Aping Language

"Joel Wallman’s book is very important because it shows, really convincingly, that animals do not have language, and that language is unique to human beings. He looks in detail at all of the ape language studies and analyses their methods and conclusions and all the published data and he concludes that, despite years and years of tutelage on the part of very dedicated individuals – trying to teach sign language to Washoe the chimpanzee or Chantek the orangutan or Koko the gorilla, or Kanzi the bonobo, etc, none of them succeed. Obviously this is contentious; the people involved would say they did succeed. If you take even a three-year-old child, they use language for many different purposes, including just commenting on the world. Round about the time they are two to three, when a child is struggling with something, they’ll often talk out loud to themselves. They’re using language to direct their own behaviour. Ape communications, by contrast, are almost exclusively requests for things. “It shows, really convincingly, that animals do not have language, and that language is unique to human beings.” For example, much has been made of Kanzi the bonobo’s communication skills. But, as Wallman points out, Kanzi’s 25 most frequent two-item combinations and 25 most frequent three-item combinations are all requests for something. He uses many other examples in the book to show that really a lot of what they learn in terms of signing is trial and error in order to get reward. It’s not anything resembling language, and they have nothing resembling human grammar. Many claims are made about how they string signs together. But, as he says, these multi-sign utterances remain relatively constant, despite intensive training. They don’t increase in length, or in any way in complexity. Whereas in young children, as Steven Pinker says in The Language Instinct, their sentences shoot off like a rocket. Children’s sentences increase in length and in complexity, so by three years of age they can string together sentences of ten words or more, and with age the mean length of their utterances increases, and so does the complexity of the word combinations. There’s nothing like that in any of the ape language projects. Wallman shows an example from the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, as he was called. His three- and four-sign combinations include things like Banana-Eat-Me-Nim or Grape-Eat-Nim-Eat, Eat-Me-Nim-Drink. The book just shows you can’t elevate any of these communications to anything near the status of human language. He also looks at animal communication in the wild, and shows that there’s no evidence of animals being able to communicate intentionally – their communication is very tightly tied to emotion and to instinct. He just shows that language is unique to human beings, and language is such a key thing for us. I believe that if you don’t have language you can’t have conscious thought. And if you don’t have conscious thought you’re not able to reflect on what you’re doing, or think about what someone else is doing that might be quite clever, and how you might be able to copy that. And if you can’t do that we would just continue to live like apes do – where one ape might have quite a clever invention: he might be able to split the branches of a stick in order to fish for termites. But once he dies that invention is lost because the other apes aren’t able to look at it and think, how did he achieve that? Yes they are sometimes able to copy it, but it is mainly through trial and error. Take, for instance, nut-cracking. A young chimpanzee may see other chimpanzees using stones to crack nuts. Nuts are high in calories and are therefore important nourishment, so you’d think they’d be really motivated to crack them, which they are. And yet it takes young chimpanzees up to four years to learn how to crack a nut. That’s how long it takes them to figure out what kind of stones you should use and where you should place the nut before you hit the stone. That’s a very important question. There are many scientists who are reacting against religion, and are therefore very reticent to acknowledge that there is anything qualitatively different about human beings. They would basically argue ‘Helene you’re wrong. You must be going down a spiritual route, if you’re saying that there is something qualitatively different about humans, and it’s not just evolution that has made us what we are. That’s unscientific, because, if it’s not evolution then there must be something spiritual, a God or something that has endowed us with something special.’ There are many very clever people around that seem to reject this idea of our uniqueness, because they think that must mean that it has to be a spiritual answer. But I think if you look at these books, they’re showing that evolution could have endowed us with a capacity for culture. But ultimately it is culture not evolution that has transformed us."