| Can apes talk? This innocent question has given rise to a furiously entertaining scientific row in | ||
| the United States. On one side are those who claim that they have taught apes to talk, or at least | ||
| to use signs; on the other, sceptics who say that the evidence is as scanty as that which persuades | ||
| some doting mothers that the first gurgles of their infants are intelligent conversation. | ||
| 5 | Angry words have been spoken - by the scientists, not the apes. The ape teachers, says one of | |
| the critics, have involved themselves 'in the most rudimentary circus-like performances' or at best | ||
| have been the victims of self-deception. | ||
| Such criticisms 'embarrassingly reveal (the critics') incompetence', the ape teachers have sniffed | ||
| back. It is all splendid stuff for those who like scientists to behave like people. | ||
| 10 | The core of the argument is rather more profound. Those who claim success in teaching apes to | |
| talk point to the apes' ability to use words creatively , either to construct sentences (a key stage in | ||
| the development of human speech) or to create new and often poetic images. | ||
| Koko, for example, a gorilla trained by Francine Patterson at Stanford, is credited with having | ||
| described a zebra as a 'white tiger'. Washoe, the original talking chimp who learned sign language, | ||
| 15 | called a watermelon a 'drink-fruit' and a swan a 'water-bird'. | |
| Such triumphs received extensive and mostly uncritical publicity until another ape teacher, | ||
| Herbert Terrace of Columbia University, threw a spanner into the works. He had been trying to train | ||
| a young chimpanzee called - a subtle academic joke, this - Nim Chimpsky. (The reference is to a | ||
| famous scholar of language, Noam Chomsky, whose theories of how language is acquired by human | ||
| 20 | children is relevant to the debate.) | |
| For a while Terrace thought he was succeeding in teaching Nim to use the sign language Ameslan. | ||
| But closer study convinced him that Nim's 'language' differed widely from the developing language | ||
| of human children. | ||
| For a lot of the time, Nim simply repeated the signs the trainer made. When he did create | ||
| 25 | 'sentences' they tended to consist of the same few words repeated, as in: 'give orange me give eat | |
| orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you'. | ||
| Some people believe that the ape-trainers have been taken in by a phenomenon almost as old as | ||
| experimental psychology itself. This might be called the 'Clever Hans Syndrome'. | ||
| Clever Hans was a horse who could do arithmetic. Asked a question by his master, he would tap | ||
| 30 | his hoof until he got to the answer, and then stop. He did it by watching his master's unconscious | |
| reactions and responding when a tiny movement of the head told the horse that he had reached the | ||
| right number. | ||
| So are Washoe and Koko just modem examples of Clever Hans? To say so implies that their | ||
| trainers have been less careful than they ought to have been in eliminating unconscious cueing, which | ||
| 35 | may explain why they find the criticism so wounding. | |
| Most probably the chimps will have to do a lot better before the sceptics can be won over. But for | ||
| the moment the animals have nothing to say; except for the chimpanzee quoted by Science as saying | ||
| of the controversy that 'those who live in the academic jungle shouldn't ape the law of the jungle.' | ||
| And even he asked for his name not to be quoted. | ||
| The Observer, June 22, 1980 |