The Flight of the Iguana (17 page)

A Personal Message from Washoe the Chimp

In a recent book titled
Silent Partners,
a man named Eugene Linden has raised an interesting and important question.

Linden is a free-lance writer who has specialized in reporting upon research into language-learning ability among primates. A dozen years ago he published a volume called
Apes, Men, and Language,
which is probably still the best overview of the subject. The sort of research enterprise that Linden described—experimental efforts to teach apes, especially chimpanzees, to use a human-designed language—was in high vogue among psychologists during the 1970s. But toward the end of the decade the vogue faded, funding disappeared, and researchers turned their attention elsewhere. Eugene Linden also turned his attention elsewhere. Then he got curious and went back. Chimpanzees live a long time, sometimes up to fifty years, and most of the animals used in the experiments had been juveniles. Knowing this, Linden had the sensitivity to wonder about those long twilight years. The question he shaped has a great depth of moral import and leads the mind off in many directions—tossing up challenges to some of the fundamental assumptions of Western culture, demanding new and careful thoughts on such matters as the nature of personhood, the definition of language, the proper conduct of
relations between mankind and other species—but the essence of that question is quite simple.

Linden asked: What ever happened to Washoe the Talking Chimp?

Washoe was once a star of stage, screen, and monograph. She was perhaps the world's most famous chimpanzee who hadn't ridden a rocket. She achieved her renown with a series of performances that were not so flashy as spaceflight, but arguably just as epochal: She communicated with humans in a human language.

Washoe did not speak aloud. What she did was gesture eloquently. Her career began on a day in April of 1967, when she first used American Sign Language (the standard system of hand signals used among deaf-mutes in North America) to tell her guardians: “Gimme sweet.”

The crucial thing about this gestural imperative was that it seemed to involve
cognitive
communication. Washoe had evidently matched particular signs to a particular message that she wished to convey in a particular situation. By way of contrast, Eugene Linden takes note of another class of animal speech, wherein a mynah bird at a Texaco station on a certain highway in Michigan states crisply to whomever walks by: “Up yours, you jive turkey.” It isn't the same.

Washoe had been captured from the wild in Africa when she was less than a year old, and acquired by two Nevada psychologists named Allen and Beatrice Gardner. She lived in a relatively privileged human environment that included good food, freedom to ramble and climb, toys and other distractions, affectionate human attention, but no chimpanzee companionship whatsoever. It had been the Gardners' ingenious idea to try teaching American Sign Language to Washoe, because earlier research had suggested that chimps might be smart enough to learn human speech but were thwarted by their vocal anatomy. Washoe, like other chimps, could compensate with manual dexterity for what she lacked in voice control. By the time she was four years old she
had a vocabulary of 85 signs. Eventually she mastered 132 signs. She could ask questions and she could use the negative. Occasionally she invented new signs, with particular referents of her own choice, and taught them to the Gardners. She even learned to swear (not so fluently as a mynah bird, but with more conviction) when she was annoyed. Some people said at the time—and a few might still say—that by crossing the language barrier Washoe had irreversibly blurred the boundary between her species and ours.

Undeniably she was special. She was something very much like a person.

•   •   •

After the period of her early work under the Gardners, two important changes came to Washoe's life. First, she was gradually shifted to the guardianship of a young graduate student named Roger Fouts. Second, she left Nevada (and Fouts with her) to take up residence at the Institute for Primate Studies, a research facility on wooded land outside of Norman, Oklahoma. The Institute for Primate Studies was in those days home to a raucous collection of gibbons, macaques, capuchin monkeys, and primates of various other species, including a sizable population of chimpanzees, and during the early 1970s it emerged as one of the main national centers of language-learning experimentation with chimps. At one point it housed a dozen chimps who each had some competence at sign language, plus a number of others not under instruction. Here at the institute, for the first time in her life, Washoe was put into a cage among other members of her species. She was horrified by the accommodations and disgusted by the other chimps, whom she described disdainfully, with her sign language, as “black bugs.” In other words, from her acquired point of view they were not persons, like herself.

Roger Fouts helped to ease Washoe's adjustment, continuing her instruction in sign language and (at least as important) developing a heartfelt and mutual relationship with her that extended
beyond the context of experimentation. They went for walks, Fouts and Washoe, hand in hand. They exchanged hugs. They argued and made up. (Chimpanzees in the wild can be quite belligerent toward each other, but are also distinguished by a great eagerness for conciliation and forgiveness after such fights.) They talked continually in sign language about simple quotidian matters.

Eventually Fouts became the most important individual in Washoe's life, and Washoe became the central subject of Fouts's career. But she was also more to him, it seems, than a scientific subject. Much later Roger Fouts wrote: “Several years ago, when Washoe was about seven or eight years old, I witnessed an event that told about Washoe as a person. . . .” He described an occasion when she had used courage and wit, dangling herself out precariously from the edge of a lake, in order to save another chimpanzee from drowning. “I was impressed with her heroism in risking her life on the slippery banks,” Fouts wrote. “She cared about someone in trouble; someone she didn't even know that well.” Having lived for a while among these creatures, she apparently no longer dismissed them as “black bugs.”

And likewise, to Roger Fouts, Washoe herself was not just a clever test animal but an appealing and valued individual. To him she was not a beast but, in his own choice of word, a
person
—whatever that distinction may signify.

Among the other language-learning chimps in Oklahoma at this time, three besides Washoe achieved some measure of notoriety. Lucy was a captive-born female who spent her first eleven years in a pampered suburban life like Washoe's in Nevada, raised by a human couple in their home, with their young son for her companion and a pet cat of her own. Lucy learned a vocabulary of seventy-five signs and showed facility at creating her own compound words, such as “candy drink” to indicate watermelon. Sometimes she spoke to her toys in sign language. Ally was another, an especially bright male, also raised in a human household,
until age four when his foster mother returned him to the institute. He took the separation hard, but then developed a new bond with a male researcher who wanted to study Ally's grasp of prepositions.

The third was named Nim Chimpsky—an irreverent allusion to the linguist Noam Chomsky. Nim was another male, born at the institute and then shipped off to Columbia University for use in an experiment that became rather famous, precisely because it was eventually declared a failure. At Columbia, Nim had sixty different teachers but apparently no close friends, no single supportive and personal relationship. After four years he was shipped back to Oklahoma, and the principal researcher at Columbia announced his conclusion that, though cleverly imitative, Nim was incapable of cognitive language use. In New York, for whatever reasons, Nim had not been a person.

•   •   •

What is a person?
One message of the whole poignant pageant of language experimentation with chimpanzees, I think, is that this question is worth wondering about.

Aristotle, Descartes, and the entire Western philosophic tradition of spiritual-material dualism would have us believe that a person is a human being, period. A human possesses a rational soul, and in that soul inheres the essence of personhood. By contrast an animal (as these thinkers generally put it, though what they meant was “a nonhuman animal”) has either a more primitive form of soul or none whatsoever, and therefore cannot be imagined as meriting personhood. John Ruskin and others have talked of the
pathetic fallacy,
a term which implies the assertion that, notwithstanding the liberties of metaphor, no storm cloud can truly be angry, no mountain can truly be haughty, and no chimpanzee can truly be heroic. All this seemed certain beyond question. For about eighteen centuries, in fact, the very idea of acknowledging personhood in a nonhuman creature was potently heretical. In some corners, it is still heretical.

Darwin is supposed to have cured us of some of this categorical smugness, but the Darwinian idea of continuity and incremental transformation throughout the spectrum of earthly life is seldom applied to the intangible aspects of what we call human nature. Darwin himself had a strong disagreement with his codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, over the question of whether the human mind was a product of organic evolution. A half-mad South African naturalist named Eugène Marais later offered a wild and interesting notion when he argued (in a book titled
The Soul of the Ape)
that what Freud called “the unconscious” in humans had evolved directly from the conscious mentality of prehuman primates, and had merely been pushed into the psychological background by the more recent development of human consciousness. E. O. Wilson, with his concepts of sociobiology, is also working in this area. But generally the modern view closely resembles the traditional view in seeing mankind as set apart—absolutely and qualitatively—from the biological and (such as it may be) spiritual continuity of all other living creatures.

So
Homo sapiens
is supposedly unique, utterly distinct from the rest, through some miracle of cumulative neurological alchemy. Very well—then what
is
it exactly that manifests that uniqueness?

Religions all offer their own irrefutable answers, but the biological and social sciences have a little more trouble with the question. For instance, biochemical genetics suggests, not only that humans and chimpanzees are very closely related, but that the relation between chimps and us may be even closer than the one between chimps and gorillas. (Though orang-utans also have a plausible claim as our closest living relatives, as described above in “The Lonesome Ape.”) Argument from behavior has turned out to be equally inconclusive. At times it has been claimed that mankind, uniquely, is the tool-using animal. Or that mankind is the weapon-using animal (as proposed so vividly in Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey).
But chimpanzees in the wild use both tools and weapons. It has also been claimed that mankind is the only
tool-making
animal. Wrong again: In the wild, chimps fashion tools especially for gathering one of their preferred foods, termites. And at last it was said, more conservatively, more confidently, that mankind is distinguished as the sole animal making cognitive use of language. That was until Washoe.

What is a person? Well, “person” is just a word, after all, and maybe the project of defining it is of no philosophic or scientific consequence. But in my own view it is an eloquent word, a richly connotative word, and one well suited for use in exactly that foggy no-man's-land between humanity and the rest of the biological community. I think it's a word that is wasted if judged to be merely a synonym for
Homo sapiens.
To me it seems that a person is any creature with whom you—or I, or Roger Fouts—can have a heartfelt and mutual relationship.

•   •   •

The great value of Eugene Linden's book,
Silent Partners,
is in telling us what became of those famous language-learning chimps in the years after the spotlight deserted them.

In 1982 Ally and Nim were sold off, along with a few other sign-using chimps from the institute, to a medical research laboratory in the state of New York. The destiny facing them at this laboratory was to be used in the testing of hepatitis vaccines.

It should be said that the laboratory maintained its chimps under relatively comfortable conditions, and that the testing program was generally nonfatal. But then CBS News ran a short piece on the matter, and that led to a brief but vociferous public outcry, which in turn led to a decision that Ally and Nim—only those two, and because of their famous names—would be spared from medical research. Nim was eventually sent to a ranch in Texas, a place run by the Fund for Animals as a refuge for abused horses, where he would receive benevolent care but where, according to Linden, he had no chimpanzee companionship. Ally
was sent to a breeding farm for chimps, where his name was changed and his illustrious past was of no interest, and so he has in effect disappeared, one of several indistinguishable chimps put out to stud in that place. There is no news about whether anyone ever chats with Ally or Nim in sign language.

Lucy was luckier. Like Washoe, she had acquired a devoted and stubbornly loyal friend. She was shipped to a certain refuge in West Africa where promising work had been done on reintroducing displaced chimpanzees to the wild. But because Lucy had lived for so many years like a human in human surroundings, and had never before even seen an equatorial jungle, the adjustment to her ancestral habitat has been difficult. Her human friend, a woman named Janis Carter, who originally met Lucy in Oklahoma, had at last report spent almost eight years over there herself, in the West African bush, trying to help Lucy learn the ways of a wild chimpanzee.