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Turner Publishing Company - Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

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149 pages

English

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The remarkable story of a "talking" chimp, a leading scientist, and the profound insights they have uncovered about our species

He has been featured in cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and National Geographic, and has been the subject of a "NOVA" documentary. He is directly responsible for discoveries that have forced the scientific community to recast its thinking about the nature of the mind and the origins of language. He is Kanzi, an extraordinary bonobo chimpanzee who has overturned the idea that symbolic language is unique to our species. This is the moving story of how Kanzi learned to converse with humans and the profound lessons he has taught us about our animal cousins, and ourselves.

" . . . The underlying thesis is informative and well argued . . . Savage-Rumbaugh's results are impressive." — The Washington Post

"This popular, absorbing, and controversial account is recommended." — Library Journal

Sujets

Zoologie

Science

Kanzi

Zoology

Sciences et techniques

Life Sciences

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	01 septembre 1996
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781620459089
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1098€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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KANZI

KANZI
The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Roger Lewin
This text is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 1994 by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin.
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If legal, accounting, medical, psychological, or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
Photographs on pp. 62, 141, and 182 Language Research Center, Georgia State University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. Sue.
Kanzi : the ape at the brink of the human mind / Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-471-58591-2 (cloth)
ISBN 0-471-15959-X (paper)
1. Kanzi (Bonobo) 2. Bonobo-Psychology. 3. Chimpanzees-Psychology. 4. Learning in animals. 5. Animal communication.
I. Lewin, Roger. II. Title.
QL737.P96S26 1994
599.88 440451-dc20
94-9038

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is dedicated to my mother and father, who gave their entire lives selflessly to their seven children, with never a thought that any parent might do otherwise. They worried over us, they prayed for us, and they tried tirelessly to set the best example they knew how, too often feeling they had fallen short.
My father taught me to value life and honesty and always to give my best to both. My mother taught me that the qualities of grace and kindness may not come easily, but they must constantly be sought, for they form the nexus of all relationships.
When I first began to study apes, they wondered why. When I first was bitten, they asked why. I hope that now-they will know why.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 On a Beach in Portugal
2 The Meaning of Words
3 Talking to Each Other
4 An Uncommon Ape
5 First Glimpse
6 Inside Kanzi s Mind
7 Childside
8 Pan, the Tool-Maker
9 The Origin of Language
10 At the Brink of the Human Mind
References
Index
Preface
This book really began the day the first joint of my right index finger was severed by an ape I didn t even see. Up from the bowels of a dimly lit cage she raged and parted me from the first joint of my finger. Was she angry at me? She didn t even know me, nor I her. I had just come to the Oklahoma Chimp Farm to learn about the signing apes, the ones that were supposed to talk to you with their hands. Little did I know that most adult chimps living in social groups are not kindly disposed to strangers, viewing them as something of a threat to be dealt with immediately. This was long before Jane Goodall had learned that apes kill members of other groups in the wild.
I had begun to study apes only a few months before this bite, but already, within three days of meeting them, I knew that the rest of my life would be spent studying apes. So like us they are, and yet so distinctly different in some ways. It had not taken long to see that human beings could learn a great deal about themselves and the kinds of creatures they might once have been, by studying apes. How much of the ape was left within us and how much of what we had become resulted from the complex society we had managed to build? I was fascinated with this question and knew that many of the keys to its answer lay hidden within these animals. It never occurred to me to stop studying them because I was bitten, either then or on the many occasions that followed. Each time I learned more about what can prompt aggression and grew grateful for the insights, if not for the injuries.
With something of a passion, I set about to find out how apes become apes. Does it just happen naturally or do they need to be taught how the world works just as human children need to be taught? This book is about one ape out of the eleven that I have studied. This ape, a bonobo named Kanzi, began to learn language on his own, without drills or lessons.
The collaboration that resulted in the telling of Kanzi s story began late one afternoon with a phone call from Roger Lewin, not long after Roger had come to the Language Research Center to see Kanzi for himself. Roger greatly enjoyed his visit, but I was feeling discouraged because in response to everything I had asked Kanzi to do, he either refused, appeared to have no clue as to what I was asking, or did exactly the opposite to what I had asked. Kanzi didn t really like being watched by strangers. When people came to see Kanzi for themselves, he often tried to determine what sort of a reaction he could get from them by startling them at unsuspecting moments. Kanzi does not like strangers in his space because he cannot understand why they want to come and stare at him. I knew that Roger was thinking of writing a report on the work at the Language Research Center for the New Scientist , and given Kanzi s lackluster demonstration, I feared the headline might read, Brilliant Ape Experiences Memory Lapse.
Having one s scientific findings painstakingly collected over decades thrown into question by the attitude of an ape toward visitors has been something that I have had to accept as a consequence of daring to study what is called ape language. Actually, I never intended to study ape language at all. I started out in the late 1960s as a behaviorist hoping to discover principles whereby behavior could be controlled but came to conclude that control was not only an elusive goal, but a dehumanizing one as well. I shifted my focus to attempting to understand the development of the mind in very young children, as it seemed that if this were elucidated, perhaps our society could use such knowledge to build better individuals from the start.
Sometimes the problems of our society are blamed on poverty, other times they are blamed on lack of crime control, and on other occasions they are said to arise from lack of tolerance. We do not yet understand why one individual born into an unstable, lower socio-economic family becomes a president and another becomes a criminal. Is it really just bad genes ? Or could there be experiences that would enable any child to reach inside himself or herself and pull out the best instead of the worst, as both come packed into each human being?
It is not possible to rear human children experimentally in such a way as to look for answers to this question. Nor can one watch and see as children are raised. Twenty to forty years are required to follow children from birth to adulthood. Even when psychologists are prepared to put their careers on hold for this length of time and even if they are able to obtain money for such work, they cannot really watch what happens inside the family. They find themselves limited to interviewing people briefly, giving standardized assessment tests, and perhaps videotaping some standardized interactions. But since we don t really know why one person succeeds and another does not, we don t know what to test for. Our tests measure what is easy to measure, whether or not it is relevant, and at the end of such studies, we are still left only with measurements. We must search to correlate these in a quest to determine which variables are related to success, assuming that the recipe for making a person may lie, for example, in the degree of correlation between income and maternal time in the home.
No one in modern societies watches what happens as kids grow up except their parents, and often they do not. In apes, as in primitive societies, everyone watches the kids grow up; indeed, everyone is responsible for everyone else.
Over the past two decades I have had the opportunity to watch some apes grow up-apes of different species and very different backgrounds. One thing stands out among a panoply of events: Rearing experiences make a difference. Exposure to people and language does not turn an ape into a human being, but it does result in an ape that can remove itself much further from the exigencies of the moment and reflect in greater depth on the possible consequences of its potential various actions. Such an ape can also understand the intentions of others as expressed through language, though the nonlinguistic expression of intent must match the linguistic one or the words will be ignored.
The first two years of an ape s life are something of a magical time. During this period, if exposed to brightly colored geometric symbols, apes learn to tell them apart as easily as if they were looking at different kinds of food. If exposed to human speech, they become responsive to the phonemes and the morphemes so that spoken language no longer sounds like a string of noises. If they watch television, they come to see the patterns on the screen as representations of other people and other apes in different places, rather than just flickering images. A sense of imagination and narrative begins to emerge, so that they become as interested in TV stories to which they can relate as are human children. They grow interested because they can make sense out of what they see and out of many of the words they hear. They especially like to watch interactions-interactions between apes as well as interactions between apes and humans. Themes of danger and danger resolved rivet their attention.
When they do not have these experiences, they encounter great difficulty in distinguishing different geometric symbols, in telling sounds from words, and in following an imaginative narrative