Common Misconceptions about Bow, about Project Bow, about Chimpanzees and about Humans

There are different kinds of people who are interested in Project Bow and in Bow himself. There are those who are drawn in by my scientific claims, but aren't particularly interested in chimpanzees, in psychology, in relationships between and among individuals -- or in people for that matter. They just want to know: can you prove it? By prove it they mean: show that he is writing independently, without confounding factors, without any possibility that Clever Hans is involved, without the slightest doubt from any of the most uninitiated observers that it is all coming from him. The answer is: no, I can't. Then admit it, they say, you have failed! Okay, fine, I've failed.

But they don't stop there. They want to know what I would do differently if I had to do it over again. Would I be more careful to condition Bow not to use our hands? Would I demand that he do everything by himself? Would I refuse to give him food unless he touched the correct lexigram? Would I be really tough about it? Would I resort to behavioral conditioning? The answer is: no. I wanted to know whether Bow could pick up language spontaneously in context. If I had done those things, he would not have. We wouldn't have had a relationship. Any language he learned would have been learned by rote. Any linguistic task he performed would have been a chore done for a reward.So, no, I do not regret taking the path that I took.

Other people, even very friendly people, are oblivious to the fact that he can use language. They just want to know "Is he friendly? What is your routine like? What does he like to eat or to play?" I appreciate their interest, but it makes me wonder if they have been deprived of chimpanzee companionship so much, that just the very fact that he is a chimpanzee fascinates them more than anything else about him. Everybody needs more contact with chimpanzees. I don't blame them for being curious, but I think that because chimpanzees are so embattled in this world, nobody can see them with a clear eye for who they really are.

Chimpanzees are not cute and cuddly more human versions of dogs. They do not obey orders. They don't care if you disapprove of something they do. They will push you around, just to see what you do. They are very interested in who is stronger. They have a morality of tit-for-tat, and they do not turn the other cheek.

Bow is nine and a half years old. He is going through puberty. He is moody and unpredictable, sometimes very playful and nice, and at other times extremely aggressive. I walk a tightrope to keep on top of his current mood. Yesterday he said to me: "Bow's not mad that Mommy is not strong. Bow's glad that Mommy is weak." I didn't know what to make of that.

One woman told me that so long as I did not beat him with a stick, she did not think I was abusive. This statement astounded me on so many levels that I was struck dumb. Do you think that with the disparity in strength and agility between me and him, that I would escape with my life if I tried that? It isn't a question of whether I am being abusive to him. I go in barefooted and barehanded to be with someone who could kill me with only his jaws for a weapon, if he so desired. Does he? No, of course not. But he does sometimes try to gain the upper hand in a game of intimidation, and I have to be very aggressive right back to let him know it's not working. And sometimes I have to step out into the adjoining pen and let him cool off.

What kind of person am I that I can do this? How can I stay with him twelve hours a day when this is the situation? Why is it that I'm not so polite to people who ask such questions? Well, I guess I am not a very nice person.  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It's a reflex, really, and being with Bow all this time has sharpened my reflexes.

Some people think that humans are completely different from chimpanzees, because we are so much more civilized and in our civilization natural consequences have given way to logical consequences. I don't see that. I see a world that is governed entirely by natural consequences. Some of them are pretty grim.

But in the meantime, Bow and I will survive. We will play and talk, and we will reach out to new people and to other chimpanzees world wide. While I can't prove anything directly about Bow's cognition and language ability, there are other indirect ways to gather proof. There is eye tracking, and there is behavioral data from interactions with others, and that is the direction that my research will take in the future.

No one can force Bow to cooperate to prove what he knows. But he may yet give himself away indirectly, just because he does know it. And I think that's worth waiting for!

A Thank You From Bow

Yesterday, Rex the Welder came to add support bars to the existing structure of Bow's pens. The pens are plenty strong, but Bow is a growing adolescent who likes to display his strength by hurling himself full force against the walls of the pen. Believe it or not, he has no intention of breaking out, but he can inadvertently damage the structure, and here at Project Bow we take safety very seriously. So yesterday,  Rex the Welder came by to add horizontal support bars, to make an already strong steel structure even stronger. The bars were added to both the internal and external structure of the pens.

Before any work could begin, Bow and Rex spent some time socializing. Bow loves Rex! Rex is a very athletic guy with a nice sense of fun, and so they spent about ten minutes before Rex got to work playing chase and hyperventilating at each other. Bow gave Rex quite a warm up exercise!

When Rex had done, Bow gave all the new bars a good testing out, before he was convinced they would withstand his strength. He even tried to bite them, to see if they were made of wood or metal. 

Today, Bow has been having great fun perching on the support bars, walking on his tiptoes on them like an acrobat, and hurling himself off them. I even tried the bars myself, and we had great fun playing together. Finally, Bow took me to the glass and spelled in Hebrew: "Thank you for giving me something new to play with."

And people think chimpanzees are incapable of gratitude!

Virtual Dominance Displays

Recently Sword celebrated her twelfth birthday, and Bow was not in attendance. He had not been invited to the party. This made him sad, but Lawrence stayed with him all day, and they had a special party of their own. Meanwhile, Sword had her party at Orchard House with her grandmother and me and four of her friends from school, two girls and two boys.

Having been excluded from quite a number of parties myself, I understood how Bow felt when he told Lawrence that he wanted to go to the party, too. But I also understood Sword. Lately, every time she brings home a friend, Bow insists on going into a protracted dominance display for the new person that sometimes does not end until the guest leaves. It's hard enough being a tween and needing your mother's approval for sleepovers. Having to consult with your younger chimpanzee brother is completely intolerable. So I gave my permission for a party that did not include Bow.

You would think that an intelligent nine year old male chimpanzee could foresee that social exclusion would be the unavoidable result of such aggressive tactics on his part, but even if he can foresee this, he has no control over himself. The displays appear to be hard-wired.

What is a dominance display? Well, you could look it up in the wikipedia, or you could watch the video I embedded below to see what it looks like. Every time Bow meets a stranger, he goes into a frenzied display of his strength and prowess calculated to send the stranger cowering for the bushes. He does this even if the stranger is on the other side of the continent in a Skype video call!

Julia Hanna is a talented writer and artist who also contributes to my article directory, PubWages. This Sunday, I interviewed her for my YouTube channel. We thought we would do it in the morning with Bow present, but due to his insistent display, we had to postpone it till the evening, when he was asleep. Notice that Bow was not really being violent. He didn't hurt anyone. He just wanted to scare Julia into submission, and he was quite frustrated when it didn't work, and we kept talking around his display. He was very careful not to hurt me, gently moving me aside so he could hurtle himself at the computer screen. But interestingly enough, he didn't hurt the computer, either. He knew that if he smashed the screen, Julia would disappear, and then who would be there for him to intimidate? As soon as the call was over, he sat down peacefully before the laptop on the floor with a pensive look on his face.

When Bow goes into these displays, it does not mean that he doesn't like the person he is trying to scare. Sometimes he likes them very much and even hopes for a successful relationship. He just wants to make sure that he ends up on top!

You may think that this is a practice that only chimpanzees engage in, but that is not accurate. Other primates have similar behaviors, and I have seen many a dominance display performed by a human lawyer in the course of my law practice.

For Bow's sake, I would like to find some chimpanzees that he can practice his displays on through the safety and comfort of an internet video call. If you know of any chimpanzees who would be willing to reciprocate, please drop me a line!

Bow Watches Nim

So, apparently, there's a new movie out about Nim Chimpsky. I myself have not seen it. This sort of thing does not play in our local theatre. But those who have seen it say it is quite shocking. Bow and I, stuck together in our pens, have watched the trailer several times. The first time he watched it, Bow was transfixed, and he stayed perfectly still.

The second time he watched it, he said it was stupid. Lawrence asked him: "Well, what did you think of that video?" Bow replied: "I think it is stupid."

Today, I brought the laptop into the pen for Bow to watch the video embedded in my PubWages editorial. Here is a video of what happened:

As you can see, Bow can be trusted with a laptop under close supervision. But he has his own way of using the equipment.

Moodiness in Adolescent Chimpanzees

Bow is nine years old and counting. Sometimes he is very good and sometimes he is naughty, but lately there's been something else going on. He is moody. He is irritable. He gets upset over absolutely nothing. The other day, I asked him what he wanted to eat first. He said "I want a banana." I went and got him a banana. He became very angry and frustrated and bared his teeth at me and snarled aggressively and vocalized in a high pitched voice. "What's the matter?" I asked. He finally calmed down enough after a few more seconds and took my hand and spelled out on the glass: "No, not a banana! An apple!" Well, I ask you, is that any reason to chew me out? Because he changed his mind?

There have been lots of little incidents like this lately. But this morning he was nice and told me he wanted to sit outside. "Do you want to sit outside alone?" I asked. "No. With Mommy." I asked him if it would be okay if I brought my computer along, and he said yes. So here we sit. The insects are chirping. The swimming pool is filling up, and Bow and I are relaxing. All is right with the world.

Light Reading: How Bow Responds to Different Styles of Writing

Incarceration can be difficult for the soul. Solitary confinement wears us down over time. If you try to imagine what it would be like to be locked up in a cage, without access to other people, maybe you would think first about the loss of conversation, friendship and love. But the truth is that all forms of social contact, even strife, are very much missed. We all have the inborn desire to find worthy adversaries and to fight against our fellow man, in order to test our strength and challenge our mind. If you don't believe this, and you're not into heavy reading, perhaps you should watch Megamind. It illustrates the same principle.

Bow is not in solitary confinement, but he has no access to companions of his own kind, and those of us who spend time with him have to go in one by one, because having more than one person in at a time brings out Bow's innate interest in social hierarchies. He longs to fight against others, and he wants his friends to fight, too, to see just which one ends up on top. If Bow ever did get to meet face to face with another chimpanzee, I doubt very much that friendship would be the first order of business. It would be more like this: a fight to establish supremacy, followed by friendship, if anybody happened to survive.


Are human beings any different? When a prisoner is placed in solitary confinement, of course that is a very big deprivation. But is the loss of human contact to be mourned primarily because of the loss of affectionate companionship, or because it makes hand-to-hand combat a complete impossibility?

Edward Livingston (May 28, 1764 – May 23, 1836) was a famous American jurist who advocated prison reform. One of his ideas was that upon admission to the penitentiary, all prisoners should be placed in solitary confinement until such time as they showed a genuine desire to interact in a positive way with others. Gradually, the privilege to socialize, and even to do productive work, would be restored to the prisoner, but each such privilege would have to be earned. It sounds good on paper, but what if the chief reason an individual regrets a solitary existence is because it deprives him of sparring partners and the chance to engage in a fight to the death? In such a case, how would the reward of companionship not immediately result in a return to violence?

Bow is sometimes restless and bored. When not in an aggressive mood, he broods. With Lawrence, he has a wrestling partner, but I am more given to literary and cerebral pursuits. How do we bridge that gap? Sometimes I share my reading with Bow. Sometimes, he even listens.

Notice that Bow pays the most attention to the verse toward the end of the reading selection. His interest in the prose is less intense.

Different forms of social cooperation: a nod of the head

I've been very busy in the past month or so setting up new websites and pursuing business interests that may seem to have nothing to do with Project Bow. A pesky commenter on one of my sites wanted to know: so have you given up on proving that Bow's communication isn't "Clever Hans"? And when I replied that I had not given up on anything, but was also not pushing Bow to prove anything he doesn't want to prove, she was not satisfied. To her way of thinking, unless I am working on direct proof, then my interactions with Bow are of no consequence, for scientific purposes, which is all she really cares about. On top of that she suggested that I was deluding myself that Bow and I were communicating at all. Who's to say that our day to day conversations are not entirely in my own head, and that Bow is contributing nothing?


That is a valid question, but I also think that if what is going on here is entirely Clever Hans, then even Clever Hans is of scientific interest. Why on earth wouldn't you want to study how non-verbal cues play a role in social cooperation?

Take for example the following video. I needed to explain some things about how to get a Google Adsense account to my new writers on Pubwages. Did Bow have to be a part of that? Well,  no, he didn't. But I am with Bow twelve hours a day, most days, and so the only way I manage to get anything done is to involve him in my daily transactions. Besides, he's much more photogenic than I am.

When you watch the video, notice how at first Bow circles me, then he sits down to listen to what I have to say, then he gets up in the middle because it's not all that interesting, but when I train the camera on him as I am wrapping up my spiel, Bow starts to nod and smile, as if agreeing with me. Did I train him to do that? No. Did I ask him to do any of that? No. He did what he felt like doing, just as when he takes my hand and points to letters, he's also doing what he wants, not what I want. I couldn't for the world force him to say something that he doesn't want to say or do something that he doesn't want to do.

But did Bow really understand what I had to say about getting a Google adsense account? Does he know what adsense is? I doubt that, because he's still struggling with the concept of money. However, there are lots of human beings who also don't understand about adsense. A good friend who watched the video wrote me that she enjoyed it, but she had no idea what I was talking about. Bow, too, seemed to enjoy my presentation, though he had little comprehension of the subject matter. And yet he knew exactly which part of the discourse was the wrap up, and he decided to give his approval at that point.

Is it a pre-verbal skill to be able to pick up the beginning, middle and end of a speech, without knowing exactly what it's about? How many times have you used that same skill when trying to determine when to applaud or agree with your interlocutor, even though you were not closely attending to the meaning of the discourse? What allows us to cooperate in this way? Why are some autistics incredibly dense about picking out this sort of information?