Note: These materials are intended as supplements for students in Ant. 301. These pages are in development and will contain errors.

The Impact of Ape Communication on Science

Animals and Ethics

Numerous models in the behavioral sciences that have been designed to provide insights about mental processes and abilities. Many of the methodologies used at the turn of the century utilized rather unscientific approaches, including introspection. Partly as a reaction to such unscientific approaches, behaviorism, as proposed by John B. Watson in 1913, became one of the most popular paradigms of the twentieth century. Its central concept is that behavior is the result of stimuli and learning. It became unfashionable in western social sciences to approach the study of behavior in any other way. This led the study of behavior away from unscientific introspection and placed an emphasis upon learning, especially reinforcement. A principal and controversial figure in this shift was B.F. Skinner, who argued that consciousness is just an epiphenonmenon, i.e., that behavior and consciousness are controlled (shaped) by experience (rewards and punishments).

Darwin had argued that animals had instincts, complex reflexes that were inherited and subject to natural selection. Ethology, stimulated by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, elaborated further by describing fixed-action patterns that were largely heritable and characterized the behavioral repertoire of a species. Well-coordinated, stereotyped, heritable movements are called fixed action patterns. Elaborate sequences of fixed action patterns that are used in communication are called displays. The process by which natural selection codes displays into a species is called ritualization.

The general pattern for nonhuman primates is that the generation of signals is largely innate. Primate displays, facial expressions, and calls tend to be species characteristic rather than individual characteristic. On the other hand, the meaning of such signals is learned by experience. Thus members of a particular species learns both the meaning of signals within their troop and the meaning of alarm calls and intention movements of other species.

The evolution of human language was characterized by a progressive decrease in the innate components of vocalizations and a corresponding increase in the learning component. As a consequence, humans must accommodate learning both how to send and decode signals. Local dialects will occur since learning permits more variation than genetic coding. As learning skills evolve, longer vocabularies, more complex syntax, and more complex strings of signals appear.

In anthropology, it became popular in the mid twentieth century to view the human mind and human behavior as unique and different from animals. Animals were automatons, bundles of reflexes with limited capabilities for learning. Humans in contrast, had few instincts, and human behavior was shaped by learning. All sorts of human abilities, including self awareness, were presumed to be uniquely human. This perspective has been effectively destroyed by establishment of effective two way communication be humans and certain nonhuman primates.

There has long been an interest in trying to teach nonhuman primates human speech. Though many people had monkey or ape pets, but two experiments prior to W.W.II had a strong influence on the scientific community. W.N. Kellogg and L.A. Kellogg kept a young chimpanzee named Gua for a few months in their home and compared the ape to their young son, Donald. Catherine Nissen and Keith Hayes kept a female chimp for six years. The inability of these young chimpanzees to acquire speech reinforced the idea of the uniqueness of human abilities.

The early 1960's celebrated a number of attempts to find ways of communicating with apes. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, David Premack and his associates taught chimpanzees to communicate with an investigator using plastic symbols on a magnetic board. However, the watershed experiment began in 1966 with the work of Beatrice and Allen Gardner, psychologists from the University of Nevada. Their success with teaching Washoe, a female chimpanzee, American Sign language (ASL) gave the Gardners and their assistants the distinction of being the first humans to open truly two way dialog between humans and a nonhuman species. The Gardners reasoned that since the chimpanzee did not have the neurological mechanisms to generate speech, it would be more appropriate to try a system of gestures. ASL was chosen because it is a language used by numerous humans. Washoe was followed by other chimpanzees in the Gardners laboratory, Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar. Washoe later taught signs to her adopted infant son, Loulis, without human intervention, demonstrating that signing had become a permanent feature of her communication systems.

While Washoe was being trained in Nevada, a team at Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta taught a young female chimpanzee, Lana, to use a computer controlled console to communicate with her keepers and her computer. The success with Lana was followed by the training of additional chimps at Yerkes, including Kanzi, a pigmy chimpanzee who has been exceptionally adept.

Numerous "ape-language" projects flourished in the 1970's. Perhaps the best well known is Koko, a female gorilla who was raised by Francine Patterson, and who has learned more than 500 signs. Koko, now an adult female, has been joined by a slightly younger male, Michael. Koko uses signs with spontaneity and insight (return to outline).

The Impact of Ape Communication on Science

In retrospect, project Washoe is one of the most significant laboratory studies in primate behavior. The primary lesson from the ape language experiments was that scientists had greatly underestimated the mental abilities that are an essential part of anthropoid societies. It is these mental aptitudes that produce behavioral complexity and plasticity among primate species with limited communication systems. Indeed, limitations of the communication systems probably increased selection pressure on mental abilities to interpret intention movements correctly and thus to be able to anticipate the behavior of group members.

The twenty years of the 1970 through 1990 document a revolution in primate sociobiology as longitudinal studies revised scientific thinking about the complexity of primate behavior and the dynamics of primate societies. The ape communication projects contributed strongly to the decline of behaviorism, the idea that primates are only made of reflexes (innate or taught). In that model, discomfort or pain were relatively unimportant to animals since there was no "self-awareness" to feel it. Behaviorism has been replaced by the presumption of continuity of process, including mental processes between humans and their close biological relatives. In these new models, it is important to avoid the pitfalls of mentalism, "mind reading", or assuming that other species think as we do. From the perspective of sociobiology, there is reason to expect that there will be contrasting behavioral biologys just as there are contrasting locomotor anatomies in different ecological niches (return to outline).

Animals and Ethics

The assumption of biological continuity implies that other animals share many of the same mental processes as humans. Given the overwhelming evidence for continuity, we must assume that other animals can experience discomfort, pain, fear, anxiety and many other mentally generated feelings. It should not be surprising to recognize a certain rejection of this idea in a nation that slaughters over 4 billion animals annually for meat and euthanizes more than 10 million each year as unwanted pets. To some extent we have distanced ourselves far enough from the farm or ranch to forget that chicken, beef, fish, leather, and other animal products were living, feeling beings. This distance allows us to behave irresponsibly. It allows us to forget that we are part of a community of living things and share a strong codependence and a common future. This blind spot allows us to be influenced by extreme and inappropriate opinions. On one hand, some would dehumanize all animals (as well as slaves, enemies, and sometimes minorities). At the opposite pole is a portrayal of nature as a paradise, filled with sentient beings that experience only health, happiness, and imagined immortality. The latter opinion is often accompanied by an attitude that treats other species as human surrogates: "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Sometimes, in these imaginary worlds we attribute to animals all the qualities we wish our fellow humans possessed. In spite of the shift to the presumption of continuity, neither introspection nor mind reading are useful approaches to the study of mental processes.

If we accept the premise that we must not injure another animal, then we must cease to eat, abandon clothing, refuse medical aid, and die. Anything short of this costs another animal somewhere along the ecosystem. The mythical garden of Eden in which a predator does not eat its prey does not exist on this planet. To assume otherwise is the biological equivalent to thinking in terms of the "flat earth." A mouse is not a snake. The relationship they have as predator and prey may seem ruthless and cruel when contrasted with "Eden," but it is the biological reality that supports the complex ecosystems that of this planet. It is not a matter of choice.

The species of plants and animals on earth represent both resources and companions. We can not sustain ourselves if we destroy or severely squander those resources. Beyond assuring our existence, our companion species represent information, useful products, processes, and genes that have great value to our future. We must treat them with insight and caution or we will be like the thoughtless child who spent his resources with abandon until he was bankrupt. Biological bankruptcy, i.e., extinction, is forever. It is ironic that endangered species legislation is sometimes all that prevents us from consuming our own vital resources - such as pumping an aquifer dry that supplies both city water systems and spring fed streams. The loss of species is an index of habitat degradation, a process that threatens our food chain and water supplies.

If we treat animals intelligently and with empathy, what about animals in research? Do we, as humans, have the right to impose our needs on other animals? In the words of Jane Goodall (1986; page 594):

"If only those responsible for the care of captive chimpanzees (and other animals too) could experience with me some of the more intimate moments at Gombe. For so often they generate overwhelming shame for the behavior of our own species - our arrogant assumption that our needs, our pleasure, our wishes must inevitably come first...."

Consider the choices. Clearly short of suicide we cannot avoid conflicts of interest between ourselves and other beings who share our world. What if we reduced animal usage in research? Consider polio. Thousands of monkeys were used to develop polio vaccines. The breakthrough actually began in 1908 when polio virus was experimentally transmitted to monkeys for the first time. In 1952, before vaccines, there were 58,000 new cases of polio in the United States. By 1982, polio rates had declined to only 7 cases. If we had chosen to approach the polio problem non-biologically, without animal models or animal tissues, the technology to deal with polio would have been a highly improved iron lung. The iron lung business would be a major American industry today.

Health problems that we share with animals present another kind of relationship. Both dogs and monkeys were used in the development of rabies vaccine. But that vaccine protects both owners and pets worldwide, producing a positive cost-benefit ratio from all points of view.

Unnecessary discomfort or pain in any animal in industry or research is not desirable, but any course of action has consequences. For example, if more money is spent on expensive housing (research housing is very expensive), the funds committed to research will support fewer projects. Some humans (or animals) effected by unfunded projects that will suffer and perhaps die as a consequence of delay. Imagine the human consequence of even a few year's delay in prevention or treatment of a parasite such as malaria that attacks over 200 million people worldwide.

Can we eliminate all but the vital health-oriented research? It is possible sometimes to separate "basic" from "applied" research projects. Basic research is analogous to the development of symbol systems, words, alphabets, spellings, and grammar. Writing a friend a note is the analogy with "applied" research. Applications are not possible without the previously conducted "basic" explorations of the biology. Though research is usually goal oriented, but we tend to learn new things when we do new things, but usually there is no way to anticipate the nature or magnitude of discoveries until they are made.

Perhaps the most important realization is that human DNA is irretrievably dependent upon the other DNA "soup" on our planet. Perhaps we should be careful to make informed choices that are worthy of a sentient, care giving-species.
(return to outline)

Home | General | Research | Instruction | World