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Apes, Men, and Language
PB VG [2 copies].
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
43 people want to read
About the author
Eugene Linden
30 books115 followersI've spent my entire writing career exploring various aspects of one question: Why is it that after hundreds of thousands of years one relatively small subset of our species has reached a point where its fears, appetites, and spending habits control the destiny of every culture, every major ecosystem, and virtually every creature on earth? What happened that enabled us to seize control in a blink of an eye?
I began scratching at this question in my first book, Apes, Men and Language, published over 40 years ago. In that book I explored the implications of some experiments from the 1960s that showed that chimpanzees could use sign language in ways similar to the way we use words - to express opinions and feelings, to make specific requests, and to comment on the events of their day. Since the moral basis of our rights to use nature as so much raw material is deeply entangled with the belief that we are the lone sentient beings on the planet, I wondered what it would mean if it turned out that other animals possessed higher mental abilities and consciousness? I never expected that the scientific establishment and society would say "oops, sorry," but I also never imagined that the issue would turn out to be as fraught and contentious as it has.
That first book was the result of a curious turn of events. My first major journalistic assignment was an investigation of fragging (attacks by enlisted men on their officers) in Vietnam. That article, "The Demoralization of an Army: Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms," was published as a cover story in Saturday Review in 1971. It got a good deal of attention, and a few publishers contacted me about possibly writing a book. I was eager to do that, but a few publishers lost interest when they learned that I wanted to write about experiments teaching sign language to apes and not Vietnam. Dutton gamely stayed on, however, and "Apes" is still in print in some parts of the world.
Since that first book, I've revisited and explored animal thinking in several books and many articles. In Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments, I looked at what happened to the animals themselves in the aftermath of the experiments as the chimps were whipsawed by a society that shifted back and forth between treating them as personalities and commodities. I wrote articles for National Geographic, TIME, and Parade, among other publications about animal intelligence as the debate progressed at its glacial pace.
Then, in the 1990s, I had an epiphany of sorts. I'd heard a story about an orangutan that got hold of a piece of wire and used it to pick the lock on his cage, all the while hiding his efforts from the zookeepers. Here seemed to be a panoply of higher mental abilities on display, unprompted by any rewards from humans, and it occurred to me that, if animals could think, maybe they did their best thinking when it served their purposes, and not some human in a lab coat. Out of this flash came two more books, The Parrot's Lament: Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity, and, The Octopus and the Orangutan: More Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity, as well as a few more articles for TIME, Parade, and Oprah among other publications. I've found this approach to thinking about animal intelligence both liberating and fun, and I intend to explore this a good deal more.
The question of what makes us different than other creatures was but one aspect of my career-long efforts to understand how we have come to rule the planet. At the same time that I was exploring the question of higher mental abilities in animals I also began to think about how our notions our notions of our own specialness related to the consumer society. If intelligence, language and consciousness gave us dominion, it was the consumer society that gave us the tools to exploit nature for our own benefit. I've developed my thoughts on the nature and origins of consumer societies in four b
I began scratching at this question in my first book, Apes, Men and Language, published over 40 years ago. In that book I explored the implications of some experiments from the 1960s that showed that chimpanzees could use sign language in ways similar to the way we use words - to express opinions and feelings, to make specific requests, and to comment on the events of their day. Since the moral basis of our rights to use nature as so much raw material is deeply entangled with the belief that we are the lone sentient beings on the planet, I wondered what it would mean if it turned out that other animals possessed higher mental abilities and consciousness? I never expected that the scientific establishment and society would say "oops, sorry," but I also never imagined that the issue would turn out to be as fraught and contentious as it has.
That first book was the result of a curious turn of events. My first major journalistic assignment was an investigation of fragging (attacks by enlisted men on their officers) in Vietnam. That article, "The Demoralization of an Army: Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms," was published as a cover story in Saturday Review in 1971. It got a good deal of attention, and a few publishers contacted me about possibly writing a book. I was eager to do that, but a few publishers lost interest when they learned that I wanted to write about experiments teaching sign language to apes and not Vietnam. Dutton gamely stayed on, however, and "Apes" is still in print in some parts of the world.
Since that first book, I've revisited and explored animal thinking in several books and many articles. In Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments, I looked at what happened to the animals themselves in the aftermath of the experiments as the chimps were whipsawed by a society that shifted back and forth between treating them as personalities and commodities. I wrote articles for National Geographic, TIME, and Parade, among other publications about animal intelligence as the debate progressed at its glacial pace.
Then, in the 1990s, I had an epiphany of sorts. I'd heard a story about an orangutan that got hold of a piece of wire and used it to pick the lock on his cage, all the while hiding his efforts from the zookeepers. Here seemed to be a panoply of higher mental abilities on display, unprompted by any rewards from humans, and it occurred to me that, if animals could think, maybe they did their best thinking when it served their purposes, and not some human in a lab coat. Out of this flash came two more books, The Parrot's Lament: Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity, and, The Octopus and the Orangutan: More Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity, as well as a few more articles for TIME, Parade, and Oprah among other publications. I've found this approach to thinking about animal intelligence both liberating and fun, and I intend to explore this a good deal more.
The question of what makes us different than other creatures was but one aspect of my career-long efforts to understand how we have come to rule the planet. At the same time that I was exploring the question of higher mental abilities in animals I also began to think about how our notions our notions of our own specialness related to the consumer society. If intelligence, language and consciousness gave us dominion, it was the consumer society that gave us the tools to exploit nature for our own benefit. I've developed my thoughts on the nature and origins of consumer societies in four b
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January 27, 2025
A SUMMARY OF LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS WITH CHIMPS AS OF 1974
Author Eugene Linden wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, “It is the purpose of this book to present what is known so far about the chimpanzee’s skills in using language and then to make sense of these achievements… Instead of setting this book in the agglomerate of notions about language, we will view that Babel of opinions from the new perspective offered by the chimpanzee. By sorting through the aggregate abilities associated with language, we will see how these abilities have been illuminated by the performances of Washoe and her confreres. We will follow Washoe into the temple of language, watch her as she steps on various toes in the behavioral sciences, and then discuss a particular aspect of language when someone cries, ‘Ouch!’… Consequently, different characteristics of language that are important to understanding Washoe will be dealt with recurrently throughout the book.”
He explains, “Washoe’s early life was baronial. Her home was a 24-foot trailer in [Allen and Beatrix] Gardners’ backyard in Reno… Outside was 5,000 square feet of open space to play in… Washoe was reared in an
‘enriched’ environment. She had a constant parade of human companions and innumerable toys and games to excite her curiosity and keep her attention engaged. Training sessions were paced to her attention span, and all human conversations were conducted in sign language to minimize any distraction that might come from using one language in conversation with Washoe while they used another in conversation with themselves. Everything in Washoe’s environment was designed to elucidate whatever cognitive abilities she had and to encourage her to use Ameslan [American Sign Language/ASL] as a means to satisfy her desires…. She was named for the county in Nevada where she was raised.” (Pg. 17)
He notes, “Washoe soon moved from making combinations of two words to longer combinations. Between April 1967 and June 1969, the Gardners recorded 245 different combinations involving three or more signs. About half of these longer combinations consisted of adding an appeal such as ‘please’ to a two-word combination such as ‘Roger tickle,’ but that the additional signs in the remaining combinations conveyed additional information. Sometimes the additional sign specified an additional agent, as in ‘you me go out’; in other cases, name-pronoun redundancy (‘you tickle me Washoe’); extension of two-word constructions (‘you me out look’); apologies (‘hug me good’), which contained action, agent, and attribute; and finally, phrases that specified but subject and object, such as ‘you tickle me.’” (Pg. 45)
He comments, “for all their strength, the chimps accept Roger [Fouts, their main ASL trainer] and Dr. [William] Lemmon [the head of the Institute of Primate Studies, where the experiment was conducted] as dominant. Washoe, for instance, is far stronger than Roger, and yet she not only accepts his authority, but reacts in genuine fear when he is angry… her discretion seems to be related to the respect and affection any social animal has for the older member of the community that reared and cared for it.” (Pg. 83-84)
He recounts, “Lucy … broke away from Roger when I began taking notes. She grabbed my note pad and pen and scrawled feverishly… there was another interesting aspect to Lucy’s scrawling. It exemplified the chimp’s interest in imitating what it sees others doing. Critics have suggested that any preference for word order shown by the chimpanzee result from imitation of human models without any understanding of the significance of word order. Many people are tempted to write off all evidence of simian cognitive ability as dumb mimicry… [However] Fouts has demonstrated that imitation is the least effective method of instruction.” (Pg. 96-97)
He notes, “Washoe was no freak, but neither is her word-use archetypical of all chimps. Due to the strong personality differences among the chimps, one chimp’s experience in learning a particular word could not be understood to hold meaning for all.” (Pg. 128)
He reports of two of the other apes, “”Bruno and Booee speak to each other quite a bit, although talk of food dominates their conversation. At the moment, their conversations are mostly one-way: Booee will ask Bruno for a raisin, and Bruno will run away to gobble it down. Representative of these importunings were Booee’s requests for orange juice: ‘Gimme food drink.. gimme drink… Bruno gimme.’ A typical conversation for a five-year-old.” (Pg. 131)
He points out, “[David] Premack is a behaviorist. He feels that the most obvious limitation to teaching a chimp language is man’s ingenuity in breaking complex actions down into their behavioral constituents and then creating the appropriate training program to inculcate the action, piece by piece, into the animal.” (Pg 180)
He continues, “[Sarah’s] feats, says [Roger] Brown, are not communication but ‘a set of carefully programmed language games.’ She does not do anything except when asked, she performs with the same steady 75 to 80 percent accuracy regardless of the complexity of the behavior involved, and she is only confronted with one type of language problem at a time… Finally, Brown is not convinced that Sarah is not cued to the correct response by the experimenters. While Premack has taken pains to prevent cueing in testing, Brown wonders whether her original learning of the proper response to questions might have involved non-linguistic cueing, and that increasing familiarity with the basic problems with which she was confronted permitted her gradually to commit to memory a vocabulary of correct responses out of the desire for rewards.” (Pg. 181)
He observes, “Apart from their fears about ill-informed publicity in the non-scientific community, the Gardners have also suffered barbed criticism from linguists, anthropologists, and fellow psychologists. Some attacks have been scholarly, but their work has aroused emotional responses as well. Their behaviorist bias toward species-blurring naturally raises the hackles of specialists who have devoted their lives to studying chimpanzees… But by far the largest group of critics is composed of scientists whose theories and statements on language and human behavior are now invalid as a result of Washoe… This storm of controversy and misinformation is the reason the Gardners eschew all consideration of Washoe’s impact on the outside world.” (Pg. 241)
He concludes, “Indeed, Washoe has made the behavioral sciences reassess their core assumptions concerning animal and human behavior. Perception of anomaly is the first stage in scientific revolution, and the reaction to Washoe … indicates that Washoe was perceived as an anomalous threat from the time the Gardners first published accounts of her progress in learning Ameslan… certain behavioral scientists were sorting out their perceptions of and assumptions about their subject matter, rather than… describing Washoe in terms of the traditional paradigm. Rather than in interpreting Washoe in terms of a discontinuity in evolution, [some] scientists… were using Washoe as evidence that the differences between animal communication and human language might be the result of a paradigm-determined APPROACH… a new gestalt might be seen tentatively arranging itself around Washoe.” (Pg.273-274)
Though now fifty years old, this book is still a useful summary of the state of the research and discussion as to 1974.
Author Eugene Linden wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, “It is the purpose of this book to present what is known so far about the chimpanzee’s skills in using language and then to make sense of these achievements… Instead of setting this book in the agglomerate of notions about language, we will view that Babel of opinions from the new perspective offered by the chimpanzee. By sorting through the aggregate abilities associated with language, we will see how these abilities have been illuminated by the performances of Washoe and her confreres. We will follow Washoe into the temple of language, watch her as she steps on various toes in the behavioral sciences, and then discuss a particular aspect of language when someone cries, ‘Ouch!’… Consequently, different characteristics of language that are important to understanding Washoe will be dealt with recurrently throughout the book.”
He explains, “Washoe’s early life was baronial. Her home was a 24-foot trailer in [Allen and Beatrix] Gardners’ backyard in Reno… Outside was 5,000 square feet of open space to play in… Washoe was reared in an
‘enriched’ environment. She had a constant parade of human companions and innumerable toys and games to excite her curiosity and keep her attention engaged. Training sessions were paced to her attention span, and all human conversations were conducted in sign language to minimize any distraction that might come from using one language in conversation with Washoe while they used another in conversation with themselves. Everything in Washoe’s environment was designed to elucidate whatever cognitive abilities she had and to encourage her to use Ameslan [American Sign Language/ASL] as a means to satisfy her desires…. She was named for the county in Nevada where she was raised.” (Pg. 17)
He notes, “Washoe soon moved from making combinations of two words to longer combinations. Between April 1967 and June 1969, the Gardners recorded 245 different combinations involving three or more signs. About half of these longer combinations consisted of adding an appeal such as ‘please’ to a two-word combination such as ‘Roger tickle,’ but that the additional signs in the remaining combinations conveyed additional information. Sometimes the additional sign specified an additional agent, as in ‘you me go out’; in other cases, name-pronoun redundancy (‘you tickle me Washoe’); extension of two-word constructions (‘you me out look’); apologies (‘hug me good’), which contained action, agent, and attribute; and finally, phrases that specified but subject and object, such as ‘you tickle me.’” (Pg. 45)
He comments, “for all their strength, the chimps accept Roger [Fouts, their main ASL trainer] and Dr. [William] Lemmon [the head of the Institute of Primate Studies, where the experiment was conducted] as dominant. Washoe, for instance, is far stronger than Roger, and yet she not only accepts his authority, but reacts in genuine fear when he is angry… her discretion seems to be related to the respect and affection any social animal has for the older member of the community that reared and cared for it.” (Pg. 83-84)
He recounts, “Lucy … broke away from Roger when I began taking notes. She grabbed my note pad and pen and scrawled feverishly… there was another interesting aspect to Lucy’s scrawling. It exemplified the chimp’s interest in imitating what it sees others doing. Critics have suggested that any preference for word order shown by the chimpanzee result from imitation of human models without any understanding of the significance of word order. Many people are tempted to write off all evidence of simian cognitive ability as dumb mimicry… [However] Fouts has demonstrated that imitation is the least effective method of instruction.” (Pg. 96-97)
He notes, “Washoe was no freak, but neither is her word-use archetypical of all chimps. Due to the strong personality differences among the chimps, one chimp’s experience in learning a particular word could not be understood to hold meaning for all.” (Pg. 128)
He reports of two of the other apes, “”Bruno and Booee speak to each other quite a bit, although talk of food dominates their conversation. At the moment, their conversations are mostly one-way: Booee will ask Bruno for a raisin, and Bruno will run away to gobble it down. Representative of these importunings were Booee’s requests for orange juice: ‘Gimme food drink.. gimme drink… Bruno gimme.’ A typical conversation for a five-year-old.” (Pg. 131)
He points out, “[David] Premack is a behaviorist. He feels that the most obvious limitation to teaching a chimp language is man’s ingenuity in breaking complex actions down into their behavioral constituents and then creating the appropriate training program to inculcate the action, piece by piece, into the animal.” (Pg 180)
He continues, “[Sarah’s] feats, says [Roger] Brown, are not communication but ‘a set of carefully programmed language games.’ She does not do anything except when asked, she performs with the same steady 75 to 80 percent accuracy regardless of the complexity of the behavior involved, and she is only confronted with one type of language problem at a time… Finally, Brown is not convinced that Sarah is not cued to the correct response by the experimenters. While Premack has taken pains to prevent cueing in testing, Brown wonders whether her original learning of the proper response to questions might have involved non-linguistic cueing, and that increasing familiarity with the basic problems with which she was confronted permitted her gradually to commit to memory a vocabulary of correct responses out of the desire for rewards.” (Pg. 181)
He observes, “Apart from their fears about ill-informed publicity in the non-scientific community, the Gardners have also suffered barbed criticism from linguists, anthropologists, and fellow psychologists. Some attacks have been scholarly, but their work has aroused emotional responses as well. Their behaviorist bias toward species-blurring naturally raises the hackles of specialists who have devoted their lives to studying chimpanzees… But by far the largest group of critics is composed of scientists whose theories and statements on language and human behavior are now invalid as a result of Washoe… This storm of controversy and misinformation is the reason the Gardners eschew all consideration of Washoe’s impact on the outside world.” (Pg. 241)
He concludes, “Indeed, Washoe has made the behavioral sciences reassess their core assumptions concerning animal and human behavior. Perception of anomaly is the first stage in scientific revolution, and the reaction to Washoe … indicates that Washoe was perceived as an anomalous threat from the time the Gardners first published accounts of her progress in learning Ameslan… certain behavioral scientists were sorting out their perceptions of and assumptions about their subject matter, rather than… describing Washoe in terms of the traditional paradigm. Rather than in interpreting Washoe in terms of a discontinuity in evolution, [some] scientists… were using Washoe as evidence that the differences between animal communication and human language might be the result of a paradigm-determined APPROACH… a new gestalt might be seen tentatively arranging itself around Washoe.” (Pg.273-274)
Though now fifty years old, this book is still a useful summary of the state of the research and discussion as to 1974.
April 10, 2014
I read this book some thirty or forty years ago when the fact that Washoe had learnt 160 words in sign language, and was beginning to combine words into short phrase-like structures was an exciting experiment in progress. Could sign languages bridge the obvious vocalization barrier for champanzees? How would the chimpanzee´s vocabulary develop? Could it actually learn a language of sorts and would we get to see true inter-species language communication? Would Washoe eventually teach her own offspring to sign in Ameslan?
Unfortunately the language barrier was not broached and true interspecies communication remains a dream. The work with sign language was important in that it provided a more complex definition of language and indirectly spurred efforts to expand communication with other species, notably bonobos, dolphins, gorillas, orangutans and, much more recently dogs and parrots.
A brief and interesting update to the efforts at teaching great apes language can be found in the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ap...
Unfortunately the language barrier was not broached and true interspecies communication remains a dream. The work with sign language was important in that it provided a more complex definition of language and indirectly spurred efforts to expand communication with other species, notably bonobos, dolphins, gorillas, orangutans and, much more recently dogs and parrots.
A brief and interesting update to the efforts at teaching great apes language can be found in the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ap...
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