Some stories just leave me flabbergasted that human beings can be so horrible, in ways that are possible only because we are so civilised. I’ve run a couple of stories about the attempts to integrate chimpanzees into human families to turn them into people, but this experiment really takes the biscuit.

In 1973 Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace decided to prove that Noam Chomsky was wrong in denying the potential of language to non-human species. His team found a ten day old chimp in a research facility, and sent him to the LaFarge family, who kept him happy and dressed in cute kid’s clothes in a toney New York apartment, assisted by the occasional joint. Each day he commuted to Columbia University who put him in the standardised conditions of a school desk, and taught him around 120 words of American Sign Language. He also learnt to “bring his adoptive mother tissues when she cried”.

He grew larger and more boisterous, and the money ran out for the Columbia experiment. He was sent off to live on a concrete floor with other chimps, as a research subject for medical experiments.

Chimps moved like this suffer very badly because they don’t know they are chimpanzees. Some are bashed because they can’t relate to other animals, some pull all the hair out of their bodies. Think about that for a moment. We are a hairless species.

In amongst this appalling account, two completely dreadful stories stick in my mind.

‘There was a children’s book all about Nim while he was in New York, basically a photo book, and Nim kept his one copy of this book safe, even though chimps tend to wreck everything. He would bring it down and show the other chimps, then bring it back to his bunk and keep it under his sleeping area so that no one could destroy it. He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again.”

And then:

“Toward the end of his life, he was paired with an ex-circus chimp named Sally Jones. That, I think, was the first deep relationship he had with his own species. They were inseparable. Sally was a lot older, a lot milder. Nim had a reputation for breaking out of his cage in Texas. When Sally came, he would break out of his cage, but then he’d remember her, and he’d go back and get her. He’d lead her out of the cage and they’d go on a little romp together. Cleveland Amory was always afraid that Nim was going to run off into the woods. But he had no desire to run away. Nim would go to the nearest house and bring Sally with him, and they would raid the refrigerator, go through the closets and try on any shoes that were lying around, and sometimes they’d get into bed and turn on the TV.”

Eventually he was released from vaccine experiments after a public outcry and moved to animal-loving celebrity Cleveland Amory’s ‘Black Beauty’ sanctuary in Texas, where he died at the age of 25. Most chimpanzees live for another 20 years.

Elizabeth Hess, who has recently written a book on the case, and is the subject of the article I quoted, makes an important but simple point in the debate about non-human language. Scientists have given Washoe and Nim collections of signs, which are human artefacts of our communication. As Wikipedia points out,

‘Roger Fouts from the Washoe Project … shares the Gardners’ point of view that the process of acquiring language skills through the natural social interactions gives substantially better results than behavioural conditioning. He argues, based on his own experiments, that pure conditioning can lead to using language as a method mainly to get rewards, rather than raising communication abilities. Fouts later reported that a community of ASL-speaking chimpanzees (including Washoe herself) was spontaneously using this language as a part of their inner communication system. They have even directly taught ASL signs to their children (Loulis) without human help or intervention. This means that not only can they use the language, but it has become a significant part of their lives.”

In other words, we teach primates ASL so they can communicate human stuff. If they could move the notion of language sideways into their stuff, would they develop a language of their own?

We have a word for a profound interpersonal and self-reflective process which has no correlative in the physical universe. It is called “shame”.

I am left to wonder if chimpanzees could ever use sign language to create a notion like that. If they did, would we know what on earth they were referring to? Perhaps they would develop their own poetry and mystery, and puzzles about the universe.

If a chimpanzee ever found a way to ask us, “why are you doing this to me?”, I don’t think we would have an answer.

——–

Laura Ann Petito, who provided much of the human contact in the first experiment, has written about Nim’s death.. Now a psychology professor, she was very young at the time, and pitched into a complex experiment with no preparation. The account is almost ingenuous, with a sort of faux childishness. She concludes with this paragraph:

“In the end, I had to tell my three-year-old daughter this: No, Nim is not your brother. No, he’s not like our neighbour’s cat. No, he’s not like your two sisters. But it’s okay to feel sad — because his was a “life,” one that contributed greatly to our understanding of him, a chimpanzee, and, because of this, we better understand the secrets of being human.”

To me, this leaves out an idea, an absence I can’t really fathom. It doesn’t quite acknowledge the most central fact – his was not just “a life”, it was first and foremost his life. He is an autonomous being, whose existence and experience should not depend on his identity to us.

Herbert Terrace, who helped to start this ghastly story, is still researching in the area. Now he is supervising a graduate student who is training primates to calculate.

“Terrace and Brannon believe that cognitive processes — thought — are needed to explain the kind of complex behavior they are studying. They hope to show that human intelligence, like other human attributes, can be traced to animal origins.

“We have ample evidence that animals can think without language,” said Terrace, who heads Columbia’s Primate Cognition Laboratory. “In our current and previous research, we have shown that animals solved complex problems without help from external cues.”

He has constructed a kind of paradox. You can’t assume that chimpanzees using sign language are working with true language, because they don’t exhibit the kind of grammar that transcends simple conditioning. (A hotly contested position, of course.) But you can’t assume that animals don’t think because they don’t use language – and the positive evidence he is advancing points to a certain respect for the animals as autonomous selves.

Who knows what he thinks about his exuberent youth in the dead of night. We know what Nim felt.

“Finish hug Nim” was one of the statements he would sign to people in ASL.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under crime, science. 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.