I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
My mother often asks me: "Has Bow said anything clever lately?" She is used to the frequent anecdotes from an earlier era, when Bow had just had his breakthrough, and there were daily stories of something new and unexpected that he had said.
As Bow arrived in his late teens, stories like that became few and far between, and now that Bow is in his twenties, he has become quite laconic. But today was an exception.
At lunch, a Jordan Peterson conversation with Frans de Waal popped up on my feed. I guess YouTube knew I would be interested. They were discussing the nature/nurture contribution to gender differences as well as what it takes to socialize males to show deference to females.
Bow, sated from his main course, made occasional grumbling agreement sounds to concur with what Peterson and de Waal were saying. From his own experience, he knew girls are less into rough and tumble play than boys are. After all, he'd had to go easy on his older sister, Sword, to get her to play with him at all.
The discussion between Peterson and de Waal, which centered on the statistical backdrop to gender stereotypes, reminded me of the playful interactions between Sword and Bow depicted in the video clip embedded above. Bow, too, enjoyed the nostalgic view of days gone by. He watched the clip twice. Then he took my hand and spelled:
"חרב יפה. זה טוב. רק קשת חזק."
"Sword is beautiful. That is good. Only Bow is strong."
So now I have another anecdote to share with my mother when we talk on the phone tomorrow.
Yesterday, Bow turned twenty. We celebrated with a cake which Bow's grandmother bought, a card from Bow's friend Charla, and a gift from me: a back pack stuffed toy.
Bow always gets excited every time the birthday song is sung, whether in Hebrew or English. He loves the can of Crush that he is served with his birthday cheesecake. He chose the plain cheesecake to eat this time. He had great fun opening his birthday card. The birthday backpack was also a big hit!
He took it with him to bed when the day was over.
But he also enjoyed trying it on.
In fact, he tried it on in more than one way.
Bow used to have big parties attended by many guests. But the cozy, snug and private parties are the safest during a pandemic. And Bow still knows that many people all over the world are wishing him well on his birthday.
The latest development on my YouTube channel is Memberships. In order to support my research, you can join the channel as a Donor, a Patron or a Benefactor. Here is a link:
Among the perks available to members are previews of videos about Bow's writing, literacy and other intellectual pursuits at a time when these are not yet available to the general public. Since revenue from viral videos comes primarily from people who are not subscribed to my channel and could not care less about ape language research, this seems like a fair allocation of our resources. The general public gets to view grooming videos right away, but more recent advances in ape language studies are shared first and foremost with our Donors, Patrons and Benefactors.
Since the inception of Project Bow, I have found that low tech methods work better and are more cost effective when working with a strong but intellectual chimpanzee such as Bow. A talking machine was quickly replaced by laminated menus, self-flushing toilet by a plastic potty chair and a touch screen computer by an old fashioned notebook and pen.
The problem that the touch screen computer was meant to solve was Bow's reliance on caretakers' hands to point at letters on the glass. This is a problem of proof, not of communication. It looks to outsiders as if Bow is being manipulated by his interlocutors to point at the letters. But it certainly does not look to us that way, and it does not explain why Bow can tell us things we did not know and share information available only to him. So it was suggested that the intercession of a non-manipulable computer could solve this PR problem for us.
In order to motivate Bow to use a computer to communicate, certain ape language researchers suggested pairing the touch screen computer with a food dispenser, so that Bow would essentially be typing for a food reward. "Machines can't be manipulated, so he would have to say what the machine wanted him to say," I was told.
I don't want Bow to have to say anything. I want him to be able to say what he wants to say. Here is an example of something ordinary, but totally unexpected, that Bow recently said to his caretaker while I was away: "Go sit outside." She was confused, "You want me to sit outside? How do you mean, like on the porch?" He answered: "Yes."
There is nothing extraordinary about this exchange, but it could not have happened with a touch screen computer tied to a food dispenser. Bow could not tell the dispenser anything. He would be totally subject to its mechanical limitations.
Recently, Bow and I watched a video of an Israeli young man who lost his voice while serving in the army. Bow identified with the voiceless man. He watched as the young man talked to a reporter by writing in an ordinary old fashioned notebook by putting pen to paper. "You could do that, too," I told Bow. "You could talk to people by writing in a notebook."
Bow was moved to try. His attempt looks like letters, though hard to tell what he wanted to say. You can contrast his attempt to write letters with his drawing on this other page in the same notebook, in which a month earlier he had tried to draw a face. (The face Bow drew is only in black ink. The other bigger face in blue was one I tried to draw.)
If you want to see the videos of Bow writing and drawing, you can join as a member of my channel. Eventually, these videos will all be released to the public, but you will see them in advance, and you can know that you helped finance my research.
Twenty twenty was the year of social isolation. I skipped that year in posting to this blog. But Bow and I continued our life in social isolation as if nothing remarkable had happened. Social isolation by now had become our way of life. We were resigned to it. We did not really understand why so many people found it unbearable.
Man is a social animal. Chimpanzees are social animals. Everybody craves companionship and interaction. The regular people flocked to Zoom, making it impossible for Julia and me to livestream there, so we had to turn to a new service: StreamYard.
The Bow fans on my successful YouTube channel berated me for forcing them to watch painting videos, because all they wanted to do was watch Bow groom me. Since the algorithm also punished me for this by reducing our income, I had to find a way to separate painting from grooming.
So now, if you want to watch a grooming video, you can find it on my main channel.
And if you want to watch a painting video, it can be found on my secondary channel.
But what about language? What about Bow's use of words? Why wasn't I mentioning that, writing about it or even publishing? Had Bow stopped using words to communicate?
No, not exactly, but Bow is a grown chimpanzee man now, and grown men very rarely communicate to their mothers about what it is they are thinking about. So we talked about what we would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course. And we talked about if we were going outside or we needed a blanket. But nothing very memorable was said, and I did not feel the need to record any of that.
And then today Bow suddenly spoke up again. It was a snowy day.
After breakfast, I was watching a Yaron Brook video in which he compared Ayn Rand's take on romantic love with the opinions of Jordan Peterson. Bow is usually not interested in videos with talking heads about abstract topics.
I had not gotten very far into the video. Yaron was talking about how happiness and not reproduction is the real goal of romantic love. Bow summoned me to his side of the pen. He told me the he wanted me to let him look at the guy. I was confused: Which guy? It turned out he wanted me to bring the iPhone in so he could listen to Yaron Brook and watch the video. But he had not listened to much, when he started to get agitated, and he took my hand and spelled out: תני לי דודה לאהוב "Give me a lady to love."
I asked him: "Do you want her to come to you? Or do you want to go to her?"
He said: שתבוא אלי "Come to me."
So here is the problem: If Bow were to go to the lady chimp, he could never return. Why on earth should his need for companionship force him to give up his freedom?
In today's age of social isolation, many people are being told that they are allowed to mingle with people from the same household, but they should not meet with strangers. Maybe now the public will understand what it is like to trapped in a holding cell "for your own kind."
Of course, Bow should be allowed to meet with other chimps and to form relationships. But nobody wants to be trapped in a concentration camp, a reservation or an institution "for their own kind." Children want to meet other children, but they also want to be able to go home to their parents, who are not their own age. Elders may enjoy the companionship of other people their age, but they do not want to be told they cannot meet with their grandchildren. People in one neighborhood want to visit friends in another neighborhood and return home at the end of the day.
If the price for companionship were never being able to leave a community, would you not prefer social isolation, too? Stone walls do not a prison make. Not being able to control movements into your own space is what makes it a prison.
Last year, I got involved in Inktober, a month-long, non-competitive art event open to anyone. During Inktober, people use ink to create a sketch from a verbal prompt consisting of a single word. Each day in October we get a new prompt, and we have to complete a sketch that day. My favorite drawing that came out of Inktober 2018 is a portrait of baby Bow.
Unfortunately, I got sick that year and was not able to complete Inktober. This year I was finally able to do one drawing each day in October, and many of my drawings have been of Bow.
While I drew on my own, I also encouraged Bow to draw, too. He didn't always want to, and when he did he would not tell me what he was drawing. By looking at older art from other family members, including myself as a child and Sword in her preschool years, I have noticed a distinct difference between the sorts of art that Bow makes and the art of children I have known. Human children do not strive for realism early on, but they do make representational art that is largely symbolic. Body parts are given symbolic representation and part/whole relations are very important. When Bow draws, he may be representing things, but not so much by symbolism, and quite possibly by a direct attempt at realism.The video linked below demonstrates more fully what I mean.
Here is a picture of the etching that we discovered on the floor of the inner pen in 2008. It had not been there before.
Do you see a head of an ape when you look at it? Do you think this is an artwork by Bow?
You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.
After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.
In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas. But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.
After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.
Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.
Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.
I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics.
As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.
Yesterday was Halloween. Bow and I celebrated in our own way. You can watch our Halloween special right here.
Watching this video, you might be asking yourself: is this really a chimpanzee who can spell out words? Is he really sixteen going on seventeen? Is he really an intelligent being? There are those who when they see too much playfulness or behavior that in a human we might associate with a lower IQ become even more skeptical about my claims about Bow's literacy.
However, language ability does not necessarily imply overall high IQ in humans. Literacy can also exist in the form of hyperlexia, implying excellence in decoding letters into sounds and patterns into words, without a high level of comprehension. Many humans I know who are perfectly normal use their language skills just to express their feelings or interact socially with others, without ever having to encode new information. They keep talking and talking, but all they are really communicating with all that hot air is how they feel at the moment or how they want to relate to another person. They can go their whole lives without expressing an original thought or comprehending an original thought expressed by someone else. That is all normal behavior for humans, and chimpanzees like Bow are not all that different.
Recently I was sick and was away from Bow for two days. He was in good hands, and people were taking care of him in my absence. When I got back, he was very gentle with me, grooming. He did not say anything at all about my illness. But one time, totally spontaneously, after a couple of days of my being back, he took my hand and spelled: שתי דודות שמרו עלי "Two ladies watched over me."
I think he just wanted me to know he had been well taken care of in my absence. There is nothing super deep about that, but it did touch my heart.
This morning, I noticed Bow had not yet used the potty. So I asked him if he needed to pee.
?אתה צריך לעשות פיפי
His answer tickled me: רק קצת "Just a little."
This is not a deep interspecies communication moment. But that is how Bow uses language to express his personality. He is not a needy person. He only needs to pee "just a little."
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