Reconsidering Our Villains

Every story has a hero, and if it's a certain kind of story, then there might be a villain, too. But what if there were no outright villains? What if every person were a mixture of good and evil, kindness and carelessness and callousness. What if every man had some of the traits of John Quincy Adams for instance?

Bow giving me a frank look this morning

Or what if  any wrongdoing alleged was not where we have been trained to think it must be by the literature we have read? For instance, Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason, and yet historians today often go on believing that he was guilty of it. Why? Is it because they keep reading -- and citing -- each others' books that keep asserting that Burr was a traitor?  

I am currently working on the second half of a book about an internment camp in China run by the Japanese. A lot of very bad things happened there. But not all of them were the fault of the Japanese Commandant who ran the camp. It would be tempting to portray him as a villain, but that does not appear to be the truth, based on contemporary accounts I have read.

My historical reading is not limited to things that happened during the War of 1812 or during World War II. I also read books about the history of ape language studies.

I have read about Washoe, Lucy Temerlin, Nim Chimpsky and several other chimpanzees who are less famous, all of whom were born on the Lemmon farm in Oklahoma. Over the years, reading many different such accounts, I came to form a bit of a caricatured view of one of the people who kept appearing in all those books. I blush to admit it, but I came to believe he was a three penny opera villain.

It's not fair to judge somebody you've never met by the accounts of other people who may have had a falling out with him. That's why I would never take Thomas Jefferson's word on the guilt or innocence of Aaron Burr. And that's why, over the past few years, after understanding the intricacy of animal rights propaganda, I have come to reevaluate the role of Dr. William Lemmon in the history of ape language research.

That's all I'm going to say for now. I have a novel to write and an ape to research language with. But if you have also read all those books about Washoe and Lucy and Nim, please reconsider. Maybe he was not as dark a figure as you have been led to believe. I recently spoke with someone who knew him, and she confirmed my suspicions that it's not quite like that.

Recognizing Our Bias

Everyone has a bias. It's impossible not to, just as each picture we take is viewed from a particular perspective and is colored in some way by our point of view.

Change the place where you are standing and the perspective shifts.

Stand further away and a bigger picture emerges, though the details are less clear.

Perspective shifting is something writers are familiar with. Psychologists will tell you that autistics have trouble doing this. But everyone has a bias, even psychologists. And real perspective shifting is something that requires a degree of detachment that few of us are capable of. Even among primatologists and others who work with chimpanzees, there are built in biases that taint almost every experiment.

Here are some books that I have read about the lives of chimpanzees who have lived among humans. Every book tells a story, and every story is told from a particular bias. In the case of Nim Chimpsky, I have read the same story from more than one bias. In the case of Washoe, I have only ever read the story from one perspective.  But Washoe, Lucy and Nim were contemporaries, and their stories were interlinked. Today, we tend to hear about all of them from a single point of view: that of people who see ape language experimentation as a damaging practice that is naturally bad for chimpanzees. Whether the scientist is Herbert Terrace or the Gardners, the story is actually told from the point of view of the assistants who worked for them, played with and took care of their chimps, and those who stayed with the abandoned youngster once the experiment was over or who rescued him or her from the mouth of hell when nobody else cared.

Don't get me wrong: I do think what was done to Washoe, Nim, and Lucy was bad. It was bad to abandon them. It was bad to enculturate them and then just walk away. But I don't think teaching them our language was bad. I don't think exposing them to our culture or sharing our lives with them is bad. But when you read the cautionary tales about their lives told from the point of view of Roger Fouts or Bob Ingersoll, that's all you get. It might as well be the story of Oliver Twist, with the animal language experimenter as Fagin, and Bill Lemmon as Sykes.

In case you think I am mistaken in thinking there is this bias, read this review:

Betrayed by Science: The Story of Nim Chimpsky.

There are several different, but somewhat related, questions to consider in ape language experimentation:

• Is there any knowledge to be gained from exposing other apes to our language and culture?
• Is it humane to rear apes among humans?
• Do chimpanzees have a language ability comparable to that of humans?
• How could we go about proving their ability without introducing our bias into the experiment?
• How should the care of chimpanzees in capativity be financed?
• Is there something about how the care of chimpanzees is financed that biases the result of experiments?

In reading the book by Elizabeth Hess or watching the related Project Nim movie there seems to be only one answer that comes to mind: NO! No, there is no knowledge to be gained, no, it is not humane, no chimpanzees do not have comparable language ability. There is only one way to finance chimpanzee captivity: through government money and tax free donations given to reputable sanctuaries. No, the government money and its conditions do not bias experiments.

 So how does this single perspective on the issue come about? Chiefly it is because scientists who depend on government grants lose their voice after the grants are taken away. Herbert Terrace believed his research with Nim was valid, and that he had disproven the theories of Noam Chomsky, up until the moment when he gave up on getting more funding for his project, at which point he suddenly recanted and changed his tune. The Gardners who worked with Washoe were convinced that they had proven she could sign meaningfully, but they gave up custody of her and sent her off with Roger Fouts, who eventually had to find a way to rescue her. So we hear the stories told from the humanitarian perspective of people who were not language experimenters, but who ended up picking up the pieces when the actual scientists dropped the ball. From their point of view, the experiments were nonsense, but the damage to the chimpanzees was palpable,  tragic and causeless. People like Fouts, after having the privilege of interacting with chimpanzees for years at public expense then blame the system and exhort us never to try to teach another ape language ever again.

Recently one of these humanitarian intervenors got in touch with me. We had been in correspondence about a year ago, but he surfaced again after my last blog post. I think it was the last blog post that reminded him about Bow, not because I wrote about Bow, but because I raised my voice in defense of a live-and-let-live policy toward other privately owned chimpanzees. He says he would like to help me and Bow, which is nice, but I wanted to make sure we had our perspectives clear and that his bias would not blind him. I mentioned the bias in the Project Nim movie, and he replied that he didn't think there was any bias in the Project Nim movie. When someone says there's no bias, what he's really saying is that the perspective from which the movie is shot is exactly his own.

I am trying to figure out now how best to explain this to him. Because even though this guy is much more neurotyical than I am, he's really bad at perspective shifting. He is good with chimpanzees.They like him. He has always felt kindly toward them and was able to enjoy an uninhibited  playful relationship with chimps, and so he thinks that the other, more intellectual way of relating to them is probably nonsense.

Every chimpanzee, like every human being, has many different types of needs: physical, emotional, social, intellectual and even spiritual. What typifies the scientific mentality is to relate most directly to the mind of the chimp, while ignoring his physical needs. That's largely what Herbert Terrace did, leaving the day to day care of Nim to assistants. It is also what the Gardners did. It is said that they were more like grandparents to Washoe than actual parents. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless it blinds the scientists to the other needs of the chimps besides intellectual stimulation.

What typifies the caretakers is that they were largely big-hearted, nurturing individuals who were less interested in the research than in a physical, playful relationship with their charge. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless it blinds one to the other needs of the chimp besides the social, emotional and physical.

One of the lessons I think everyone should learn from the Nim Chimpsky story is that you do not abandon a child that you have adopted, even if he is just a chimpanzee. Another lesson is that once somebody has learned something, like language or culture, you cannot expect him to just unlearn those things and be happy under "more natural conditions." Nim was not scarred for life by the absence of chimp companions. He was shocked by being abandoned by every human he had come to trust. He was sold down the river, because everybody  he depended on needed government funding to keep their projects going.

 But these are not the lessons that the book or movie emphasize. Instead, most people somehow go away with the idea that every chimp is better off in a sanctuary "among his own kind."  That  is the bias of Project Nim.

So I am hearing a lot from this individual about how great the facilities at certain sanctuaries are, but not about wanting to place homeless chimps with me and Bow. It just all seems very one sided.

In thinking of things that this individual might do to help me and Bow, I brought up the possibility of recruiting other chimps to talk to Bow via Skype or Facetime or some other electronic device. I mentioned that I had wanted to do this also with privately owned chimps, but most of their owners don't give the adolescent or adults among their chimps access to electronics. He replied that this is because chimpanzees largely don't respond to that kind of stimulus and don't interact with others long distance.

Bow loves electronics. When I got my new iPhone, he immediately wanted to change the camera perspective so he could see himself when taking a picture.

He has spoken to his grandmother  and others on Skype.

The difficulty with these long distance conversations is that Bow feels the need to display at the start, as he would indeed when meeting someone after a long period of not seeing them or in reacting to a new person who might be an intruder. With other chimpanzees as well, I expect it will take some accustomation before any communication beyond "I am bigger and stronger than you" will take place. So what we need is a regular, continuing and committed long distance relationship with another chimpanzee.

What can we learn from this? Lot of things! Among others, we can learn how chimpanzees communicate, how chimpanzees relay information to one another long distance, and whether there is any abstract code for the transmission of information that does not depend on showing another chimp where something is hidden.

What would Bow gain from this? A long distance friend of his own kind, without risking leaving home, losing his loved ones, or engaging in a physical confrontation with another chimp.

But this only makes sense if you believe there is more to a chimpanzee than just a very powerful, very affectionate animal. Those who tend to see the playful animal that resides in every chimp tend to discount the mind that is also there and is capable of abstract thinking. Those who see the mind sometimes forget the social and emotional needs.  We tend to see in others a little bit of ourselves. This stereotyping happens to children as well as chimpanzees.  Nurturers see physical and emotional needs. Teachers see intellectual potential. Scientists want to test how much there is of each.

Everybody's got a bias. The first step in trying to communicate with someone else is to acknowledge what our bias is. Sometimes that takes an intellectual effort from someone whose normal mode of operation is to go by gut feeling alone.

Lessons That I Learned from Reading About Nim

I highly recommend Elizabeth Hess' biography Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. It is an objective, even-handed coverage of Nim's life from the moment of his birth to the day he died. Many people have tried to use the story of Nim Chimpsky as a cautionary tale over the years, but some of the conclusions that they have drawn are completely unwarranted.

Isn't it true that Nim was only signing to please his trainers and that he didn't even know what he was saying? Generations of college students have been taught that this is the lesson to take away from his story. But did you know that long after he had been abandoned by all the humans who were involved in that experiment, and he was confined to a cage in a sanctuary where he was meant to be "humanely" retired, Nim was still trying to communicate with people by signing?

Isn't it true that the tragedy of Nim's life was due to the fact that he was enculturated as a human, but he was really a chimp, and genetic breeding always trumps enculturation? No. The real tragedy of Nim's life is that the people who adopted him did not take their commitment seriously, and they discarded him the moment having him in their lives turned out to be inconvenient. First his adoptive mother, and then his adoptive father, gave up on him, when he was just a little boy. He was shuttled from one caretaker to the next, and every time he developed an attachment, the person was yanked from his life. We know how harmful it is for human children to be brought up this way. It is no less harmful for a chimpanzee.

Isn't it true that Herbert Terrace's involvement with the scientific community is what kept him "honest" about his project, and allowed him to admit that he had no viable results? No. Terrace was constantly engaged in trying to raise funds. Part of the reason he couldn't spend much time with Nim was that he kept having to spend his time trying to get grants and writing up reports. He was so intent on documenting everything that he had a bigger budget for "proof" than he had for spending quality time just being with Nim.

Language doesn't happen in a vacuum. Real language is learned in context, when we try to communicate with one another. Terrace had results, but they weren't nearly as good as he thought they were, because all his time was going into chasing after the funding that he needed to keep going. When he realized there was never going to be enough money to keep Nim and his caretakers going in the manner to which they were accustomed, he shipped Nim off back to the Lemmon farm, and only then did he decide that the experiment was a failure. Not getting the funding influenced Terrace's assessment of the outcome. Nim was not yet an adolescent when that happened. He had years of development ahead of him.  Imagine what would happen to a human child, if parents gave up that easily!

Learning language requires love, a commitment, and the ability to live independently. If every parent expected to make a living off their child, how many children would learn to speak?

Of course, we all have to try to raise funds for our living expenses. But one difference between me and Herbert Terrace is that while I sit here writing this, Bow is sitting right next to me, and listening to me read it out loud! 

Chimps Are Misrepresenting their Linguistic Abilities: and How!

Chimpanzees are perhaps well known for their tricky, tricky ways. A totally honest chimpanzee is hard to find. However, I was really surprised to read this sentence in the wikipedia article about Nim Chimpsky:

The validity of the study is disputed, as Terrace argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation from the chimps.

Funny, how chimpanzees can disseminate so much "misinformation" about their ability to use language without actually using language!

I turned to Bow and asked him: "Are all chimps lying when they say they can talk?" Bow took my hand and confidently spelled: "Yes." Okay... If you want to take his word for it!

One of our problems at Project Bow is that Bow likes to have physical contact with us and use our hands to spell. Now, he doesn't spell what we want him to spell. We who deal with him know that we couldn't possibly control his language use, even if we wanted to. He's not that cooperative! But to outsiders, it really does look bad.

Lawrence has been trying to wean Bow from using his hand, by giving him less and less of his hand to use, gradually. At this point, he's just giving him a pinky. He hopes later to phase this out and only lightly touch Bow on the small of his back, as a sort of moral support.

I told Lawrence, the last time he was here, that any physical contact between the two of them will be interpreted as cuing by critics. "They'll figure that you and Bow have worked out some kind of code between the two of you so that you can tell him what to write."

Lawrence laughed. "If he's smart enough to understand a code, why do they think he wouldn't be smart enough to spell?"

I laughed, too. But there are some people who will believe almost anything -- except the truth!