Next of kin: what chimpanzees tell us about ourselves

 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were a series of experiments that were conducted on chimpanzees to determine if these animals were capable of understanding or producing human speech. At first, experiments involved the animals actually trying to make human sounds, but it was discovered that chimpanzees lack vocal cords, so they would be unable to make human voice sounds. For some reason, it was considered best that the subjects of these experiments were brought up as human children in human families and taught sign language. The sign language was not so strange, as chimpanzees in the wild do use gestures to communicate with each other. The chimpanzees began to use signs in a naturalistic way- up to about 360 varied signs, and one later was able to teach her child some signs. There was a controversy regarding this language research when one chimpanzee was studied and the methodology of the experiment was poor to be generous. Basically in this study the chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky was rewarded for making signs. Which the other studies ruled out quite early because the point was not to create a reward-based system of communication but an actual system of communication. Because of this controversy, and also the fact that chimpanzee research was being directed towards finding cures for human diseases in the early 1980s, none of these experiments have been replicated. So we cannot conclusively say whether chimpanzees could theoretically communicate with human beings using sign language. Although, for me, it is incredibly obvious that they can seeing as they are our closest cousins and our ability to understand create and use language must have come from somewhere. So probably it came from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. There is an interesting sentence in the Wikipedia article about this topic. " just because they can use the sign to communicate doesn't mean they know what the sign means say some deaf people." what a weirdly constructed sentence. I think if you know what the word water means, and you ask somebody water please or give me water or give me a glass of water you understand what it means. I think this attitude is just evidence that we do not as a species like to accept the fact that we are animals, much like chimpanzees but also like other animals as well. It also reminds me of watching parrots communicate. Parrots can understand some words, and they can use them to communicate with human beings, but parrots also just jabber away saying all kinds of meaningless things. And we can say well that's incoherent the parrots are just babbling - but isn't the majority of what we talk about also just babbling and only meaningful because we have attached some meaning to it? So maybe in the parrot mind there is some kind of meaning attached to the babbling, just like we attach some meaning to our babbling. But back to the book. The great part about this book is not what I just talked about, the great part about the book is the fact that it is a story of one man's understanding of the moral and ethical implications of testing basically people. I like the fact that he refers to his chimpanzee friends as friends and people with personalities and emotions, and that they are creatures that suffer. I have never heard any primatologist refer to the animals they study as people. We can assume that's because only humans are people, but why? Why couldn't a chimpanzee be a person. Especially if they share the same emotional life as us. So eventually the author becomes disillusioned with the whole idea of experimenting on chimpanzees, even though his results were mind-blowing. It's kind of like you treat someone as your friend or rather  your relationship develops into one of friendship, but you started off doing really horrible experiments on them, and not only that, to do these experiments your friend's parents were murdered, and your friend was kidnapped and taken to another country and introduced into a culture that they can never fully fit into and because of their weird cultural upbringing they can never return to their home. There's a great moment when the chimpanzee subject of the experiment,  Washoe, is first introduced to other chimpanzees, and she has this horrifying realization that she is also a chimpanzee and not a human being. I think if you are looking for more scientific explanation of animal intelligence, there are better books. For example, 'Are We Smart Enough to Know That Animals are Smart' is great for that. But this is a great book that explores not just animal cognition, but interspecies empathy.