Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky
Natasha Mitchell, host of the excellent ABC National Radio Program (Australia) recently interviewed Elizabeth Hess, author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human.
Natasha Mitchell: The story of project Nim begins with an ambitious research project whose goal is really embodied in the name the chimp was given. What was the project and tell us about the name?Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky (ABC National Radio)Elizabeth Hess: Nim Chimpsky was the chimp's name and the psychologist at Columbia University whose brainstorm this was was called Herbert Terrace and he was BF Skinner's protégé. And there was a longstanding argument essentially between BF Skinner and Noam Chomsky, famous linguist and philosopher, over whether or not you could draw the line between humans and non-humans at language. BF Skinner of course argued that language was learned, even a chimpanzee could learn a language; whereas Chomsky argued language only could be found in the human species and there was actually a biological organ responsible for the fact that we can speak and most animal species do not use language the way that we do.
The idea was to put an infant chimp into a human family, allow that chimp to learn language in the same way that human children might learn language, that they would absorb it naturally from their siblings. And the reason that they were using American sign language is there had been earlier studies which had shown that chimps are extremely gestural, they were able to learn American sign language whereas they don't have the same voice boxes that we have. But no chimp had been raised from infancy in a human language and taught ASL, so this was an experiment that everybody was really looking at and watching to see what would happen.
...
Natasha Mitchell: He even got to a point where he drank beer and smoked.
Elizabeth Hess: Yes, it was the 70s so you know it wasn't uncommon for Columbia students to be hanging around at night smoking pot, and Nim loved pot and eventually developed his own sign for give me a joint. You know chimps have the same vices that we have. Nim started the day for his entire life with a cup of coffee and as he grew older was often grumpy if he didn't get it.
the latest
latest episodes
http://www.livescience.com/animals/080529-chimp-human.html
Chomsky won. The stubborn little bastard just wouldn't ''talk.''
Skinner won - no matter what the others think.
I can't believe they just up and sent the chimp to a medical research facility. You would think there would be so many other primatologists, or even linguists that had research groups that would be very interested in continuing the work of Terrace.
I dare say there are a number of home sapiens who could not pass all such tests to prove their humanity.
i would love to share a stick of some mellow hydro with this cat, er, chimp.
#3 ZombieBabyDiego:
''Skinner won - no matter what the others think.''
I suppose that includes project director Terrace who says Chomsky won.
Every 10-20 years a funded attempt fails to make our hairy little cousins talk. But they keep coming, failing to understand the difference between a sign and a symbol, and thus the fundamental difference between man and ape.
Skinner by no means won. All children who do not have some sort of pathology and are exposed to language learn to speak w/ a native fluency. Even if they are not taught language, but just around it they learn to talk. This is not true of animals. Even chimps as far as I know do not naturally pick up sign language. For a modern example of Children creating Language being spontaneously look at Nicaraguan Sign Language. Skinner's model has a hard time accounting for all of that. There are linguists who disagree w/ this, but they are in the minority. The majority of Linguists have adopted Minimalism which is Chomsky's new take on Language. There are other theories out there for sure including HPSG and TAG, but Minimalism has a much larger piece of the pie per se.
Send him to Guantanamo. They'll make him talk.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/03/31/Nim_Chimpsky/
The saddest part, to me, is this:
"The former graduate students in New York believe that Nim had no idea he was a chimpanzee. One of them suggested to me that Nim might have thought he was going to grow up, lose all his facial and body hair and eventually look like the people who were around him.
(...)
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."
But could Chimpsky roll his own joints?
'Cause if he could do that, I would be in favor of electing him President...
behaviorism schme-haviorism.
Funny, Zeroy, I almost sneezed the roach.
...This thread raises an even more important question: when is Boing Boing going to hire a chimp as one of its bloggers?
:-P
For a short time I worked on another of these projects with Alan and Trixie Gardner in Reno in 1980. We found it wasn't quite so easy to determine if chimps "have language". I remember sitting in a discussion with a linguist who was hard pressed to supply a useful definition of language. And The Unusual Suspect makes a crucial point that things get tricky when you consider humans that can't or don't communicate.
Yes language is different than communication and it's true chimps won't readily take up sign language on their own, but they did learn signs (faster than humans up to age 4 or so), and used them appropriately. At least on our project, they never heard English -signing was it.
A fellow slave (sorry, RA) summed it up nicely: "They need it to get by during the day". It's how they interacted with us. One example; on a hot day swinging around in the hay barn it seemed quite appropriate for Dar (one of our chimps) to sign "ice cream" -sure seemed like a good idea to me -and Reno's downtown Dairy Queen was a special treat on hot days! I'm sure they wouldn't do it unless we made them (hmm... like my teenagers) but to suggest they had no idea what they were doing seems wrong.
Herb Terrace indeed chalked it all up to imitation and had an ongoing feud with the Gardners about this. Personally, I'd challenge anyone to say our kids don't also learn by imitation. We tested the chimps rigorously, requiring them to use the sign unprompted by the sign itself for 15 days in a row before it was considered reliable. 15th day, no sign -it dropped back to day one -and still there were 150 reliable signs -a lot in sign language. We did this most often with slide shows of objects and actions, though other unprompted uses were counted.
It does seem difficult to place chimps after they have finished a project. Dar is up at Friends of Washoe with other chimps from the project but it has been no cakewalk for Roger Fouts to keep all that set up.
Kind a wish we'd thought of lighting up a fatty with them though -that might have been interesting!
That chimp had a monkey on his back!
The Chomsky/monkey meme goes back a long way. This piece was created in early 80's.
http://empiresnafu.org/tfuc/chomkey.html
What I want to know is if Chomsky has a sign he uses to indicate it's time for a joint.
And of course Chomsky "won". Cripe, language is absolutely innate in Humans. You (or I) wouldn't be recognizable as a Homo Sapiens without the ability. Same can't be said of any other species.
Still, communications between species* is also a part of life, but that isn't Chomsky's argument.
*I've had a couple of really great cats that regularly indicated to me when it was time to get fed "wet" canned food, time for an intense petting, time to play rough, etc. None used syntax, all got their point across.
Not being a linguist, and not having a chimp in this fight, I'd guess that it is a matter of degree rather than a sharp difference in kind. Humans brains have evolved to develop the ability to speak to an extreme degree. Chimps, dogs, et al have a much much less evolved need for such abilities, though obviously they use some part of their brains to communicate non-verbally. It is just such a huge difference of degree that really Skinner and Chomsky are both winners. Yaaay!
The more interesting issue is the possibility that rights and personhood could also be a matter of degree. Why do we feel less empathy for a crab being boiled alive than we do a dog being beaten? I don't think chimps should have the right to vote, but to me there is no hard shining line between us - just a slippery slope that is fascinating to ponder as I take a bite of my cow sandwich.
CHEETA
I never got along with the chimps
—they were always biting me.
— Maureen O'Sullivan
It seems like a good life:
fussed-over house pet and companion
to the boy, protected by
the long knife and great strength
of The Lord of The Jungle,
he is loved, allowed almost any excess,
free to come and go as he pleases.
First to discover, his passion
is disorder. Screaming at
outsiders he trashes their tents,
steals what's not nailed down,
destroys what can't be carried.
When threatened he flees
to the safety of Tarzan's arms.
Un-gawa, Cheeta!
Cheeta, Un-gawa!
Means GO! Means NOW!
Means HURRY! Means HELP!
Means, finally, THINK!
Ah, the good life slides away like
a crocodile. Never to understand,
out of his head with frustration,
he is reduced to howling rages
and manic flights, mouthing the terror
of the Word, fucking up the rescue,
the liberating, delivered message.
He is always a dark parody of Tarzan,
a beastly thing. Black against
th
He is always a dark parody of Tarzan,
a beastly thing. Black against
the white sky of that shining body
he clings, riding the huge swells
of an elephant tide, stunned witness
to a world in which he is both
fevered supplicant and mere survivor.
If you want to learn about oranges, but all that you have to compare them to is apples, your learning will probably be shallow. If you have a lime to compare to though, well, you have to know a LOT about an orange to understand why it's different from a lime.
When we study language, it is similarly singular. But as we've learned, teach a chimpanzee what it can learn of language and you learn much more about what language really is.
And when we study ourselves, we suffer from the same lack. But when we study chimpanzees, we learn as much about ourselves as we learn about the chimps.
Think how much we could learn if we could live among chimps. It may be unrealistic (okay, it's really, really unrealistic - we can't all be gifted with Jane Goodall's talents) but think what we would learn.
BTY cool poem Buddy66. Yours?
i am now surer than ever that '2001: a space odyssey' is stone cold documentary.
"Natasha Mitchell, host of the excellent ABC National Radio Program (Australia)..."
Wow, it makes it sound like there is only one National Radio Program in Australia, and it's hosted by Natasha Mitchell.
On the other hand, I think you mean "Natasha Mitchell, host of the excellent 'All in the Mind' program, featured on ABC Radio National (Australia)..."
;)
Chimpsky must have understood more than he could say. The most talkative humans are seldom the wisest.
Uncle Geo sez:
I'll take up that challenge: "our kids don't learn by imitation". At least, not for important parts of language acquisition, such as grammar. The fact they don't is a crucial premise to the "poverty of the stimulus" (POTS) argument, and it's one of the bedrocks of Chomsky's work.Eustace,
Yep, a looong time ago when I was masquarading as a beat poet.
Thanks.
Kids certainly CAN learn everything by imitation. Suppose you NEVER heard an ungrammatical utterance, and were corrected from infancy for syntax errors; you would grow up a perfect 'enry 'iggens and a great pain in the ass. We learn to write not from grammar books but from the writers we read. Monkey see, monkey do; man hear, man do.
@Buddy66,
Kids don't learn language by imitation. Children have their own grammar internally. If not then why do they come up with words like "amn't" instead of "am not" "seeked" instead of "sought". Trust me they didn't hear these words anywhere. I at least have never heard an adult say them. (Please don't bring up dialects like AAVE (African American Venacular English) since I consider AAVE to be properly spoken and not to be bad grammar, it just has a stigmitized status in the US-People incorrectly call it Ebonics) Also take a sentence with these words and ask a child to repeat it back, they will repeat it back with their version not yours. You can get them to parrot it back correctly if you try, but ask again in ten minutes with no further coaching and it reverts right back. Also this happens after kids learn the right forms in more of a memorized form. So they can memorize a few words, but can't correctly form the past of words they don't know. When they discretely chunk each word and develop a more sophisticated grammar then you get words like seeked and amn't since based on the rules children have developed for creating past or contractions they would be acceptable except they are exceptions in the English language to the well formed rule. So basically in order to account for this you would have to find who they are imitating when they say this. Going the imitation route you have to account for this as well as explaining how children know certain constructions are bad even though no one tells them they are bad, but they can make the correct version easy even if they aren't familar with it.
#29 posted by ULOR:
''Kids don't learn language by imitation. Children have their own grammar internally.''
Ulor, let me quote YOU from an earlier comment:
''All children who ... are exposed to language learn to speak w/ a native fluency. Even if they are not taught language, but just [sic?] around it they learn to talk.''
But how? You'll have to help me out here. How can they just be ''around it'' and learn it without imitating what others are doing with it? Is there any controlled study you know of where children were not taught language but just allowed to hang around people and sort of pick it up, without imitating anyone, through non-verbal osmosis or something? How could that occur? I can't imagine another means to acquire language. Can you expand on this and clear it up for me?
I have to know how you think words are acquired before we can tackle syntax and grammar, which are merely part of the framework that conveys meaning through language from one person to another.
Words are memorized, but that wasnt the point of Skinner's argument with Chomsky at all. Skinner argued that syntax and grammar were learned in the same way as other learned things and could be taught and that the language faculty was taught to children like tying shoes. Chomsky argued that the language faculty was innate and that children form internal grammars which eventually become Universal Grammar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
My point is that children have their own internal grammar which is not taught to them, but developed internally. Sort of like how an array or structure in computers is developed before it is filled. And even more interesting it continues to change and become more sophisticated as children age. Children don't use passive constructions such as "The ball was hit by Bill" normally till almost 7 although there are exceptions. The internal structure is there and when the right input (language via words) is given it acts in predictable ways.
Also a major problem w/ chimp research is anthropomorphism. If you have ever had to listen to some explain that there dog is smart and like a person, then you have been subjected to this. I agree that animals used in these experiments were treated horribly and from what I can read it violates my own principles with how to treat animals, but that doesn't change my opinion that Language (yes with a capital L) is uniquely human.
This is weird . . . although I may be having a real senior moment. Entire sentences seem to have been edited out of my reply — it might have made it better, of course, but still . . .
Is that possible? Not disemvoweling, but editing!
Buddy,
I think that you got hit by the glitch.
Antinous,
That's some glitch! An AI glitch, I mean it. I've had editors weren't that good. I've edited copy and can easily argue that the glitch knows what it's doing. Is there any way to put it on the payroll? I bet it would do it for scale.
/ laughing all the way to the ice bucket...
Now the son of a bitch is stuttering for me!
Buddy,
You invoked the God of Accidental HTML. When you used a < , you opened a tag and it rendered the rest of those sections invisible. If you want to use < or > , you have to code them in.
WHOOO! Then there IS a god in the machine. I thought that was just old time Greeky stuff.
Well, thanks for the explanation and your time; but it's sure amused the hell out of me . . . and my penates.
/back to the ice bucket
I'll preface this all by saying that like many others with Psych degrees, I've been earning my living doing something else for a few decades so I am not as up on the literature as many here.
Domster, I meant that kids can learn through imitation too so it's hard to make the case that Gardner's chimps or Nim "only" learn through imitation as if that somehow diminishes the accomplishment. Our chimps used it appropriately to get by.
JetSetSC, I think, makes an excellent point -either/or- is not really valid. Kids are probably "hard wired" for language in the same way birds are hard wired for song (summed up nicely as "Fish gotta swim; bird gotta fly"). Birds raised in isolation sing a song that has some characteristics of the song its parents sing. Imitation is a way to learn but it's not the only.
I came out of the experience thinking that what mainly separated us from the other animals was not necessarily language directly but that humans can take control of the learning paradigm. We somehow can step back and "see" how learning works and we can design ways to teach ourselves. (There have been only a few examples of this kind of aha experience in animals but many examples of perfectly serviceable communication among animals where, as a species, they have all the communication they need to survive.)
With this seemingly unique ability to understand and synthesize learning experiences we expand our admittedly more vast hard wired capabilities for language -i.e language is a product of that ability. Just a hunch though.
#31 posted by ULOR
''Words are memorized, but that wasn't the point of Skinner's argument with Chomsky at all.''
I didn't ask you about Chomsky vs. Skinner. I asked you about how children acquire language. After first denying that children learn language by imitation, you now say ''words are memorized,'' I guess you mean learned. Okay, gotcha. Why didn't you say that in the first place?
I have no doubt that the healthy human brain contains a grammatical paradigm that is, in all likelihood, ''universal.'' And I certainly agree that the human brain, and what is done with it, is unique ''in kind'' and not degree from that of all other animals. There were a couple of other commenters who defended Skinner, not me. The brain is obviously hard-wired for language and its grammatical framework — but it has to be triggered by other people; it has to be taught or otherwise actively acquired from them through imitation.
So you have no debate with me. I did not mention the Chomsky-Skinner dispute because it doesn't matter for my point that humans learn language from each other. They learn it because they CAN learn it; chimps can't. But that's not going to stop the next bunch of dipshits with a research grant from playing monkey see-monkey do with more unfortunate primates. And all because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE IS.
Do you? Okay, describe it precisely in one short paragraph or less. Precisely.
@39 No one totally understands language and I wont even try to come up with a working definition in a paragraph.
My whole point just to clarify is that children don't learn language by imitation in a simplistic I see that and now I can do it kind of way. Children need exposure to language like you mention they have to hear it, but in my example I was thinking like in an orphanage where no one actively teaches the child to speak, but none the less the child learns to speak by being around language. Yes it is imitation in a way, but more it is a synthesis of the input into their own language. If a child has no exposure to language they will never learn to talk after age 9 or so. This is called the critical period. This is why kids learn foreign languages easy, but adults struggle because we try to learn language not acquire it.
So my point is that children are not taught language they learn it because there brains is wired to learn it. And yes Children can learn languages no one around them speaks such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. Before the children developed it recently it didn't exist they taught it to themselves as a variation of a collection of inputs such as home sign and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
"The idea was to put an infant chimp into a human family, allow that chimp to learn language in the same way that human children might learn language, that they would absorb it naturally from their siblings." . . ."But no chimp had been raised from infancy in a human language and taught ASL, so this was an experiment that everybody was really looking at and watching to see what would happen."
First and foremost, I would like to explain why this paragraph is misleading. It leads one to assume that Project Nim was the very first study to attempt to research ape language acquisition in this manner. This is certainly not the case. Cross-fostering projects using chimpanzees actually began in the 1930s in the United States although these earlier studies did not use ASL as the target language. Then in 1966 Project Washoe began(well before Project Nim) and studied a 10 month old chimpanzee, named Washoe, who was cross-fostered by the Gardners. This study was specifically designed to research the effect of immersing a non-human primate into a human environment and to determine whether or not said primate would acquire language skills (ASL) in the same or a similar manner to that observed in human children. This necessarily means that Washoe was provided with a home that was psychologically as well as physically equivalent to that in which human children are raised. This type of cross-fostering project operates on the premise that language as it has developed in humans is social in nature. One of its primary functions then is to allow for appropriate and necessary communication between members of a community.
This then leads me to my second point. The above paragraph is also misleading because we are given to understand that Nim was raised in an environment similar to that which I have just described. However, if you read Terrace's work ("Can an Ape Create a Sentence?"in Science Vol.#206, No.4421, 1979) it will be clear from his methods that there are significant differences in the environmental situation of these two chimpanzees. Although Nim lived in a human home the research project required that he be taken out of his home daily for language lessons in an environment that more closely resembled speech therapy sessions than anything else. Thus, Nim's primary language environment did not accommodate the social aspect of communication. The Nim study focused on an externally structured language instruction rather than a more natural language acquisition opportunity. This may sound like semantics but any good educator knows that a full immersion environment will be more effective when attempting to learn a second language than any formal instruction could be.
Buddy says: "But that's not going to stop the next bunch of dipshits with a research grant from playing monkey see-monkey do with more unfortunate primates. And all because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE IS."
We don't know what Gravity is -should we stop studying physics?
You are making what I call the Golden Fleece argument (after William Proxmires neanderthal annual prize): Basic research is useless because I can't see how it fits into the progress of the field (oh, and it costs me money).
#40 posted by ULOR
''No one totally understands language and I wont even try to come up with a working definition in a paragraph.''
Wouldn't it be fun to try? C'mon. I mean, maybe we can't sail the bounding main or explore the Amazon in a canoe, but there are intellectual adventures aplenty in this life; and although it's not as challenging as finding the source of the Nile, seeking a brief definition of language (that does not repeatedly beg the question) could be one of them, don't you think?
''Children can learn languages no one around them speaks, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language.''
The other children ''speak'' it around them, don't they? Hell, they invented it; so they learn from each other. Except in the case of raving lunatics, language is SHARED communication between people. Those kids have a shared innate ability to create language, so they do it. It's really a wonderful thing. (Incidentally, close siblings living in otherwise isolated settings often invent private languages, e.g. the famous Bronte children.)
Do you know 'The Miracle Worker,' the film about Helen Keller and her teacher? The scene at the water pump in the garden is, in itself, a visual essay on the definition and understanding of language. It's astoundingly portentous.
@41:
And still nothing succeeds. It may be stubbornness or an affectionate reluctance to draw a line of true difference between man and ape, but people just don't give up, do they? The ape is never going to take part in human language. The ape will never create and bestow non-sensory meaning on things or events; nor will it ever understand and share such creative bestowments by others. Apes will never ''symbol.''
@42:
Such fruitless repetition of effort is not doing Science; it's just farting around. The point is, how much failure is enough? How much more dithering around with apes will it take before enough X-ologists say, ''Okay, the little bastards are never going to get it''? Even alchemists finally shut down the forges and went home. Let's hope it doesn't take as long to stop chatting up our hairy cousins.
Cheeta ain't ever going to be Tarzan.
Buddy, I've never lived with any great apes, primates,monkeys etc. Have you? Can you really be sure about them?
I've lived with primates all my life. I is one. :)
Friend of mine at Ann Arbor had a night job in the primate lab back in, um, 1960, and we would hang out and smoke and take a few sips and bullshit the ''Cheetas;'' four of them, I think. Wonderful beasts, strong as The Hulk but much smarter. My Anthro advisor, Leslie A. White, used to tease the ''monkey men,'' telling them they were never going to get their charges to talk (which, to be fair, they weren't trying to do); and even if they did, the only thing the chimps were going to say was: ''I want to go to Ohio State.''
White, in fact, was rough on people who did not agree to the ''difference in kind' thesis, and approved of efforts by Chomsky and others to locate in the brain's structure the source of our qualitatively different behavior.
I don't think he liked any primates.
The main separation between the species in terms of language appears to be grammar.
The case of Genie showed that a child who misses the "critical period" of language acquisition has difficulty or is unable to learn grammar. From the descriptions of language of chimpanzees and Genie, it seems that both were able to gain a similar level of language mastery.
Although Genie may have acquired many more words than chimps, from some notes in this discussion, that may be a limitation of the signing they were taught rather than a natural limitation of the chimp brain.
Buddy, Much of this research did, in fact end back in the 80s. There are some projects still going from then but it's certainly not a "hot" topic of research. Replication is also important in science, especially from the perspective of a later time.
Also, it would be fair to note that "can chimps acquire language" was not the entire focus of the work with Washoe or the other Gardener chimps. Allen Gardner was interested primarily in learning theory not language. He was a Guthrian -i.e. that it's all classical conditioning and that reward simply strengthened the behavior. Trixie was interested in animal communication in general and had experimented with disrupting the "normal" communication of a species.
I.e., there were other reasons for this research besides getting a non human primate to use language.