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.
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."
I am surrounded by teenagers with attitudes. My daughter just turned seventeen. Bow is fourteen and will be fifteen in February. They are too old for this and too mature for that, and this movie is just for little kids and that book is juvenile, and I am beginning to feel a little left out of all this maturity -- because the kid stuff still appeals to me. I never outgrew it.
Bow' friend who brings him bananas and pickle ice gave us a recent issue of the Missouri conservationist that featured black bears. Bow did not appear interested at first, but then I started reading it out loud to him, He came and sat down beside me and took the magazine away from me to look at it himself.
He leafed through the article. I noticed that when he got to the end of the article about the bears, he leafed back, so he did seem to want to remain on the topic of black bears.
However, when I wanted to talk about the bear cub picture, and how the cub was just a baby, and how Bow used to be a baby, too, Bow grew impatient with me. He retreated away from the magazine, and sat there distancing himself, his hand supporting his chin, no longer engaged.
Note to self: never remind a teenager that he used to be a baby. That's something we must never talk about. But it seems like only yesterday...
I have seen a lot of deer on my property over the years. I have also seen deer making wild dashes into the road while I was driving through the countryside, as if no one had taught them how to cross the street when they were little. But city deer are different from country deer. They don't make a mad dash in the blind faith that they will be able to get across. City deer cross deliberately without haste, giving the cars a chance to slow down and avoid hitting them. City deer are sophisticated.
The video embedded above is of a deer I saw in Bloomington while visiting my mother. At no time did it run away. Its movements were slow and deliberate, and it eventually crossed the road safely, continuing on its path. This deer knows what to do, because it lives among humans. It has been assimilated into our society, at least a little bit -- enough to know how to cross the street.
We are all so steeped in the culture we live in, we sometimes take for granted most of what we know about how things work. For instance, when you open a book, which side do you look at first? It might depend on the language.
The bilingual version ofIn Case There's a Foxopens on both sides. It depends on which language you are reading it in,
Bow knows which way to go, depending on the language. In the video below, at about 38 seconds in, he is pointing at the Hebrew word for fox at the exact point when I read that word from that page. But notice which direction he arrives from when he gets to the word. He moves from the right to the left.
There are a lot of little things that show us what Bow knows. But we have to stop taking for granted that everybody should know these things, in order to observe the evidence. Bow is an enculturated chimpanzee. He behaves quite differently from a wild chimpanzee. But he is also bilingual, and he is literate, and he knows the conventions of each language he reads. He knows how to approach a Hebrew book, and he knows how to approach an English book, and his way of reading changes, depending on which language the story is written in.
Someday there will be a formal way to quantify this. But for right now, think about how differently a city deer behaves from a country deer. If all deer were exactly the same with hard wired routines common to their species, why would the difference in their behavior around roads be so obvious?
We came home from a brief visit to my mother, and the proof for the bilingual edition of In Case There's A Fox was waiting for us. You can open the book on the left side, and it's in English. If you open on the rights it is in Hebrew. The two versions meet in the middle of the book, where the two endings are side by side.
Bow likes to point to words in the book sometimes when I am reading them. Can you see where he pointed at the words ראית שועל "did you see a Fox" as I read them out loud?
Bow points at the Hebrew word for fox while I read it out loud
Bow loves leafing through magazines. Usually, he does not seem to be reading them intently, but he likes to look at the pictures. For instance, just last week he got a new issue of Harper's Bazaar and enjoyed looking at all the new fashion choices.
But last Wednesday a friend of his, who comes by and brings him bananas every week, brought him a few issues of the Missouri Conservationist, and that is a completely different kind of magazine.
Bow can be very boisterous and exuberant, and sometimes when is in the midst of a dominance display, this can seem very uncivilized to humans who observe him. But Bow also has his quiet, focused moments. He took a lot of time with these magazines, and he was very gentle with them. He would pause for moments at a time, looking at a page and thinking about it.
Some of the headings of these articles use letters in large typeface, and they feature very familiar-looking words.
What do you suppose Bow was thinking to himself when he came across this heading: BOW FISHING ? Did he think it was about him? He stared at the man in the picture for a long time.
Or how about this easy-to-read caption: BIRDS ARE AWESOME.
I don't use words like "awesome" very much, but Bow is familiar with them, because the interns who volunteered with Bow used to pepper their speech with that word. "It's awesome that he used his words with a stranger!" Sara can be overheard saying to Allie in one of our earlier Project Bow DVDs. So Bow is familiar with these words, and this may be writing at just the right level of simplicity to capture his attention on the page.
Bow can read, but that does not mean that he will sit down and read a book cover to cover or even a page in a magazine in proper sequence. On the other hand, he recognizes words and phrases very easily. The Missouri Conservationist is full of beautiful images of many plants and animals. Bow took it all in, but he paused the longest on the images of human beings accompanied by familiar words.
The picture above, of boys and girls shooting at targets using bows and arrows, had him pause for much longer than any other image. He likes people. He likes children. And he likes the word "bow"!
Yesterday was my day off. When I returned from my errands, on the dining room table, on a paper napkin over which was an apple with one bite taken out of it, Lawrence had written: "Bow took bite of this, spit it out and said it was bad. Do you think others?"
He was referring to all the other apples that had come in that bag. If this was a bad apple, were all the other apples bad? I felt of the apple, and it was hard and unyielding. There was no indication to me that it was rotten. The only reason the part Bow had taken a bite of was brown was because of the normal oxidation process.
I went to the pen to ask Lawrence about it. Lawrence said he had asked Bow why he thought the apple was bad, but Bow, who is not good at answering questions that start with "why" had merely answered: "Because it is bad."
In the evening I made my own investigation. I cut open the apple, tried to remove the oxidated spots and bit into it. The apple tasted fine. I then took it into the pen with Bow, along with the napkin, to begin an inquiry of my own.
"Bow, do you know what it says here?" I asked him, brandishing the napkin. "What does it say?" "?אתה יודע מה כתוב כאן? מה כתוב כאן"
I then read him the napkin, word for word. While I was reading it out loud to him, Bow followed along on the napkin, pointing at the appropriate words. He can read. But when I was done he looked away, as if totally uninterested in the issue that the napkin's words addressed.
"Is it bad? Look, I am eating now," I said and took a bite of the apple. "Is it bad?"
"?האם זה רע? תסתכל' אני אוכלת את זה עכשיו. האם זה רע"
Bow picked up the apple and started eating it. He finished the whole thing. There was no more talk about the apple being bad.
Mind you, this was one of a bag of red delicious apples, which are the least tasty of all the apples in the store. Even the Wikipedia says they don't taste so good.
But that's why they have the lowest price per pound from all the apples in the grocery store. Supply and demand. These are human grade apples, fit for eating. I eat them, too. I also let Bow have more expensive apples in moderation, but I can't have him turning up his nose on the red delicious as long as we are on a budget.
It has been very cool lately. At lunch yesterday I was wearing a jacket. I decided to give Bow only my pinkie to spell with.
Bow was discouraged at first, and he took a break from his spelling to gaze despondently at the windy landscape through the the front door. But then he took up the task and asked for an apple.
Things went more smoothly when Bow requested his meat dish, which was actually the main course for lunch. He finished the entire meal, and then the mowers came.
Bow gets very excited whenever he sees the mowers. He watched them for a while through the front door window.
When he had tired of watching them from the inside, he took my pinkie and spelled בואי אתי החוצה -- "Come outside with me!"
This is very different from what he usually says when he wants to go outside. Usually he just writes "Let me go outside." But apparently this time he wanted my company.
While the mowers mowed, Brownie took some time to dig a nice big hole in the back yard.
Bow was pretty complacent at this point, and I was able to leave him for a moment out there and pick my daughter up from school, as the bus did not run locally yesterday for some reason. By the time I got back, Bow was ready to come in, and the grass was already mowed.
In the evening, we had a beautiful sunset. If you look closely at the front lawn in the picture above, you can see that it is freshly mown. The wildflowers that sprang up there are gone, but their memories live on.
In the pens, we are having a bit of a battle of wills.
Bow keeps gesturing to me that he wants me to give him my hand, and I keep telling him that he can spell by himself. I want things to change, and he wants everything to remain exactly the same.
When you are in a state of equilibrium, sometimes you don't notice when a major status changing crisis is right around the corner. Things seem the same day after day.
The wildflowers in the woods are blossoming, and in the unmown lawn what look like tiny, miniature irises are springing up.
Soon the mowers will come, and this flower will be no more, and the entire state of equilibrium that it was counting on to grow will be gone. Things may seem like a steady state, but there are cycles that come and go.
When something cataclysmic is about to happen to us, we don't always know. It may seem to come out of nowhere, but there are usually signs.
The ants have been on patrol for three days and counting on the peony by the lagoon.
They have not harmed the flower head, but they clearly have some objective in mind, something not known to me.
Bow is not angry with me, and I am not angry with him. We just each want something different. To try to cajole me, he picks up tiny specks of dust and hair from the corners of his pen and throws them into the potty. See, he seems to be saying, I am keeping it tidy. I am good. But still I will not give him my hand to use as a pointer. So he takes it and grooms it, instead,
Then he takes my hand and leads me to the letters on the glass. "But I want you to spell by yourself, Bow!" I slip out from his grasp. "Write 'give' by yourself," I tell him. In Hebrew, when Bow is speaking to me, it is just a three letter word תני. He spells it many times each day, when he is requesting things. But always he uses my hand as a pointer.
I try to bargain with him, just as he earlier tried to bargain with me. "If you spell 'give' by yourself, I will let you use my hand for the rest of the sentence." But he is not swayed.
He keeps offering me his hand, but when I ask him to spell by himself, he turns away.
We can go on like this for hours. Nobody gets angry, but the status quo will not change.
It's a delicate equilibrium, but eventually something has got to give.
Just on the edge of the woods, where the lawn meets the trees, the delicate clover flowers sway in the breeze. Their life seems the same every day, but one day the mowers will come.
Just inside the woods, where it is no longer lawn, the cypress spurge is blooming. They say it is an invasive, and it grows in transition areas, that are neither fully wooded nor fully open. The balance of woods and fields on my land is changing. While it may seem that everything is always the same with me and Bow, that is also a delicate balance. Someday the status quo may change, and we might have our next big breakthrough.
You never know when a delicate flower is about to push up from the ground and bloom, not because you planted it yourself, but just because the seeds were there.
After many, many days of incessant rain, the sun has finally come back out. Bow is happy.
On Wednesday Lawrence stayed with Bow while I ran errands. When the delivery person brought a new man with her, Bow was at first wary, but then he warmed up to the new man. It turned out he really liked him. Bow gestured to Lawrence excitedly that he wanted to say something. Then he took Lawrence's hand and spelled: "I want him to come in."
Bow can go for a long time without saying anything new or surprising. But when he needs to say something in order to express himself, he knows how.
Someday, we will develop new ways to test intelligence and learning. Instead of expecting a subject to be compliant, we will test what they can do when they are actually engaged by the subject and are initiating a communication rather than responding to one.
Successful employers have already noticed that a high GPA predicts little about future performance by a employee, besides coming to work every day. Soon they will realize that standardized testing does not tell you much about creative use of intelligence in real life. Once we develop a way to determine knowledge and ability without cooperation, when we distinguish compliance from intelligence, Bow's achievements will shine, and people will see that he is much smarter than that dog who can identify objects by name on command.
In the meantime, Bow and I continue with our routines. There's a new review of Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain on Amazon. Bow and I are spending more time outdoors. In the video below from yesterday, Bow and I were just sitting peacefully on the stoop together, when I noticed an injured wasp on the floor. I asked Bow if he caused that.
Right after lunch, I went out for a walk and noticed a butterfly sunning itself on the road. I stayed and looked at it until a car drove by and the butterfly flew away.
On my way back to he house, I spotted several colorful butterflies enjoying the milkweed flowers in our pasture.
In the evening, I went to a local carnival with my daughter and her friend. It was Friday the 13th, and people had made up a rumor that there was a murderer at large at the carnival. Of course, we saw no sign of a murderer. But I did get a great shot of the sun setting at the carnival grounds.
Last night was the night of the Strawberry Moon. No, I did not get a good picture of it with my cell phone camera. So I will leave that to your imagination -- or you could check the blog of somebody who has a real camera.
But I did have some interesting experiences, possibly due to the full moon, and also a few thoughts to share.
Yesterday I ran across an article in the Atlantic about how literacy improves empathy. It was full of platitudes: reading about another person's experiences in a literary work (as opposed to say, low brow lit) improves our ability to empathize with others, according to the article. Then they gave some reasons why they think that, among them: literacy is something that has to be taught. Because it's unnatural, it makes us think more. And thinking leads to empathy, and so we are getting better and better, and are more empathetic than pre-literate people.
If you have connections, you can write anything in a prestigious journal and get it published. But really! That argument is full of holes. First of all, literacy does not have to be taught, any more than language has to be taught. It can be picked up, but it requires exposure. Like language itself, literacy is something few people would come up with on their own, because most do not invent their own language or their own alphabet. But with exposure in a social setting, we pick up the ambient language. And many children, including Bow, have also picked up the ability to read, without explicit instruction. Literacy happens when people who are pre-wired to decode are exposed to writing and language in a social setting.
Secondly, high literature predates writing. Many great classical works of literature, including parts of the Old Testament and the Iliad, existed as oral tradition before they were ever set down in writing. Writing does not beget literature. It merely helps to preserve it. And empathy, if we have any, is something we bring to literature: not something we gain from reading it. People without empathy can't get it out of a book.
Take Bow, for instance. He has empathy, because he can feel what another person feels without getting under their skin. He brings this empathy to bear every time he grooms me.
Bow has surgical instruments at his fingertips, and yet his touch when he examines me is soft and gentle. He can remove a mole with a single flick of a finger, and yet he examines each blemish on the surface of my skin with care. Like a doctor, he examines ears, eyes and nose to determine any signs of ill health or disease. But unlike most of today's doctors, he does it without asking for a fee.
Can empathy be taught? I don't think so. No more than literacy can be. It can be demonstrated, but we cannot expect to teach it to an unwilling and unmindful pupil. My experience is the same with readers of my books. You can take them on the journey, but they will not suffer along with the characters, if their mind is closed. To feel for another, you have to have feelings for yourself. Today, many humans have shut themselves down. They are blind to the sights that surround them, and they feel nothing that they have not somehow been given permission to feel by the society they live in.
Walking alone yesterday evening, I stayed open to the world around me. A snake was lying across my path, so I stepped aside and walked around it. But then curiosity got the better of me, and I turned back and tried to film it. The snake, wanting to avoid a confrontation, seeing that I was not leaving, decided to go back into the overgrown pasture.
It was an eastern yellow-bellied racer, a friend later told me on Facebook. Racer is a good name for it, as once it made up its mind to leave, it wasted no time in executing that decision.
I peered into the pasture, where I spotted a beautiful flower, which a Facebook friend later identified as common milkweed.
I continued along my path all the way to the western edge of my property, then headed back. On the way back, I came across a turtle. The turtle, being slow, allowed me to take more time to observe it.
There was exposed dirt where the turtle's hind quarters were moving, and at first I thought it was trying to dig its way out of the shallow hole it was in.
But when I shared the footage I got of the turtle with a Facebook friend, she told me it was female three-toed box turtle who was digging a nest to lay her eggs in.
I left her alone, thinking that whatever she was up to, she did not need my help to do it.
My friend says that seeing a female box turtle dig a nest in the wild is quite rare, because they usually do this in private where no one can see. But it was the evening of the strawberry moon, and the animals were coming out. I was glad I was there to see it.
Does empathy come from a book? I don't think so. Empathy means being able to feel for others, even those quite different from us. Empathy prepares people to understand what they read. It makes us better readers and better people. But empathy is not found between the pages of a book. It is found within us -- or not at all.
I think people are very confused about literacy these days. They assume that literacy is the ability to read, and once you learn how to read, you can read anything and understand anything, so that literacy can open the entire store of human knowledge to any given person. As romantic as that may sound, and as much as I would like to believe that it's true, there is an element of magical thinking in that.
Literacy at its simplest is the ability to decode and encode writing so that symbols on the page or on the screen can be associated with pronounced words in a particular language. Being able to read can precede being able to have a conversation. It can even come before the meanings of some of the words one can read are understood. Little children can do this. Chimpanzees can do this. It is no big deal, and it does not imply a giant leap of intelligence.
I've had people ask me: "Since you say that Bow is literate, does he read books?" My honest answer has always been that I don't think he does. He has been exposed to books since infancy, and he likes to have them read to him, and he also likes to handle them, but so far, I have not seen any evidence that he reads books. He may read a few words here and there, but he does not sit down and sequentially read a book from cover to cover, taking it in the way the author intended.
Bow knows what books are. He has seen me use them in the canonical way, but it's not something he wants to do. So what does he actually do, when given a book to read? Here is a video clip that answers that question.
Notice that Bow holds the book right side up, not upside down. He is interested in getting to know the different parts of the book,and he flips through finding small snippets that are of interest to him, whether pictorial or textual, but his attention span does not allow him to stop for too long on any given thing.
Admittedly, this is a book that is of interest to me because of the subject matter. Bow is not interested in the ideas and personages involved, but I have in the past given him books about other chimpanzees to read, and he treated them about the same way. He would sit for hours -- or at least twenty minute intervals with breaks -- to have me read to him about Nim, but he did not sit for hours reading about Nim himself.
To be honest, I don't read every book sequentially, either. When it's a book that I use for research purposes, I go through the index just like Bow, and I pick up particular passages that have something to do with my own purposes.
Many humans have trouble sitting down and reading a book cover to cover. Bow is not alone in this. If you would like to learn about the problems of other readers, I recommend this blog:
Literacy isn't everything. There are many other components to reading a book besides being able to decode a sequence of letters and make out which word it spells. It isn't magic. And Bow's achievements in literacy do not in any way imply that his intelligence is abnormally high. That claim was never made.
What I am hoping for, someday, is to find a way to prove what Bow really can do. It's not all that remarkable, once you realize what it is, but it would be nice to be able to share this knowledge with others. And maybe if people realized how modest an achievement literacy is for the average human, they might come to be less closed to the idea that a chimpanzee can do it, too.
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