The honor of "first contact" - a conversation between representatives of different species - belongs to the chimpanzee Washoe and her educators, spouses Allen and Beatrice Gardner. By that time it was already known that animals are capable of thinking: they can solve problems "in their minds", that is, not only by trial and error, but also by inventing new options for behavior.
This was proved by the German psychologist Wolfgang Koehler, who conducted his famous research on the intelligence of chimpanzees at the beginning of the twentieth century. In one of his experiments, a monkey, after a series of unsuccessful attempts to knock down a high hanging banana with a stick or get it, climbed onto a box, sat down, “thought,” and then got up, put the boxes one on top of the other, climbed on them with a stick and knocked down the target.
These experiments inspired scientists to make the first attempts to "humanize" monkeys. In the 1930s, the psychology couples Kellogg adopted a baby chimpanzee named Gua, who grew up with their one-year-old son Donald. Parents tried not to distinguish between "children" and communicate with them in the same way.
True, they did not succeed in achieving special success in raising Gua, but Donald began to behave like a monkey: the development of his speech slowed down, but he learned to perfectly imitate the cries and habits of Gua and even began to gnaw bark from trees after him. Frightened parents had to stop the experiment, Gua was sent to the zoo. Another pair of psychologists, the Hayes spouses, who raised the chimpanzee Vicki, with great difficulty still managed to teach her to pronounce a few words: "mom", "dad", "cup".
Only in 1966, ethologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner, while watching films about Vicki, noticed that she wanted and could communicate using signs: for example, she loved to ride a car and, in order to communicate her desire to people, she came up with the idea of bringing them images cars that I pulled out of magazines. It was not a lack of intelligence that made her incapable of speech, but the structure of the larynx. And then the Gardners came up with the idea to teach chimpanzees the sign language used by deaf and dumb people.
This is how the Washoe Project began.
Promotional video:
Washoe and her family
The future first lady in the world of chimpanzees was a 10-month-old baby caught in Africa: originally it was supposed to be used in space exploration - apparently, she was simply born for glory.
The Gardners raised Washoe as their own child. She not only memorized the gestures with which her adoptive parents addressed her, but also asked questions, commented on her own actions and the actions of her teachers, and spoke to them herself.
Her first “word” was the sign “more!”: To tickle, hug, treat or introduce new words. During the first year of her life with the Gardners, Washoe mastered 30 signs-words of Amslen - the American language of the deaf and dumb, in the first three years - 130 signs. Mastering the language in the same sequence as the child, she learned to combine signs into simple sentences. For example, Washo pesters one of the researchers so that he gives her a cigarette that he smoked: there are signs “give me smoke”, “smoke Washoe”, “quickly give me smoke”. Finally the researcher said, "Ask politely," to which Washoe replied, "Please give me this hot smoke." However, she was never given a cigarette.
Chimpanzees were also easily given such seemingly purely human skills as joking, deceiving and even swearing. She called one of the attendants, who would not let her drink for a long time, "dirty Jack." But swearing is not at all so primitive, because it speaks of Washoe's ability to use words in a figurative sense, to generalize their meanings. It is on this ability to generalize with the help of words that human intelligence is built.
It turned out that Washoe builds generalizations as well as small children who begin to master the language. For example, one of the first signs she learned was "open!" - she first used it when she wanted to open the door of the room, then she began to use it to open all the doors, then for boxes, containers, bottles and finally even to open the water tap.
The monkey correctly used personal pronouns, ideas about the past and the future (in the future, she was mainly interested in holidays, for example, Christmas, which she loved very much), word order in sentences (for example, she perfectly understood the difference between "You tickle me" and "I tickle you "). Sometimes Washoe tried to "talk" not only with people, but also with other creatures. Once, when a dog barked after the car in which she was driving, Washoe, who was afraid of dogs to death, instead of hiding, as usual, leaned out of the window and began desperately gesticulating: "Dog, go away!"
Meanwhile, several other newly born chimpanzees were brought to the Gardner lab. They learned quickly and soon began to communicate with each other in sign language. And when Washoe gave birth to a cub, he began to learn gestures, observing not people, but other monkeys. At the same time, researchers have repeatedly noticed how Washoe "puts his hand" - corrects the gesture-symbol.
In April 1967, Washaw first used word compounds. She asked "give me a sweet" and "go open". At this time, the chimpanzee was at the age when human children first began to use combinations of two words. Comparison of the abilities of humans and monkeys was the next line of research. But this aspect also brought some trouble to the Gardners. The fact is that at first some of the scientists did not recognize Washoe's ability to speak. Roger Brown, a Harvard professor known for his research on early childhood speech development, believed that Washoe was not always firm in the correct word order and therefore did not understand the connections between the different categories of words that give meaning to a sentence. Jacob Bronowski and linguist Ursula Bellugi published a poignant article,in which it was argued that Washoe cannot talk, since she never asks questions or uses negative sentences. Finally, linguist Nom Chomsky has categorically stated that chimpanzee brains are not designed for an animal to speak.
Research, meanwhile, gave more and more new results, which the Gardners analyzed and carefully compared with the available data on the development of speech in children. And soon the critics were forced to withdraw some of their objections.
Roger Brown admitted that word order is not critical. In some languages, like Finnish, it is not as important as in English. The location of words in a sentence does not play a big role in the language of the deaf-mute ASL. And the children themselves often violate the word order, but … they perfectly understand each other.
The Gardners concluded that babies and monkeys are very close when it comes to answering questions, constructing two-term sentences, using nouns, verbs and adjectives, and word order in a sentence. Unfamiliar with grammar, children, like chimpanzees, tend to replace entire sentences with one or two words.
Testing showed that Washoe is fluent in asking questions and using negative sentences. The monkey is able to use the signs "no", "I can not", "enough". Washoe willingly leafed through illustrated magazines, asking people: "What is this?" Chomsky's statements about the limited capabilities of the chimpanzee brain simply cannot be verified: there are still no methods to clarify this issue. Only recently did the American scientist Norman Geshwind begin experiments to determine whether there is a region in the chimpanzee's brain analogous to that which regulates speech in humans.
When the Gardners finished their work with Washoe in 1970, she was in danger of going to one of the biomedical centers "for experiments" and, if not dying, then at least spending the rest of her days in a small solitary cage. She, and then other chimpanzees who were trained in the laboratory, were rescued by Gardner's assistant Roger Fouts, who created the "Monkey Farm", on which the "Washoe family" now lives - a colony of "talking" monkeys.
Gorilla professor
The results of the studies of the Washoe family seemed completely incredible, but in the 70s several groups of independent researchers working with different species of great apes confirmed and supplemented these data. Perhaps the most capable of all the 25 "talking" monkeys was the gorilla Coco, who lives near San Francisco. Coco is a real professor: she uses, according to various estimates, from 500 to a thousand signs of Amslen, is able to understand about 2000 more signs and words of the English language and, solving tests, shows an IQ corresponding to the norm for an adult American.
However, like other "talking" monkeys, the main development of her speech and intelligence took place in the first years of life (as a rule, talented monkeys reach the level of a two-year-old child in speech development, and in some respects - a three-year-old). Growing up, they remain much like children, react like children to life situations and prefer games to all other ways of spending time. Coco still plays with dolls and toy animals and talks to them, embarrassed, however, when someone catches her doing this.
For example, Coco acts out an imaginary situation between two toy gorillas. Placing toys in front of him, the monkey gestures: "bad, bad" - in relation to the pink gorilla, and then "kiss!", Referring to the blue. And when her partner, gorilla Michael, ripped off her rag doll's leg, Koko burst into the worst curse ever heard from a monkey: "You dirty, bad toilet!"
Koko is very fond of cats (she had her own cat, which recently died), loves to draw. Coco's drawings can be viewed on her website https://www.koko.org/index.php, where you can also find out the latest news from the life of a gorilla, which is already in its forties (chimpanzees and gorillas can live up to 45-50 years).
Now scientists want to take Coco's "humanization" to a new level - they are going to teach her to read.
Trained animals or brothers in mind?
Nevertheless, the conclusions from these studies turned out to be too scandalous and completely unacceptable for most of the scientific community. On the one hand, the "talking" monkeys turned out to be a fly in the ointment of the philosophers and psychologists' reasoning about the gap between a man with consciousness and animals like automata controlled by reflexes and instincts.
On the other hand, linguists attacked: according to the concept of Noam Chomsky, which dominates in American linguistics, language is a manifestation of a genetic ability inherent only to humans (by the way, one of the "talking" monkeys was named Nim Chimski in a mockery).
According to critics, the gestures of monkeys are not meaningful signs, but a simple imitation of researchers, at best, "conditioned reflexes" acquired as a result of training. Experimenters, talking with monkeys, supposedly give them hints all the time, without realizing it - with facial expressions, glances, intonation, and the monkeys are guided not by their words, but by non-verbal information.
The "talking" monkeys were compared to Clever Hans, the Oryol trotter, whose owner "taught" the horse to count and answer questions. Then it turned out that Hans was simply reacting to the subtle movements of his coach.
Researcher Sue Savage-Rambeau was among the skeptics. She decided to refute the idea of "talking" monkeys. A series of studies began in which bonobos pygmy chimpanzees communicated with scientists through a computer in a specially designed artificial language - yerkish. Instead of gestures, he was trained to use a special computer keyboard with conditional icon keys that denote words. When a key was pressed, the word was displayed on the monitor as a picture. Thus, it is convenient to conduct a dialogue, correct or supplement remarks. But Kanzi also recognized about 150 words without special training. His guardian Dr. Sue Savage-Rambeau just talked to him like that.
One of Rambeau's goals was to reward monkeys as little as possible for correct answers. The adult monkeys Savage-Rambeau worked with showed little talent and only exacerbated her skepticism. But at one point, baby Kanzi - the son of one of these monkeys, who was always spinning around his mother - suddenly began to take responsibility for her on his own initiative. Until that moment, no one had taught him anything, the researchers did not pay much attention to him at all, but he answered brilliantly.
It was soon discovered that he also spontaneously learned to understand English, and in addition showed considerable talent for computer games. Gradually, thanks to the successes of Kanzi and his sister Bonbonishi, there was no trace of Savage-Rambeau's skepticism, and she began to show the scientific world evidence that her "speaking" chimpanzees know three languages (yerkish, amslen and about 2000 English words), understand the meanings of words and sentence syntax, generalizable and metaphorical, talk to each other and learn from each other.
According to the scientist, monkeys often guess the intentions of the speaker, without even understanding the meaning of the words. As if a person was watching a "soap opera" with the TV turned off. After all, the meaning will still be clear. Rambeau confirmed this observation by conducting an experiment comparing sentence comprehension between 8-year-old Kanzi and 2-year-old Ali, testing from May 1988 to February 1989. Of the 600 oral assignments, Kanzi did 80% and Ali 60%. For example, “put the plate in the microwave”, “take the bucket out into the street”, “pour lemonade into the Coca-Cola”, “put pine needles in the bag”, etc. This amazing language behavior of monkeys raises an obvious, albeit ambiguous question: Is it possible to consider that the language of Washoe, Kanzi and Coco is close to the language of a two-year-old child, or is it a completely different "language", only slightly similar to human?
It was very difficult to argue with the results of Savage-Rambeau's research. Those who value human exclusivity can only say that the language used by monkeys is still very far from human. As in a joke: “A pig entered the circus arena and played a virtuoso piece on the violin. All enthusiastically applaud, and only one spectator does not clap, looking indifferently at the stage. "Didn't you like it?" - asks his neighbor. “No, not bad, but not Oistrakh.”
In the animal world: culture, education, emotions
"Animals are devoid of consciousness." This thesis is the last hope to assert the exceptional position of man among other living beings, which gives us the moral right to keep them in cages, use them for experiments and build factories for the production of "live meat".
But back in the middle of the twentieth century, ethology appeared - the science of animal behavior. And the observations of ethologists made it possible to look at the psychic abilities of animals in a completely different way.
It turned out that great apes (like elephants and dolphins) have self-awareness, at least at the bodily level: they recognize themselves in the mirror. The range of emotions they display is very rich. For example, according to the observations of ethologist Penny Patterson, gorillas love and hate, cry and laugh, they are familiar with pride and shame, sympathy and jealousy … One of the latest studies carried out by British biologists from the University of St. names for each other.
Many great apes use tools, which until recently was considered the exclusive privilege of man. “Since about half a century ago, Jane van Lavik-Goodall first saw how chimpanzees with the help of a thin twig fish out of a hole in a termite mound of its inhabitants, zoologists have discovered in the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys about forty more methods of purposeful use of all kinds of objects,” says Evgeny Panov from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This is no longer an instinct, but a cultural skill that is passed down from generation to generation. In recent years, more and more studies of cultural traditions in monkeys have appeared, and the word "culture" is used there without quotation marks.
However, according to Evgeny Panov, “the high level of development of the tool activity of great apes indicates their ability to rationally plan long sequences of actions. However, this does not lead to the emergence of a developing material culture."
But maybe the monkeys just don't need it? Let us recall the aphorism of Douglas Adams: “Man has always believed that he is smarter than dolphins, because he achieved a lot: he invented a wheel, New York, wars and so on, while dolphins did nothing but have fun, tumbling in the water. Dolphins, on the other hand, have always believed that they are much more intelligent than humans - for this very reason."
Yes, the brain of a great ape weighs three times less than ours, but this does not make us an exception among other living creatures: dolphins, whales, elephants have a much larger brain than ours. The researchers came up with the idea of comparing not the volume of the brain, but the ratio of brain weight to body weight. But bad luck - laboratory mice were ahead of us in terms of this coefficient.
Then the Gardners worked with three chimpanzees. Moya (her name means "one" in Swahili) is six years old, Tatu ("three") is in her fourth year, Nne ("four") is a male, he is two and a half years old. Washoe was removed from the experiment shortly before this phase began. All chimpanzees arrived at the farm no later than the fourth day after birth. From the very beginning, they lived under a strict, scientifically based regime. Each animal has its own living space - a bedroom, a playground, a bathroom and a dining room. Three employees work with each pet, and in strictly planned classes they quickly teach the chimpanzees the ASL language. The teachers are used to using it - one of the employees is deaf herself, the rest are children of deaf parents. In the presence of animals, all employees on the farm communicate only with the help of ASL, so chimpanzees never hear human speech.
The working day at the farm begins at seven in the morning when the chimpanzees are woken up by the attendants. Every day, a "sign of the day" is determined - a new sign that educators try to introduce into the everyday life of their pets when the situation is right, creating as natural conditions as possible for replenishing their vocabulary. After the obligatory morning toilet - breakfast, including, among other things, a glass of warm milk. And while eating, chimpanzees learn to be independent: they have to tie a bib on their own and eat without assistance. After eating, brushing your teeth and brushing your hair follows.
If there is no heat, chimpanzees walk in clothes that they must wear themselves. They make the beds and do the cleaning. As a rule, monkeys are able to wipe up spilled liquid, wash dishes, and perform other tasks. All this has a beneficial effect on the knowledge of the language and avoids being spoiled.
Classes are held before and after lunch. Half an hour - training in the use of signs, and another half hour - viewing illustrated magazines, books. With the so-called "pedagogical" games, they are encouraged to draw, select objects from a certain range, play with blocks, they are taught to thread a needle and even sew. It has been established that chimpanzees have enough attention for thirty minutes. And to avoid overexertion, they are sent to sleep twice during the day. At about seven in the evening they bathe and frolic in long, light clothes until sleep, so that the wool dries well.
With this lifestyle, Moya has acquired a vocabulary of 150 characters and Tatu more than 60. Once a week, all researchers come together to discuss the results of the work, including the evolution of the Chimpanzee to Chimpanzee Signs program. In some weeks, up to 19 acts of communication between animals using ASL were recorded. Most of them boil down to signs "go play" or "come tickle" (chimpanzees love to be tickled). It happened that Moya, willingly rolling Tatu on herself, gave a signal "here", pointing to her back, where Tatu was supposed to climb. Moya designated Nne with the sign "child", cooed over him and gave him a drink from her bottle, while Nne himself, for a reason known only to himself, calls Moya a cookie.
This generation of chimpanzees, as shown by comparisons, overtook Washaw in development, since their acquaintance with the ASL language began earlier and from the first days they were in a more favorable "stimulating" environment.
The speaking abilities of great apes are being successfully investigated in the United States and under the programs of four other experiments.
But an experiment with chimpanzees at Columbia University in New York was recently interrupted. The reasons that prompted the professor of psychology Herb Terreis to surrender, caused serious controversy among colleagues.
Four years ago, Terrace began an experiment in which the chimpanzee Nima (his full name is Nim Chimsky is an allusion to the American linguist Nom Chomsky) was also taught the ASL language. Nim mastered sign language as diligently as other "prodigies", and even stretched out his hands to educators to show him new signs. He successfully passed the "child" phase of language development, inventing new signs, and learned … to deceive and scold. Despite all this, Terrace came to the conclusion that chimpanzees are incapable of constructing sentences correctly. In his experiments, Terrace paid attention not to how Nym's vocabulary is replenished, but to the grammar of his statements. Nim, composing a combination of two words, combined the words quite meaningfully. Some words, for example, "more", were always in the first place with him, others, for example, "me", "me" - in second. He saw that the phrases “give to me” and “to give me” were constructed differently. But further, according to Terrace, he did not go. And this is where the differences in the use of speaking skills between young children and chimpanzees begin.
Firstly, if chimpanzees build combinations of three or more word-signs, then the third and subsequent elements only in rare cases contain additional information, they either repeat the gesture already used, or add a name to a personal pronoun - “play (with) me Him (om)”Of the 21 four-term sentences that He formed, only one did not contain repetitions. In the children's language, however, such repetitions, according to linguistics, are almost never observed.
The second difference is what linguists call the mean length of an expression. Children use longer and more complex phrases as they get older. At two years, their average sentence length was about the same as that of Nim - 1.5 words (or signs), but in the next two years, the length of Nim's phrases grew very slowly, while in children (both deaf and healthy) it increases sharply.
And Nim's semantics were different from those of children. The connection between the semantic meaning of the sign and the way of its use was inaccessible to him. The positional connection between, for example, something edible and the corresponding verb for Nimes did not exist - he did not see any difference between "there is a nut" and "there is a nut." It follows, Terrace argues, that chimpanzees don't understand what they're saying.
Finally, Terrace conducted a thorough analysis of motion pictures of Nim's “conversations” with a person, and compared these results to a study of conversations between children and parents. Children begin to understand early that conversation is a kind of game in which the participants constantly change roles: first one will say, then another. The child rarely interrupts the interlocutor or speaks at the same time. For Nim, about 50 percent of the time, the statements wedged into the interlocutor's speech.
There are three ways to keep the conversation going after the partner has finished speaking: you can repeat the phrase of another completely, you can partially reproduce what was said and add something of your own, and, finally, you can say something completely new Children under the age of two repeat after their parents up to 20 percent of their statements … The next year, the repetition rate drops to two percent. Nim, however, imitated 40 percent of his teachers' phrases throughout his third year. Children under two years old supplement what the interlocutor said in 20 percent of cases, and by the age of three they support half of the conversations in this way. Nim's additions did not exceed 10 percent.
Between a monkey and a man
One of the main problems is that we are everywhere looking for "similarities" to our mind and our language, unable to imagine anything else. "Talking" monkeys are completely different creatures than their natural cousins, "stupid monkeys", according to Washoe's definition. But they never become people, at least in the eyes of the people themselves.
Washoe was named after the area in Nevada where the Gardners lived. Later it turned out that in the language of the Indian tribe, originally living in this area, "washo" means a person. Washoe herself considered herself a man. “She is the same person as you and me,” says her educator Penny Patterson about her Coco. In the experiment on dividing photographs into two categories - "people" and "animals" - Vicki, who knows only three words, confidently put her photo in the group "people" (like all other "talking" monkeys with whom this experiment). She also confidently and with visible disgust put a photo of her own “non-speaking” father in the “animals” group along with photos of horses and elephants.
Apparently, linguists and biologists simply do not have a reasoned answer to this question. And the main reason for the disagreement is that there are still no well-established definitions and concepts. The fact that a child and a monkey perceive human language differently is unconditional. But "talking" monkeys classify reality in a manner similar to humans. They divide the phenomena of the surrounding reality into the same categories as people. For example, with the sign "baby" all trained monkeys designated children, puppies, and dolls. Washoe made the dog gesture when she met dogs, when she heard a dog barking, and when she saw pictures of them - regardless of breed. Children do the same. Gorilla Coco, seeing a ring on Penny's finger, “said”: “finger necklace”. And the chimpanzee Washoe called the swan "bird-water." What is this if not the language of a child? He, too, when he sees a plane,says "butterfly". Moreover, the groom Koko gorilla Michael, who acquired sign language at a very late age, showed wonders of ingenuity! He appealed with abstract concepts such as past, present and future.
Once he said that when he was little and lived in the jungle, the hunters killed his mother. Unlike humans, the “talking” monkeys have long since solved the problem of “identifying” their language: in their opinion, it is definitely human. And since language is a unique feature of a person, it means that they themselves “became people”. This conclusion was confirmed many times. Washaw, for example, did not hesitate to rank herself as a human, and called other chimpanzees "black creatures." Coco considered herself a human too. When asked to separate the pictures of animals from pictures of people, she confidently placed her picture in front of pictures of people. But a photograph of her hairy and naked father was attached to a pile of elephants, horses and dogs.
How should we treat these creatures? In the glorious Soviet film "The Adventures of Electronics" there was exactly the same problem: for adults, Electronic is a talking robot, and it can and should be "turned on and off", while children clearly see: this is a human being, even more human than his twin Syroezhkin.
Today, animal rights advocates are viewed as sentimental loonies. But, perhaps, tomorrow everything will change, because once even slaves or representatives of other human races were not considered human.