THE HEISENBERG PRIMATE:

What about the heart-warming stories of human-ape understanding? Human handlers interacted with the apes for thousands of hours, and occasionally the human interpretation of a string of signs would stand out as interesting. But, this makes the interesting sign combinations look more like generous interpretations of anecdotes that were cherry-picked, or fed to the ape by human handlers, and not a conscious thinking pattern.

What's more, the meaning of the signs was very easy to over-interpret. Is water bird the intellectual combination of two concepts to indicate a waterfowl? Or is it just rote repetition that a lake and a bird are nearby, combined with generous and wishful human interpretation? Studies in the field generally focused on picking unusual instances out of thousands of hours footage, rather than systematically studying whether apes expressed meaningful ideas. When Terrace did this, he found that interesting sentences began to look like drops in the ocean.

Most of that footage demonstrated the apes producing word salads that contained signs for food or affection they desired. Usually these sentences were very short, and in no sense grammatical. Terrace noted that nearly all Nim's sentences were two or three words long; extended sentences were very rare. The general pattern was: Nim or me followed by eat, play, tickle, banana, grape, or the like. Human children begin with short sentences. But they rapidly develop the ability to form longer sentences, conveying meaningful thoughts, asking questions, and expressing new ideas. Nim never did any of these things.

Nim once formed a sixteen-word sentence: give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. If that sounds to you more like the nonsense babbling of a parrot, or what your dog might say to you if he saw that you had an orange, and much less like the thoughts of a child, you can see the problem.

This situation was amusingly summed up by another famous researcher. Here is Noam Chomsky, on Nim Chimpsky:

"The ape was no dope. If he wanted a banana, he'd produce a sequence of irrelevant signs and throw in the sign for banana randomly, figuring that he'd brainwashed the experimenters sufficiently so that they'd think he was saying 'give me a banana.' And he was able to pick out subtle motions by which the experimenters indicated what they'd hope he'd do. Final result? Exactly what any sane biologist would have assumed: zero."

Chomsky adds in a final dig:

"Then comes the sad part. Chimps can get pretty violent as they get older, so they were going to send him to chimp heaven. But the experimenters had fallen in love with him, and tried hard to save him. He was finally sent off to some sort of chimp farm, where he presumably died peacefully -- signing the Lord's Prayer in his last moments."

Likewise, Terrace ultimately concluded that: "[Nim] was unable to use words conversationally, let alone form sentences."

Koko the Impostor had a nipple fetish

Similar giant flaws appear to run deep through the stories of most signing apes. Former handlers have given accounts of concerning issues in studies of several animals. Let's focus on the example of Koko the gorilla. Koko's global warming message was obviously pieced together from a great many pieces of different footage, and no one seriously believes that a gorilla understands anthropogenic climate change. This brilliant lecture hilariously details many further problems with the study of Koko. No actual data was published of Koko's signs. Instead, years of apparently random utterances were sifted through, and dubiously interpreted, to find heart-warming stories. The rest of the gibberish signing was ignored.

A transcript of a text message session with Koko demonstrates this issue. Read on their own, Koko's words don't make much sense. However, her interpreter comes up with explanations for them. Here's an example, quoted from the text session:

(Handler): Koko, do you like to talk to people?

(Koko): Fine nipple.

(Handler): Yes, that was her answer. "Nipple" rhymes with "people," OK? She doesn't sign people per se, so she may be trying to do a "sounds like..." but she indicated it was "fine."

Is that a fair interpretation? Did the gorilla understand and use rhyming in the English spoken language to play a clever conversational word game? The entire transcript is rife with apparently meaningless responses that may or may not be interpretable. The transcript also broaches the topic of Koko's apparent nipple fetish, which eventually caused legal problems.

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