[New Statesman Logo] [Image] [Image] [Image] Search this section [Image] 2 August 1999 [Image] Chimps don't talk, but they do cry [Image] [Image] [Image] Ignore the reports about chatte[Image]nobos; Home language remains unique to humans. But animals Contact us can think and feel, writes ColThe back half About New Statesman [Image] Subscribe now! Bonobos - or "pygmy chimpanzee[Image]n, [Image] Advertising in effect, talk, with a little[Image] from a computerised synthesiseZiauddin Sardar on [Special Supplement - Privatised water] say Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and hehow Malaysia'sne Rumbaugh, of Georgia State Unishadow economyta; [Save up to 40% with the New Statesman Bookshop] but although this claim is intempowers itsis not as exciting as the newspappopulation en making out, and the discussion[Read this article] This week [Image] that has inevitably ensued has[Image]erely [Image] irritating. In a nutshell: the[Image]s yet no [Image] good evidence that the bonobos[Image]ent America says: never again! After Kosovo, the US linguistic skill is qualitativRichard Cook on is wary of a humanitarian foreign policy. A ours; and the matter of their Ravi Coltrane and Kissinger-style realpolitik may be on its way affected, whether they can spekeeping Jazz in the back, writes John Lloyd [Read this article] family Chimpanzees cannot talk, not l[Read this article] [Image] their larynx - as in all other[Image]s except [Image] us - is high in the throat and[Image] as a [Image] valve to stop water running do[Image]r Leader: Now repair the window frames windpipes as they drink. Only Phil Johnson picks [Read this article] larynx slung low, where it canup African themes [Image] voice box), to produce somethiin New York blues [Image] grunt or a miaow. So those who[Read this article] [Image] investigated the putative ling[Image]skills of Why I had Mandelson's life pulped chimps, beginning with Robert [Image]in the [Read this article] United States in the 1920s, ha[Image]cally [Image] tried to teach them American sHughlanguage. [Image] Aldersey-Williams [Image] The results have often been imexplains Britain's New Statesman Media Lecture - Sir John particular, in the late 1970s,love affair with Birt [Read this article] Beatrix Gardner claimed that tmaritime style [Image] Washoe knew more than 100 sign[Read this article] [Image] string them together into simp[Image]ences. [Image] Here, surely, was primordial lmore [Image] . Why the City likes Internet nonsense Yet Herbert Terrace, of Columbia University, [Read this article] New York, an erstwhile supportBook reviews [Image] Gardners, now says that Washoe[Image] fellow [Image] linguists merely picked up cues from their [Image] investigators, like clever Han[Image]famous [Image] counting horse. [Image] more [Image] Robert Winder But there is a more fundamentaon thee, first articulated properly by Noam Cgloriousat the Massachusetts Institute of Tecfailure thatthe Regulars [Image] 1960s. B F Skinner, who carriewas C B Frey [Image] behaviourist flag through the [Read this article] this century, argued that peop[Image]n language in much the same way that circ[Image]hants learn to pirouette: they assoc[Image]rticular [IBS] sounds with particular circumsRichard Gottre [Image] rewarded when they get the conon anon right. Language, in short, is simply Englishman's Search 1.4 application of general mental peregrinations million book [Read this article] titles. Enter But this "model", said Chomsky[Image]not fit book title or the facts. Children learn thei[Image]anguages author in the box within a few years - Cantonese[Image]ie or below. Morningside, it makes no diffeTerri Natale time [Image] when their general cognitive sdigs fore [Image] primitive; they cannot learn aburiedtic, for [Image] example, at that stage of lifetreasure inn the [Submit] local language, furthermore, wTroy inimal cues: from almost random sentences c[Read this article] [First-time subscribers save 10%] angles, they infer the extraor[Image]y subtle underlying rules - imperativesmore [Image] s, the whole shooting match. [The Electronic Town Hall - New Media Awards] Although these rules are not made explicit Search archive [Image] until secondary school, when children already speak perfectly, by the time children do learn [Image] to think clearly, they also lose the ability to pick up new languages. So language, said Chomsky, cannot simply be a subset of general Receive learning. Children must be born with a updates customised "language module" in their brains in [Image] which rules of grammar are already embedded and into which vocabulary is slotted. Further, all Enter your email the many thousands of human languages in the address to end prove to have a similar "deep structure" - receive regular subject, object, verb, conditional clauses; updates about NS this grammar is universal. and related events. Many, since, have offered elaborations. Terence [Image] Deacon, in his admirable The Symbolic Species, [Image] suggested that languages and brains have [Image] co-evolved, with the languages self-selected [Submit] for user-friendliness. Chomsky himself refuses To unsubscribe, click here to acknowledge that his putative language module could have evolved at all by Darwinian means, though many feel that this position is downright perverse. All in all, though, Chomsky's view holds the day: language skill, whatever it is, seems to be special. It must have evolved (pace Chomsky) by borrowing pre-existing, more primitive skills. But human beings don't and can't learn language simply by applying a general ability to think to the particularities of words. Many animals produce sounds of their own that symbolise aspects of the world at large and are effectively "words". They may learn human words, too. The mahouts of Asia expect their elephants to learn scores of commands in the course of their working lives. The Rumbaughs' star bonobo, Panbanisha, apparently knows thousands of words. Clever animals, such as bonobos, can join words together, apparently expressing novel thoughts. But virtually everything that animals do in the way of language can be explained in behaviourist terms. They learn to associate sounds or signs with objects and actions, just as a dog associates the rattle of the lead with walkies; and some, such as the Gardners' chimp Washoe, will shuffle combinations of signs until they receive the required reward, as in "drink, fruit, want" - which looks like a sentence of a kind. Animals seem, in short, to be doing precisely the thing that Chomsky said humans do not do: applying general cognitive skills to collections of words. The putative language module, with syntax already built in and allowing infinite flexibility, is lacking - one of the few human skills that really does seem to be exclusively human. Animals cannot speak like us; it's just that the clever ones can use other skills to produce a plausible imitation. Such ingenuity is impressive, however, even if it is not true language; and this raises another issue. Rene Descartes proposed in the 17th century that thinking depends on words, and since animals don't verbalise, they can't think. Philosophers, scientists and slaughtermen went on believing him for the next 300 years, vindicating appalling cruelties by impeccable Gallic logic. Science needs measurement, and since we cannot measure the thoughts of animals - if they have any - we must be content to measure their behaviour. So the behaviourists set out to explain what animals do, treating them as if they were simply automata with not a thought in their heads. Not till the 1980s was it finally proved beyond doubt that although a clockwork toy may emulate a worm or do a fair imitation of an ant, it could never match a pig or a chimpanzee. Such creatures really do work things out and make decisions, guided by their emotions, just as David Hume suggested we do. The much-despised anthropomorphism could thus give deeper insight than the apparent rigours of behaviourism. The task, as Terrace said, circa 1984, "is to explain how animals think without human language". Today serious biologists have growing respect for the thoughts and emotional depths of animals. At the very least, the Atlantan bonobos must reinforce this respect. To some, too, including me, it has long been self-evident that we should afford "rights" to animals. Each individual agrees to take seriously the things that are important to other individuals, and "rights" is a shorthand way of expressing this general principle. Some moral philosophers suggest that there can be no rights without responsibilities; but such conditional clauses are purely arbitrary - written in to enable philosophers to put their cats out at night with a clear conscience. We should be prepared to afford "rights" to others without any quid pro quo. We should be good to chimpanzees not because they might resemble us but simply because they are chimpanzees and, as such, like dogs or pigs or anything else that breathes and is aware, should be deemed worthy of respect. Colin Tudge is a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of Economics