Aping humans
Can chimps really be taught basic human language?
An evolutionist researcher debunks some of the wilder claims
by Carl Wieland
The more that the origins controversy ‘hots up’, the more we seem to
be getting a relentless barrage ‘reminding’ us of how ‘close’
we are to our alleged chimpanzee cousins. But a lot depends on who’s telling
the story.
Photo by Chad Littlejohn, sxc.hu
For instance, a report in USA Today1
had this opening volley: ‘Humans and chimpanzees share an almost identical
genetic inheritance.’ Given that the same report pointed out that there were
40 million differences in the genetic code, one is struck by the blurring of the
line between fact and propaganda.
Also useful for ‘educating’ the public into evolutionary ways of thinking
are the alleged ‘language achievements’ of chimps such as Washoe and
Kanzi, who have been taught to use symbols, via signing and keyboards, similar to
the way that small children use words.
However, Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University and an evolutionist,
thinks this is not really language. He pours the cold water of sceptical reality
upon what he calls ‘a silly game to see how much a chimp can act like a human’.2
Marcus points out that chimps learn words one at a time, whereas toddlers learn
them in explosive bursts. Moreover, chimps lack what the article calls the ‘linguistic
silver bullet’—the capacity to ‘combine bits of language into larger
units’. This is called ‘recursion’, and is only one of the many
skills he thinks are likely to prove to be crucial to real language. Recursion greatly
opens up the range of possibilities, and enables the speaker to ‘appreciate
the views of others’.
As Marcus indicates, even the most sophisticated chimpanzee would be completely
bamboozled.
As Marcus indicates, even the most sophisticated chimpanzee would be completely
bamboozled by a sentence such as ‘She knows that I know where the peanut is
hidden’.2
Unfortunately, the general rebellion of fallen mankind against its Creator, as described
in Romans 1, means that there will always be a deep vested
interest in denying the obvious fact that humans are vastly different from apes—consistent
with their being made in the image of God.
Bottom line: we might get some emails protesting against the conclusions of this
article, but they won’t be sent by Kanzi, or Washoe, or any other ape.
References
- Sternberg, S.,
chimps almost a match, 31 August 2005. Return to Text.
- Pilcher, H., What the chimp means to me, Nature
437(7055):20–22, 1 September 2005. Return to Text.
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