There's a long history of humans trying to get apes to talk to them
But will we ever get close to a true conversation?
Scientific efforts to talk to animals have often focused on the great apes
our closest, cleverest cousins
I grew up believing that apes COULD talk to humans
using sign language
I remember this one Reading Rainbow episode about a gorilla named Koko
"Who is that?"
Penny interprets: "Think me there."
"That's very good."
This blew my mind!
Here was an animal whould could talk to me!
But years later, in college, my dream was shattered
by professor Robert Sapolsky.
He said, in a lecture, that all that stuff with Koko was baloney.
"There were no data.
Scientists couldn't make any sense of it because there were no numbers.
There was no anything you can actually analyze.
And then you look at the films
Wait, what?
Can Koko use language or not?
Looking for answers I dove into the long history of ape language studies
One of the earliest experiments was captured
in this 1932 film
Two psychologists - Luella and Winthrop Kellog - asked
If we raised an ape as a human, would it start to speak?
So they brought up Gua -- a chimpanzee -- alongside their own son, Donald.
She learned to respond to English words and phrases - faster than Donald actually -
things like "Get down!" and "Don't touch"
But was this any different than a dog being conditioned to respond to ...
That doesn't mean this dog understands English.
And there wasn't any evidence that Gua did either.
There's something really disturbing about this experiment
Is it right to forever change the life of an ape --- who could live 50 years
just to satisfy our curiosity?
This study from the late 40s wasn't any better
Viki's keepers tried to teach her to speak
by literally shaping her lips with their fingers
She learned to form a few words
... sort of ...
Scientists decided that spoken language wasn't the way to go
But they'd noticed that in the wild, chimpanzees
use a lot of gestures
Maybe they could be taught a few words of
American Sign Language!
Enter Washoe.
As you can see in these videos Washoe had
an all-American childhood.
She lived with psychologists Trixie and Allen Gardner
And they taught her to use a few signs based on ASL
signs for dog
for cat
for ... creepy baby
Wasn't this incredible!
Washoe could sign hundreds of words and seemed, to her caretakers,
to combine the signs into new sentences
- one of the hallmarks of human language
"ME EAT TIME EAT"
When Washoe saw a swan, she made the signs
for "water" and "bird"
What a breakthrough!
People started teaching other apes to sign.
And psychology graduate student Penny Patterson started teaching
Koko
Penny said Koko didn't just talk about objects
"Were you sad?"
She expressed her emotions
"What? Frown lips, bad, frown"
Koko became a celebrity
I was convinced!
But other people were a bit more skeptical
People like Herbert Terrace - a psychologist at Columbia
He was working with another ape -
Nim Chimpsky
Nim used a bunch of signs, just like Washoe and Koko
But Terrace took a cold hard look at the videos of Nim
And he also went back and analyzed the videos
of other apes
He said all those claims about ape language were nothing but wishful thinking
Take the idea that apes could combine signs to form new meanings
Maybe when Washoe saw a swan and signed "water bird"
she was just separately pointing out water and a bird.
But his skepticism went much further.
He doubted the apes even understood the words they were signing
When the trainers would ask questions the apes would just guess at the right sign
They'd look for cues in the trainer's body language
or simply mimic the trainers gestures
The apes weren't using language like we would
to ask questions or ... express opinions
They just wanted to get food and affection
Nim's longest recorded "sentence" was
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
Terrace said the trainers were like parents eager to see their child learning
They'd confidently interpret vague gestures and find the meanings they were looking for.
Plenty of people objected to Terrace's study
in large part because they said Nim was treated very badly
But the damage to Nim (and the whole field) was done
Funding for ape language research dried up.
So where does that leave us?
ARE all these claims of talking apes baloney?
Well, I here's one more study that's still going on ...
Kanzi is a bonobo - a smaller cousin of the chimpanzee
He doesn't use hand signs - he uses these icons called lexigrams
He selects them on a screen
This one represents dog
This one is tickle.
This one ... yogurt.
The touch screen system is less ambiguous than hand signing.
We can be more certain that Kanzi is choosing his words intentionally
and there's less room for humans to overinterpret what they think he's saying
The results are a bit more scientifically rigorous
And what do these results show?
Kanzi knows hundreds of lexigrams - he uses them correctly 9 times out of 10
"Blueberries?"
Computer: "BLUEBERRY."
And he also seems to get some abstract ideas like "bad" or
Computer: "GOOD."
But he rarely combines lexigrams to convey new ideas
Most of the time, he just uses them to try and get things he likes
"BLUEBERRY."
"BLUEBERRY. BLUEBERRY."
When people combine words he knows to create a command he's never heard before, Kanzi does respond
In this video he isn't getting any cues
from this woman's face
Woman: "Can you put the pine needles in the refrigerator?"
But you have to keep it simple.
Kanzi wouldn't understand if you asked him to put the pine needles AND the blueberries in the fridge.
So is Kanzi using language the way humans do?
People are still arguing.
But it's pretty clear that I'll never get to have a real human-style conversation with an ape.
And maybe that's okay.
These are amazing, intelligent animals who do communicate a lot in their own way.
And maybe if I stop wanting them to be furry little humans
I might really get to know them.
What do you think?
Are these apes using language?
Post your comments, subscribe to our channel, and submit your questions here!
If you want to learn more about the conversations and controversies
surrounding these ape language studies
I put a lot of links down in the description