March 15, 1968
Our progress is slow. Jennie is often distracted, and she has begun to tease R. She will behave like an angel until R. enters the room, and then she will be up and about touching things, which she well knows R. abhors. Today R. shouted at her and Jennie, cool as a cucumber, deliberately let fall a knickknack she was holding, which fortunately bounced unharmed on the carpeting. Then she signed Sorry in a manner that I can only characterize as insolent, although R. does not, fortunately, understand American Sign Language. Jennie had been frequently employing another sign that had a rather vulgar air, and which I looked up and discovered was “Phooey!” Imagine teaching an animal to speak like that. I was shocked and amused at the same time. Jennie is very like a human child in challenging and testing her elders. I feel that R. wants to love Jennie, and wants Jennie to love her. She does not, I fear, have the right touch with Jennie. She is too cross and nervous, and she is overly attached to material objects. Jennie is very sensitive and has a mischievous streak in her. The combination is not good.
It has, indeed, been a trying day. Jennie tore pages from The Life of Christ and attempted to eat one. She signed God over and over again, indiscriminately, at everything, and I simply was incapable of making her desist. It was redolent of blasphemy, of taking the Lord’s name in vain.
No one promised this would be easy. Some of my most devout congregationals are often those who came to God through adversity and sneering doubt.
[FROM an interview with Harold Epstein.]
I’m sure you’ve heard from Mrs. Archibald all about the subject of Dr. Pamela C. Prentiss. Now Mrs. Archibald is a strong-minded, capable, smart woman, sharp as a tack, and cranky as hell. In almost any marriage there is a dominant partner, and she was the dominant partner in that marriage. This is not to say Hugo was weak. I think you know what I mean.
Dr. Prentiss, in many ways, was just like Mrs. Archibald. More intellectual, perhaps, but not smarter. More defensive. Wrapped up in her science, and not aware of much else. As often happens when two strong women meet, they clashed. I want you to take what Mrs. Archibald said with a grain of salt, you understand?
Now these two women respected each other, and that’s what kept the project going. Hugo and Lea were both excited by Jennie’s progress. Lea, as a good mother, recognized what an important force Dr. Prentiss was in Jennie’s life. Dr. Prentiss, for her part, may not have approved of Lea’s relationship with Jennie, but she recognized that, for all intents and purposes, Lea was Jennie’s mother. You don’t second-guess a mother.
Dr. Prentiss took herself very seriously. Ah! You see, she was compensating for her looks. Beautiful blond women are supposed to be dumb, and she was, shall we say, a little overanxious to correct that misapprehension. The Jeep, the old clothes, the absence of makeup, all this was by way of compensation. And back then women were discriminated against in science. No doubt about that. So she was a bit defensive.
It is no mystery where the real source of conflict with Mrs. Archibald came from. The feminists are going to jump down my throat, but Dr. Prentiss, like most women, had a strong maternal instinct and this she directed to Jennie. All subconscious, of course. This put her in subconscious conflict with Lea for Jennie’s love and attention. Two mothers, one child. This is not to say both individuals were undisciplined neurotics. To the contrary. They handled their relationship quite well, considering. I don’t believe the conflict affected Jennie. Of course I wasn’t there when they were together.
Let’s talk about the science for a moment. Can you stand it? Just a little bit? If it gets too dull you can always edit it out. Young man, I’m going to make you understand the scientific issues here whether you like it or not.
Dr. Prentiss came ’round my office from time to time, to discuss her findings. We had an informal arrangement. As a psycholinguist, she lacked a sense of the human context of the experiments. I, being a cultural anthropologist, was able to provide this.
I felt that we were seeing results that had wide implications. The colony chimpanzees weren’t learning at anywhere near the rate of Jennie. Dr. Prentiss therefore concluded that language acquisition in chimpanzees was dependent on their degree of human socialization. We know that language acquisition in human children is also dependent on their degree of socialization. The link between human culture and language is so tight, and so complex, that—Pam reasoned—even an animal requires some degree of human socialization in order to learn language. Astounding! Happily adjusted chimpanzees, no matter how pampered, just can’t cut it the way a home-raised chimp could. This was her conclusion.
Now I detected a flaw in this hypothesis. What if Jennie were a genius? Dr. Prentiss saw my point immediately. Jennie’s fluent signing ability might not be the product of human socialization; she might just be smarter than the Barnum chimps.
However, a solution suggested itself to me rather quickly. Why not devise a chimpanzee IQ test? We agreed this was a brilliant idea.
Little did we know where it would lead us, and what astounding results would emerge.
We devised a set of tests that were not dependent on language. This was to equalize Jennie’s advantage over the Barnum chimps. We created a number of “problems” and set the chimps to solving them. The details are complicated, but I will describe a few. You see, it was the results from these cognitive “problems” that so startled us. To the point where Dr. Prentiss greatly expanded the Jennie project. It was these IQ tests that finally (in my mind) erased the dividing line between human and animal.
The problems ranged from simple to very difficult. The simpler ones were mechanical, the more difficult ones cognitive. The problems required only the minimum of signing ability, well within the range of the colony chimps. Dr. Prentiss and I had a great deal of help from an ethologist at the museum named Alfred R. Jones, and a psychologist at Tufts by the name of Murray Sonnenblick.
I’m going to describe some of the tests and their results. The conclusions were astounding. I can see you are nodding off already. Bear with me; I promise you will not be disappointed. This is not boring.
We tested Jennie in the museum. In an empty storage room in the basement, which we painted with bright colors and turned into a playroom. We built a one-way mirror in the door, visible from the corridor outside. It wasn’t the most comfortable observation point, sitting out there in the filthy basement corridor, with the steam pipes rumbling—but it sufficed.
The first tests involved mechanical problem solving. Many of these tests we adapted from earlier primate researchers.
The first test was called the “banana in the tube” test. It was originally thought up by Yerkes. We bolted a tube to the floor, open at both ends. Then we put a banana in the middle, out of reach. The only way to get the banana out was with a pole, by poking it through the tube and pushing the banana away from you and out the other end. Somewhat anti-intuitive.
We put Jennie inside the room and left. There was a long pole in the corner. Jennie explored everywhere, and it wasn’t long before she peered into the tube and saw the banana. Jennie was so upset! She screamed and pointed and signed Banana, Jennie eat banana! Give banana! Nothing happened, so she tried to reach it. She hammered on the tube. She somersaulted and hooted. She drummed her hands and feet on the floor. We gave her an hour of this and then let her out. It took her three one-hour sessions before she solved the problem.
She was staring down the tube through her legs, and chattering grumpily, when suddenly she stopped, stood up and went directly to the pole propped in the corner, and grabbed it. In that very instant it was obvious to all of us that she had solved the problem. Sure enough, she went straight to the tube, pushed the banana out, and ate it with a great smacking of the lips. It was extraordinary. We could actually see when the idea occurred to her to use the pole.
Our psychologist, Dr. Sonnenblick, told us we should test Jennie for an ability called “cross-modal transfer.” This is nothing more than the ability to recognize through touch so
mething we see with our eyes, and vice versa. This was, Sonnenblick said, supposed to be a uniquely human ability.
Aha! Not so. We let Jennie feel a football blindfolded. Then we showed her photographs of five objects. Right away she picked out the football. We showed her a picture of a teacup, and then blindfolded her and let her feel five objects. Again, she picked out the teacup. The other chimps at the Barnum colony were also able to do this. Ha! You should have seen Sonnenblick’s face!
I won’t go into all the experiments that were done. The IQ tests showed that Jennie was smarter than the colony chimps, but not by an overwhelming margin. So, in fact, her upbringing as a human had something to do with her acquisition of language. Very, very interesting!
This was not all we discovered. The question of the chimps’ IQs became secondary to what we learned from the tests themselves. And what was being discovered about chimpanzees in the wild. I’m telling you, the sharp dividing line between man and ape has been erased. Many of the fundamental traits that we thought distinguished humans from the animals went the way of the flat earth. Now let’s see . . . I want to read you something. [Editor’s note: At this point Dr. Epstein took a book down from his shelf and flipped through it.]
Aha! Diogenes. Here we are. “Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the Academy, and said, ‘This is Plato’s man.’ On which account this addition was made to the definition: ‘With broad flat nails.’ ” [Laughs.]
You see, we’ve been trying to define Man for a long time. I mean in contradistinction to all the animals. We’re obsessed with it. It was a ridiculous exercise then, as Diogenes points out, and it is now. But we can’t help it, can we?
Many years ago they said: only human beings have the ability to make and use tools. Not so: Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees making and using tools. Then they said it was language that made us human. Not so again: since the late fifties chimpanzees have been learning ASL and other symbolic languages.
Well then, they said: only humans have imagination and creativity. Well, I told you about Jennie and the doll. We did other tests that showed extraordinary imagination and creativity on the part of chimps.
So they said that we human beings are the only ones who could understand and manipulate symbols. Right? Wrong. In dozens of tests, Jennie and the colony chimps showed ample knowledge of symbols and pictures. I remember Jennie putting her ear to a drawing of a conch shell, listening for the sea. We were able to show that she recognized certain letters and even two or three words. Yes indeed, whole words. The Barnum chimps used colored disks to get food and toys.
Aha! they said, but chimpanzees surely don’t have the awareness of self that humans do. Wrong again. All you had to do was put Jennie in front of the mirror and sign Who that? and she would sign Me Jennie! Now if you can devise a better test for self-awareness than that, be my guest.
Yes, they said, but only humans have the ability to abstract and generalize. Right? Sorry, my friend. Jennie and the colony chimpanzees all showed the ability to classify apples, oranges, and bananas into the concept of fruit. She could classify plates, cups, and spoons in the category of tableware, many kinds of insects as bugs, and so forth. Jennie used the open sign to indicate the opening of doors, cans of food, turning on the water faucet, and opening the mouth. Think about that for a moment. That alone requires a high level of symbolic reasoning, generalization, and symbolic classification.
Aha! What about lying? What about all those bad human qualities that animals supposedly don’t possess? Lying, cheating, stealing, cruelty, murder? The chimps had those too. Goodall observed coldblooded murder, viciousness, and cannibalism among her chimpanzees. And lying! Jennie could lie just as well as any human. We did a fascinating series of tests that showed this.
Dr. Prentiss placed a banana inside one of three locked boxes, while Jennie watched. Then, a “selfish” volunteer came into the room and asked Jennie: Where banana?
The first time, Jennie pointed to the right box. Then the “selfish” assistant unlocked the box and ate the banana, right in front of Jennie, without giving her any. Jennie was outraged! The perfidity of it!
The experiment was repeated. This time, when the “selfish” person asked Jennie where the banana was, she lied! She pointed to the wrong box, an empty box! Had she forgotten? We had the “selfish” assistant leave the key in the empty box and leave. And Jennie grabbed the key, opened up the real box, and ate the banana.
Think about it! It gives me shivers even now.
However, when we repeated the experiment with a “nice” assistant, a person who shared the banana with Jennie, she always told the truth. Weeks and even months later, she would still remember which volunteers were “selfish” and which would share fruit with her. She would lie to the former and tell the truth to the latter.
I’ll tell you something else that wasn’t in the reports. It was too subjective. It was just the kind of thing that would get the ethologists up in arms. When Jennie lied, she averted her eyes from the person she was lying to. It was uncanny. It was so damn human. She’d lie to you and her eyes would slide sideways in the most guilty way.
We extended this fascinating experiment one step further. Could Jennie tell when someone was lying to her? This time, we had the “selfish” assistant hide a banana in one of two boxes when Jennie couldn’t see. Then we gave Jennie the key and let her in. The “selfish” assistant was there. And he lied, telling Jennie (using ASL) that the banana was in a particular box. Did Jennie believe him? Not on your life. She went straight to the other box and opened it up. But when the “nice” assistant told Jennie where the banana was, she believed it.
You know, I would watch Jennie in action, and my skin would crawl. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of connection between me and this animal. I could feel in my very blood the relationship between us.
If you can be a little patient, let me just tell you a few other extraordinary experiments we did. Then I’ll let you get back to the story.
We did this experiment with the colony chimps. We gave them colored disks, the red ones representing food and the blue ones representing toys. We taught them how to exchange the disks with assistants to receive one or the other. Pretty soon, when a chimp wanted something, he would go fetch a disk and give it to one of the staff. All right.
We took two chimps, and put one in one room and one in another, with a little hatch separating them. One chimp had been well fed, and he was put in a bare room with a pile of apples and a token representing toy. The other chimp was left hungry, and he was put in a room with a pile of toys and a token representing food. Do you follow?
What happened next was amazing. The full chimp saw the toys in the other room. So he handed his toy disk to the hungry chimp, and the hungry chimp gave him toys. Then the hungry chimp exchanged his food disk for the apples.
Think about that! That is much more than symbolic communication. The two chimps had spontaneously created a primitive economy.
Since the Jennie project ended, more recent experiments have shown even more startling results. Do you know the chimpanzee Washoe, who was taught ASL? Washoe recently adopted a baby and began spontaneously teaching that baby ASL. Without intervention from humans. So even transmission of learning can cross generational lines in chimpanzees.
Speaking of self-awareness, let me just end with one final experiment. This, for me, was the most startling experiment of all. We had a pile of photographs of animals, a photo of Jennie, and photos of people. We put the stack in front of Jennie and told her to separate the animals from the people. She started through them and carefully separated them.
She made only one mistake: she put herself in the human stack.
We told her she had made a mistake and asked her to do it again. Again, she put herself with the humans. So I said to her that she had made another mistake, and I took the photograph of her and put it in the animal stack.
I signed, Jenn
ie you are an animal.
And do you know what happened? Jennie hooted and laughed and did a somersault. Great joke, huh?
We insisted that Jennie sort through the pictures again. This time she started to become annoyed, but she still placed herself in the human stack. Once again, I corrected her. I took her photograph out of the human stack and put it in with the animals.
This time Jennie wasn’t so amused. She picked up the photographs and threw them across the room.
That wasn’t all. Next, we added photographs of other chimpanzees to the stack. Jennie started sorting, again putting pictures of herself in the human stack and the animals in the other. Then she came to another chimpanzee. She stared and stared at it. Then she blithely threw it across the room and continued sorting. “Not classifiable” seemed to be her decision! Think about it! Whenever she came to a photo of a chimp she would just throw it across the room.
So you see, Jennie had a real identity problem, even then. For the life of me, I don’t know why we didn’t see it. No, we saw it, but we just didn’t take it seriously. It seemed . . . cute that Jennie thought she was human.
My friend, man does not stand in glorious isolation, the crowning jewel of evolution. Man does not stand proudly on one side of a great divide with all the animal kingdom on the other. Hell no. The difference between us and apes exists only in degree. When you look at the sweep of evolution, the great magnificence and variety of life, from paramecium to dung beetle to man, the chimpanzee is a mere whisper away from us. A mere whisper. We must get over this idea that man is a special product of creation.
I will tell you a strange experience I had. I was eating in the curators’ dining room and this powerful feeling started to grow on me. A kind of jamais vu. I looked around at all the people talking and eating. And it suddenly seemed to me that all these people were apes: chattering, masticating, perambulating, gesticulating apes. Big grotesque hairless apes, with comical tufts of hair sticking out on top. Wearing these bizarre, ritualistically colored strips of cloth. We were a big gathering of apes, like apes in the forest gathering at a tree that had dropped its fruit. The sound, I tell you, it was like the sound in the ape house, this loud, meaningless chattering. And suddenly everything seemed so comical, so ridiculous and trivial . . . so bizarre and utterly without importance . . . that I found myself leaving the room in a panic.
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