We keep chewing away at the nature v nurture dichotomy, because it has intuitive attraction both for and against. As I grow older, I sense the power of nature more and more, even though I think the dialectic is cheap and uniformative.

Psychology professor Winthrop Niles Kellogg became interested in feral children who had been raised with animals, as a number of cases were discussed in the late 1920’s. As an ex-pilot in the U.S. Army Air Service with the Croix de Guerre, he was also a very determined man. He could not directly demonstrate that the survivors of these strange cases were developmentally disordered because of their non-human environment, but he could do the reverse.

This idea would take him to a very strange place…

In 1931, as a new parent, he arranged with Robert Yerkes and the Yale Anthropoid Experiment Station at Orange Park in Florida, to acquire a female chimpanzee, which he proposed to raise with his own son. And by “raise”, I mean put the two together all the time, with identical stimuli and educations, so the child had a black, furry doppelganger, a sort of evolutionary twin. The family quit work and started an intensive period of rearing and education.

“For the next nine months, Winthrop and Luella served as experimenters in a project that demanded 12 hours a day from the two of them, seven days a week. With a few exceptions necessary “to meet the indispositions of the infants or experimenters,” the schedule remained unchanged. Winthrop Kellogg was concerned that the experiment measure up to his demands. There was nothing he could do about the age differential between Donald and Gua, nor about the fact that Qua was not obtained shortly after her birth. Nevertheless, he would conduct his experiment as no other prior investigation with apes. He would maintain identical rearing conditions for his two experimental subjects. Further, he would use a variety of tasks to test his infants, not only on a comparative basis but also in looking at developmental sequences within each of them. Lastly, he would maintain sufficient scientific detachment to be able to evaluate objectively the data he was collecting.

So for nine months, Donald and Gua were tested daily on such things as blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span, and others.”

The two played affectionately together, and

“From the moment they first entered each other’s presence there was evidence of curiosity and interest on the part of both. The second time they were acquainted with each other, Gua immediately extended her lips in a series of exploratory kisses on the child’s lips and face. Donald was startled at first but made no avoiding reactions.

Mutual attachment grew after their initial meetings. Gua almost always would make her way to be near Donald, she would stare after him if he was carried from a room, and frequently follow after him. Gua would stand outside Donald’s room if he had yet to wake, and in latter months would open the door to see him.

Gua’s reaction to fear would be to rush towards Donald and hold him tightly as she cried.

Donald learned to say “Gua” which he pronounced as “Gya”, a few days after they met. He would go to her if she did not come to him, and invariably seemed to enjoy feeling and touching her.”

But, the chimpanzee grew faster than the human in many ways, expressing emotion, kissing, becoming jealous. She learned to eat with a spoon, and walked with a human rather than a chimpanzee gait. For the first month, she could not be prised off Kellogg’s trousers; if he was not around she dragged an item of his clothing until he returned.

Kellogg was a tough customer, and totally committed to his experiment, even though its subject had its hairy arms wrapped around his leg. As a valedictory appraisal says

“Winthrop Kellogg was a man of strong likes and dislikes who formed impressions of people on initial encounters, impressions that were not easily altered. He has been described as fair in his dealings with others and perhaps naive in his expectation that he would be treated similarly. He had little tolerance for those he viewed as unjust or those whose behavior he viewed as less than ethical and he had clear ideas about who were the incompetents and scoundrels in science. These negative evaluations often provided Kellogg with the impetus for his own research, thus at times giving it an adversarial quality. He was more than a little egocentric and frequently had difficulty in recognizing validity in positions contrary to his own. Kellogg was an individual with great self-confidence in his professional as well as personal life. Indeed, overconfident might not be too exaggerated a description.

His wife, Luella, apparently resisted him but he convinced her at the end. He seemed indefatigable:

“The tests were exhaustive, and likely exhausting for the experimenters if not for the subjects. There were occasional baby sitters which gave the experimenters a brief respite from their duties, but those were rare occasions. The scientific rigor and ingenuity of these tests is readily apparent from the detailed descriptions provided in the book.

The reader is also likely to notice the impersonal style in which these tests are reported. If the preface and initial chapter of the book were omitted, the reader might not realize that the authors were describing studies involving their own child. At times one gets the impression of an over
zealousness in the pursuit of knowledge. For example, consider the following passage from a chapter that deals with physical differences and similarities:
“The differences between the skulls can be audibly detected by tapping them with the bowl of a spoon or with some similar object. The sound made by Donald’s head is somewhat in the nature of a dull thud, while that obtained from Gua’s is harsher, like the crack of a mallet upon a wooden
croquet or bowling ball. (Kellogg & Kellogg, 1933, p. 25)”

He also recorded the experiment on film – though probably not the bit where he banged them on the nut – and some fragments are posted as remarkable and truly weird Quicktime movies.

After nine months, the experiment was terminated abruptly, and the chimpanzee was taken back to the Yale facility to be gradually reintroduced to its future life as an experimental subject.

As the appraisal points out, there is some doubt as to the reason for this. The work may simply have been too gruelling (and I wonder about the role of the apparently compliant Luella). It was becoming pretty apparent that the monkey was simply behaving like a monkey in the most important ways, and never started on the preliminary path to vocalisation.

But Kellogg noted in his book, “The Ape and The Child: A Comparative Study of the Environmental Influence Upon Early Behavior”, that his son Donald was not learning to talk either. To some extent, he blamed the time spent on the tests, as he fiddled incessantly with his son under controlled conditions.

Basically, it seems the experiment was terminated because the child started to behave like the ape – not surprising, given his original theory that feral children were feral because they learnt from the animals.

That was too much, even for the single-minded scientist, who finally had to admit that he was working with a real family (his) and a child (his own). There is something about this which is surreally beyond daft.

He went on, by the way, to work with porpoises, which led him to discover that human beings can use echolocation to sense the presence of objects they can’t see.

“First, close your eyes and put on a blindfold, and then ask a friend to move a frying pan forward and backward in front of your face. Now start making noises—any noises you want… With a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to tell when the pan is close to you and when it’s not.

You won’t even know you’re hearing an echo. In general, you’ll only catch your sound repeated if it bounces off something far away: First you’d hear your own voice, then a pause, and then the echo of your voice returning to your ear. When you bounce a noise off of something that’s close to your face—like the frying pan—it zips back so fast that it overlaps with the original sound. The brain hears the combination of the two as something like an alteration in pitch. So, you may not hear a discrete echo when you whistle at a frying pan, but your ears can pick up the difference.

Anyone can echolocate, but blind people happen to be especially good at it..”

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under science, strangely compelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.