s reasoned, that chimpanzees have
substantial language abilities which could not be expressed
because of the limitations of their anatomy. Was there any
symbolic language, they asked, that could employ the strengths
rather than the weaknesses of chimpanzee anatomy?
The Gardner’s hit upon a brilliant idea: Teach a chimpanzee American
sign language, known by its acronym Ameslan, and sometimes as
“American deaf and dumb language” (the “dumb” refers, of course, to
the inability to speak and not to any failure of intelligence). It
is ideally suited to the immense manual dexterity of the chimpanzee.
It also may have all the crucial design features of verbal
languages.
There is by now a vast library of described and filmed
conversations, employing Ameslan and other gestural languages, with
Washoe, Lucy, Lana and other chimpanzees studied by the Gardners and
others. Not only are there chimpanzees with working vocabularies of
100 to 200 words; they are also able to distinguish among
nontrivially different grammatical patterns and syntaxes. What is
more, they have been remarkably inventive in the construction of new
words and phrases.
On seeing for the first time a duck land quacking in a pond, Washoe
gestured “waterbird,” which is the same phrase used in English and
other languages, but which Washoe invented for the occasion.
Having
never seen a spherical fruit other than an apple, but knowing the
signs for the principal colors, Lana, upon spying a technician
eating an orange, signed “orange apple.” After tasting a watermelon,
Lucy described it as “candy drink” or “drink fruit,” which is
essentially the same word form as the English “water melon.” But
after she had burned her mouth on her first radish, Lucy forever
after described them as “cry hurt food.”
A small doll placed
unexpectedly in Washoe’s cup elicited the response “Baby in my
drink.” When Washoe soiled, particularly clothing or furniture, she
was taught the sign “dirty,” which she then extrapolated as a
general term of abuse. A rhesus monkey that evoked her displeasure
was repeatedly signed at: “Dirty monkey, dirty monkey, dirty
monkey.”
Occasionally Washoe would say things like “Dirty Jack, gimme
drink.” Lana, in a moment of creative annoyance, called her
trainer “You green shit.” Chimpanzees have invented swear
words. Was-hoe also seems to have a sort of sense of humor; once,
when riding on her trainer’s shoulders and, perhaps inadvertently,
wetting him, she signed: “Funny, funny.”
Lucy was eventually able to distinguish clearly the meanings of the
phrases “Roger tickle Lucy” and “Lucy tickle Roger,” both of which
activities she enjoyed with gusto. Likewise, Lana extrapolated from
“Tim groom Lana” to “Lana groom Tim.” Washoe was observed “reading”
a magazine-i.e., slowly turning the pages, peering intently at the
pictures and making, to no one in particular, an appropriate sign,
such as “cat” when viewing a photograph of a tiger, and “drink” when
examining a Vermouth advertisement.
Having learned the sign “open”
with a door, Washoe extended the concept to a briefcase. She also
attempted to converse in Ameslan with the laboratory cat, who turned
out to be the only illiterate in the facility. Having acquired this
marvelous method of communication, Washoe may have been surprised
that the cat was not also competent in Ameslan. And when one day
Jane, Lucy’s foster mother, left the laboratory, Lucy gazed after
her and signed: “Cry me. Me cry.”
Boyce Rensberger is a sensitive and gifted reporter for the
New York
Times whose parents could neither speak nor hear, although he is in
both respects normal. His first language, however, was Ameslan. He
had been abroad on a European assignment for the Times for some
years. On his return to the United States, one of his first domestic
duties was to look into the Gardners’ experiments with Washoe.
After
some little time with the chimpanzee, Rensberger reported,
“Suddenly
I realized I was conversing with a member of another species in my
native tongue.”
The use of the word tongue is, of course,
figurative: it is built deeply into the structure of the language (a
word that also means “tongue”). In fact, Rensberger was conversing
with a member of another species in his native “hand.” And it is
just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans
to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to
communicate with the animals.
In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are
being taught a variety of other gestural languages.
At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia,
they are learning a specific computer language called (by the
humans, not the chimps) “Yerkish.” The computer records all of its
subjects’ conversations, even during the night when no humans are in
attendance; and from its ministrations we have learned that
chimpanzees prefer jazz to rock and movies about chimpanzees to
movies about human beings. Lana had, by January 1976, viewed The
Developmental Anatomy of the Chimpanzee 245 times. She would
undoubtedly appreciate a larger film library.
In the illustration on page 120, Lana is shown requesting, in proper
Yerkish, a piece of banana from the computer. The syntax required to
request from the computer water, juice, chocolate candy, music,
movies, an open window and companionship are also displayed. (The
machine provides for many of Lana’s needs, but not all. Sometimes,
in the middle of the night, she forlornly types out: “Please,
machine, tickle Lana.”) More elaborate requests and commentaries,
each requiring a creative use of a set grammatical form, have been
developed subsequently.
Lana monitors her sentences on a computer display, and erases those
with grammatical errors. Once, in the midst of Lana’s construction
of an elaborate sentence, her trainer mischievously and repeatedly
interposed, from his separate computer console, a word that made
nonsense of Lana’s sentence. She gazed at her computer display,
spied her trainer at his console, and composed a new sentence:
“Please, Tim, leave room.” Just as Washoe and Lucy can be said to
speak, Lana can be said to write.
At an early stage in the development of Washoe’s verbal abilities,
Jacob Bronowski and a colleague wrote a scientific paper denying the
significance of Washoe’s use of gestural language because, in the
limited data available to Bronowski, Washoe neither inquired nor
negated. But later observations showed that Washoe and other
chimpanzees were perfectly able both to ask questions and to deny
assertions put to them.
And it is difficult to see any significant difference in quality
between chimpanzee use of gestural language and the use of ordinary
speech by children in a manner that we unhesitatingly attribute to
intelligence. In reading Bronowski’s paper I cannot help but feel
that a little pinch of human chauvinism has crept in, an echo of
Locke’s “Beasts abstract not.” In 1949, the American anthropologist
Leslie White stated unequivocally:
“Human behavior is symbolic behavior; symbolic behavior is human
behavior.”
What would White have made of Washoe, Lucy and Lana?
These findings on chimpanzee language and intelligence have an
intriguing bearing on “Rubicon” arguments-the contention that the
total brain mass, or at least the ratio of brain to body mass, is a
useful index of intelligence. Against this point of view it was once
argued that the lower range of the brain masses of microcephalic
humans overlaps the upper range of brain masses of adult chimpanzees
and gorillas; and yet, it was said, microcephalies have some,
although severely impaired, use of language-while the apes have
none.
But in only relatively few cases are microcephalies capable of
human speech. One of the best behavioral descriptions of
microcephalies was written by a Russian physician, S. Korsakov, who
in 1893 observed a female microcephalic named “Masha.” She could
understand a very few questions and commands and could occasionally
reminisce on her childhood.
She sometimes chattered away, but there was little coherence
to what she uttered. Korsakov characterized her speech as
having “an extreme poverty of logical associations.” As an
example of her poorly adapted and automaton-like intelligence,
Korsakov described her eating habits. When food was present
on the table, Masha would eat. But if the food was abruptly
removed in the midst of a meal, she would behave as if the
meal had ended, thanking those in charge and piously blessing
herself.
If the food were returned, she would eat again. The
pattern apparently was subject to indefinite repetition. My own
impression is that Lucy or Washoe would be a far more
interesting dinner companion than Masha, and that the
comparison of microcephalic humans with normal apes is not
inconsistent with some sort of “Rubicon” of intelligence. Of
course, both the quality and the quantity of neural connections
are probably vital for the sorts of intelligence that we can easily
recognize.
Recent experiments performed by James Dewson of the Stanford
University School of Medicine and his colleagues give some
physiological support to the idea of language centers in the simian
neocortex - in particular, like humans, in the left hemisphere.
Monkeys were trained to press a green light when they heard a hiss
and a red light when they heard a tone.
Some seconds after a sound
was heard, the red or the green light would appear at some
unpredictable position- different each time -on the control panel.
The monkey pressed the appropriate light and, in the case of a
correct guess, was rewarded with a pellet of food. Then the time
interval between hearing the sound and seeing the light was
increased up to twenty seconds. In order to be rewarded, the monkeys
now had to remember for twenty seconds which noise they had heard.
Dew-son’s team then surgically excised part of the so-called
auditory association cortex from the left hemisphere of the neocortex in the temporal lobe.
When retested, the monkeys had very
poor recall of which sound they were then hearing. After less than a
second they could not recall whether it was a hiss or a tone. The
removal of a comparable part of the temporal lobe from the right
hemisphere produced no effect whatever on this task.
“It looks,” Dewson was reported to say, “as if we removed the structure in the
monkeys’ brains that may be analogous to human language centers.”
Similar studies on rhesus monkeys, but using visual rather than
auditory stimuli, seem to show no evidence of a difference between
the hemispheres of the neocortex.
Because adult chimpanzees are generally thought (at least by
zookeepers) to be too dangerous to retain in a home or home
environment, Washoe and other verbally accomplished
chimpanzees have been involuntarily “retired” soon after
reaching puberty. Thus we do not yet have experience with the
adult language abilities of monkeys and apes. One of the most
intriguing questions is whether a verbally accomplished
chimpanzee mother will be able to communicate language to her
offspring. It seems very likely that this should be possible and
that a community of chimps initially competent in gestural language
could pass down the language to subsequent generations.
Where such communication is essential for survival, there is already
some evidence that apes transmit extragenetic or cultural
information. Jane Goodall observed baby chimps in the wild emulating
the behavior of their mothers and learning the reasonably complex
task of finding an appropriate twig and using it to prod into a
termite’s nest so as to acquire some of these tasty delicacies.
Differences in group behavior-something that it is very tempting to
call cultural differences-have been reported among chimpanzees,
baboons, macaques and many other primates. For example, one group of
monkeys may know how to eat bird’s eggs, while an adjacent band of
precisely the same species may not. Such primates have a few dozen
sounds or cries, which are used for intra-group communication, with
such meanings as “Flee; here is a predator.”
But the sound of the
cries differs somewhat from group to group: there are regional
accents. An even more striking experiment was performed accidentally
by Japanese primatologists attempting to relieve an overpopulation
and hunger problem in a community of macaques on an island in south
Japan. The anthropologists threw grains of wheat on a sandy beach.
Now it is very difficult to separate wheat grains one by one from
sand grains; such an effort might even expend more energy than
eating the collected wheat would provide.
But one brilliant macaque,
Imo, perhaps by accident or out of pique, threw handfuls of the
mixture into the water. Wheat floats; sand sinks, a fact that Imo
clearly noted. Through the sifting process she was able to eat well
(on a diet of soggy wheat, to be sure). While older macaques, set in
their ways, ignored her, the younger monkeys appeared to grasp the
importance of her discovery, and imitated it. In the next
generation, the practice was more widespread; today all macaques on
the island are competent at water sifting, an example of a cultural
tradition among the monkeys.
Earlier studies on Takasakiyama, a mountain in northeast
Kyushu inhabited by macaques, show a similar pattern in
cultural evolution. Visitors to Takasakiyama threw caramels wrapped
in paper to the monkeys - a common practice in Japanese zoos, but one
the Takasakiyama macaques had never before encountered. In the
course of play, some young monkeys discovered how to unwrap the
caramels and eat them.
The habit was passed on successively to their
playmates, their mothers, the dominant males (who among the macaques
act as babysitters for the very young) and finally to the subadult
males, who were at the furthest social remove from the monkey
children. The process of acculturation took more than three years.
In natural primate communities, the existing nonverbal
communications are so rich that there is little pressure for the
development of a more elaborate gestural language. But if gestural
language were necessary for chimpanzee survival, there can be little
doubt that it would be transmitted culturally down through the
generations.
I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language
in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate
were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about
1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies
exceeding 10 percent of that number. Although a few years ago it
would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not
appear to me out of the question that, after a few generations in
such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs
of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in
English or Japanese (with perhaps an “as told to” after the
by-line).
If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of
abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as
“human rights”? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before
killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show
before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts
at conversion?
I recently was escorted through a large primate research
laboratory by its director. We approached a long corridor lined,
to the vanishing point as in a perspective drawing, with caged
chimpanzees. They were one, two or three to a cage, and I am
sure the accommodations were exemplary as far as such institutions
(or for that matter traditional zoos) go. As we approached the
nearest cage, its two inmates bared their teeth and with incredible
accuracy let fly great sweeping arcs of spittle, fairly drenching
the lightweight suit of the facility’s director.
They then uttered a
staccato of short shrieks, which echoed down the corridor to be
repeated and amplified by other caged chimps, who had certainly not
seen us, until the corridor fairly shook with the screeching and
banging and rattling of bars. The director informed me that not only
spit is apt to fly in such a situation; and at his urging we
retreated. I was powerfully reminded of those American motion
pictures of the 1930s and 40s, set in some vast and dehumanized
state or federal penitentiary, in which the prisoners banged their
eating utensils against the bars at the appearance of the tyrannical
warden.
These chimps are healthy and well-fed. If they are “only”
animals, if they are beasts which abstract not, then my comparison
is a piece of sentimental foolishness. But chimpanzees can abstract.
Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have
certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer,
but I think it is certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why,
exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major
city, are apes in prison?
For all we know, occasional viable crosses between humans and
chimpanzees are possible.*
* Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had fortv-eight
chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the
correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have
forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a
viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare.
The natural experiment must have been
tried very infrequently, at least recently. If such off-spring are
ever produced, what will their legal status be? The cognitive
abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching
questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which
special ethical considerations are due, and can, I hope, help to
extend our ethical perspectives downward through the taxa on Earth
and upwards to extraterrestrial organisms, if they exist.
It is hard to imagine the emotional significance for chimpanzees of
learning language. Perhaps the closest analogy is the discovery of
language by intelligent human beings with severe sensory organ
impairment. While the depth of understanding, intelligence and
sensitivity of Helen Keller, who could neither see, hear nor speak,
greatly exceeds that of any chimpanzee, her account of her discovery
of language carries some of the feeling tone that this remarkable
development in primate languages may convey to the chimpanzee,
particularly in a context where language enhances survival or is
strongly reinforced.
One day Miss Keller’s teacher prepared to take her for a walk:
“She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm
sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a
thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure. We walked down the path
to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle
with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher
placed my hand under the spout.
As the cool stream gushed over my
hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then
rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of
her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something
forgotten-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of
language was revealed to me. I knew then that W-A-T-E-R meant that
wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living
word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
There
were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be
swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a
name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned into
the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.
That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that
had come to me.”
Perhaps the most striking aspect of these three exquisite paragraphs
is Helen Keller’s own sense that her brain had a latent capability
for language, needing only to be introduced to it. This essentially
Platonic idea is also, as we have seen, consistent with what is
known, from brain lesions, of the physiology of the neocortex; and
also with the theoretical conclusions drawn by Noam Chomsky of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from comparative linguistics
and laboratory experiments on learning. In recent years it has
become clear that the brains of nonhuman primates are similarly
prepared, although probably not quite to the same degree, for the
introduction of language.
The long-term significance of teaching language to the other
primates is difficult to overestimate. There is an arresting passage
in Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man:
“The difference in mind between
man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of
degree and not of kind. ... If it could be proved that certain high
mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts,
self-consciousness, et cetera, were absolutely peculiar to man,
which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these
qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced
intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the results of the
continued use of a perfect language.”
This same opinion on the remarkable powers of language and
human intercommunication can be found in quite a different
place, the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel. God, in a
strangely defensive attitude for an omnipotent being, is worried
that men intend to build a tower that will reach to heaven. (His
attitude is similar to the concern he expresses after Adam eats
the apple.)
To prevent Mankind from reaching heaven, at least
metaphorically, God does not destroy the tower, as, for
example, Sodom is destroyed. Instead, he says,
“Behold, they
are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only
the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they
propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go
down, and there confuse their language, that they may not
understand one another’s speech”
(Genesis 11:67).
The continued use of a “perfect” language . . . What sort of
culture, what kind of oral tradition would chimpanzees establish
after a few hundred or a few thousand years of communal use of a
complex gestural language? And if there were such an isolated
continuous chimpanzee community, how would they begin to view the
origin of language? Would the Gardners and the workers at the Yerkes
Primate Center be remembered dimly as legendary folk heroes or gods
of another species? Would there be myths, like those of Prometheus,
Thoth, or Cannes, about divine beings who had given the gift of
language to the apes?
In fact, the instruction of chimpanzees in gestural language distinctly has some of the same emotion tone and
religious sense of the (truly fictional) episode in the movie and
novel
2001: A Space Odyssey in which a representative of an advanced
extraterrestrial civilization somehow instructs our hominid
ancestors.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that
there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so
willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in
its application once the language is taught. But this raises a
curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no
nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One
possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically
exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of
intelligence.
(This may have been particularly true of the nonhuman
primates who lived in the savannahs; the forests must have offered
some protection to chimpanzees and gorillas from the depredations of
man.)
We may have been the agent of natural selection in suppressing
the intellectual competition. I think we may have pushed back the
frontiers of intelligence and language ability among the nonhuman
primates until their intelligence became just indiscernible. In
teaching gestural language to the chimpanzees, we are beginning a
belated attempt to make amends.
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