G. K. Chesterton on the difference between humans and apes

“That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants [anticipating E. O. Wilson?] and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an anthill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a beehive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever un-domestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.” – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908.

On Jane Goodall, apes, human uniqueness, and God

As New Scientist has published yet another piece on why humans are supposedly not so special (about which more later maybe), a friend reminds me of a comment by primate specialist Jane Goodall, contemplating the Cathedral of Notre Dame:

"How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that had led up to that moment in time-the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built …and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so I must believe in a guiding power in the universe-in other words, I must believe in God" - Jane Goodall (1999) Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey Warner Books Inc, New York, NY

My own response to the sort of claims made in the New Scientist article is that I will take the claims seriously when I discover a primate ape (or wait, I will settle for a dolphin or an octopus) that is struggling with the question of what differentiates humans from their species. Even asking such questions or considering them important puts us clearly on one side of a great divide, however we came to be here and whatever it means. Consider the intelligent apes in Planet of the Apes. I don't know if they would build Notre Dame, but they would build something that embodied ideas in a way that the apes at the local sanctuary will not do, because they feel no inner need to do it.


You can read an excerpt on line.

Incidentally, she also says,

I was taught, as a scientist, to think logically and empirically, rather than intuitively or spiritually. When I was at Cambridge University in the early 1960s most of the scientists and science students working in the Department of Zoology, so far as I could tell, were agnostic or even atheist. Those who believed in a God kept it hidden from their peers.

Generally, people do not learn materialism from science, they interpret science in the darkness of materialism.

Neuroscience: Language feature unique to human brain?

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Center used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to probe language areas of the human brain, vs. that of non-human primates. They found that the pathway (arcuate fasiculus) connecting brain regions involved in human language such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area is much larger and more widely connected than in rhesus macaques or chimpanzees.

Yerkes researcher James Rilling notes,

"We know from previous functional imaging studies that the middle temporal lobe is involved with analyzing the meanings of words. In humans, it seems the brain not only evolved larger language regions but also a network of fibers to connect those regions, which supports humans' superior language capabilities."

Findings like this may modify overly optimistic projections for communicating on an equal footing with apes - though don't count on it. Ideas like that die hard in times like these.

New assessment of ape language skills is dramatically scaled back

You've probably heard about all the apes who have been taught to communicate using sign language in recent years. As Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, the discovery that American Sign Language could, in principle, be taught to apes spurred a number of interesting research projects - and some pretty unrealistic claims. In Dragons of Eden (1986), for example, Carl Sagan dreamed of a day when

Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in English or Japanese (with perhaps an “as told to” after the byline).

What you probably DIDN'T hear much about is the mood of skepticism with which much of the science community has greeted this work in recent years - even as the apes impress hosts on national television programs.

In "Aping Language", a thoughtful article in E-Skeptic, Clive Wynne explains how that happened. Wynne certainly does not have a hitch in his craw about the concept of ape language. On the contrary, would have been pleased to discover that apes can be taught grammar. The trouble is, after the initial flurry of success stories, later, more critical research came to the conclusion that they generally can't.

Why did initial reports sound so favourable? One problem was overinterpretation. The ability to learn a large number of signs is not the same thing as the ability to learn a language whose meaning depends largely on grammar. The former achievement is sometimes found among birds as well as mammals, but the latter seems unique to humans.

The ability to string a sequence of words together does not necessarily mean awareness of grammar. The sentence "Tom shot John" does not mean the same thing as "John shot Tom," and the difference is pretty important. Overly generous assumptions were made about the extent to which apes such as Washoe and Kanzi were using grammar. When they were examined by scientists other than their trainers, they did not perform well.

Also, attuned as they were to individual signs of success, researchers were often not looking at the big picture. Reporting on how one researcher revised his thinking after closer study, Wynne notes,

Terrace now argued that Nim's use of ASL signs was quite unlike how children learn language. Nim failed to initiate conversations, he seldom introduced new vocabulary and just imitated what the humans around him said. Nim's sentences failed to grow in length. In human children there is a close relationship between the number of words known and the number of words used in a sentence. Not so in Nim. Throughout his time in the language project he stuck to using one or two words at a time. And his longer utterances were without any regard for grammatical structure. Nim’s longest recorded “sentence” was give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. Not hard to understand — but not very grammatical either.

The key difference between an ape and a child is that the child is growing in intellectual capability. The ape is not. Thus, the ape isn't under any internal pressure to expand his language competence. Once he knows how to satisfy his fairly simple needs, any pressure he experiences will come from drill by humans - at the expense, one suspects, of things he would rather be doing.

Wynne describes his own disillusion,

For a start Kanzi — like Nim before him — did not show the increase in sentence length that is typical of children learning language. In fact, at 1.15 symbols per sentence, Kanzi's average utterance is even shorter than Nim's. And it turns out that to complete many of the requests that were put to him Kanzi did not need to understand grammar. For example when Kanzi was asked to "Take the hat to the colony room" - which Kanzi did successfully - all he needed was some sense of "hat" and of "colony room."

Wynne's point is that, unlike "John shot Tom"/"Tom shot John" the command given to Kanzi is not reversible - a room cannot be taken to a hat. He concludes that, while Kanji's and his trainers' achievements are significant, as far as grammar is concerned, "on any assessment not tinted with rose-colored glasses, Kanzi just doesn’t get it."

Commenting on John Berman's recent Nightline show with 26-year-old Kanzi, he quotes Berman's assessment, "Moments like this are proof that these conversations help scientists learn about apes, from the apes themselves," but says,

I don’t disagree, though I fear the conclusion I draw is not the one Berman intended. Moments like this tell us that Descartes was right, there really are no beasts, no matter how fortunately circumstanced, that can make known their thoughts through language.

As I see it, the take home point is that Kanji doesn't really want anything more out of life than his limited language skills give him. That is what makes all the difference between him and a three-year-old child.

Anyway, it's good to see a magazine that bills itself as "skeptical" living up to its billing by exercising its skepticism in an area that has long been in need of it.

Update: An interesting combox discussion developed on this story over at Uncommon Descent, with some participants claiming that many scientists had never been fooled by the claims. (And, implicitly, shame on me for pointing out how long Sagan-like claims went on being fronted).

I responded to one as follows:

getawitness, it would be scary indeed to think that everyone was fooled. But one Chomsky doesn't alter a pattern that Mario Beauregard and I note in The Spiritual Brain - a very familiar pattern, replicated widely over many issues. The notion that apes can learn grammar was treated as the default "scientific" position in accounts of the subject - even though one did not need a great deal of familiarity with the area to see why it probably wasn't true.

Now, of course, the fact that that was the case - as is demonstrated by the way popular culture sources replicate it to this day - is somehow supposed to fall down a memory hole.

That way, we can avoid disconfirming a materialist prediction.

I for one will work to see that it doesn't fall down a memory hole, but is entered among the disconfirmed materialist predictions.

That will force materialists to redefine their theory so as to exclude what they once enthusiastically included as evidence. Eventually, a paper trail develops ...

Science journalist notices that people are smarter than apes

I was, so to speak, "shocked" to read this story from Reuters:

Shock: kids smarter than chimps
by Will Dunham
September 07, 2007 09:22am
Article from: Reuters

IN another case of researchers reporting the bleeding obvious, European scientists have found that children are smarter than chimpanzees.

A unique study comparing the abilities of human toddlers to chimpanzees and orang-utans found that two-year-old children have social learning skills superior to the apes, the researchers said.
In one social learning test, a researcher showed the children and apes how to pop open a plastic tube to get food or a toy contained inside. The children observed and imitated the solution.

The apes, of course, tried to smash their way in.

I think I LIKE Will Dunham. He admits stuff that is true.

Ape watch: Another claim for ape language that doesn't pan out

Well, John Berman's ABC report "Hello, How Are You Doing?: Groundbreaking Research Has Scientists Talking with Apes" certainly sounded groundbreaking. The bonobos and orangutans at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, are said to "talk"*, using a 350 symbol keyboard on which they have been trained since infancy. One ofthem, a 26-year-old orangutan, Kanzi, is the star: He can map a series of English words to symbols on the keyboard. But then, it all fell apart during Berman's "interview" with the ape:

Sound beyond belief? During a visit to the Great Ape Trust, I sat down with Kanzi the Bonobo -- the first Ape I have ever interviewed.
I read Kanzi a series of words, and then without fail, he hit the corresponding lexigram symbol on a touch screen.

I said "Egg."

He pressed "Egg."

I said, "M and M."

He pressed "M and M."

Then Kanzi took control of the conversation and pressed the symbol for "Surprise!"

Needless to say, I was quite surprised, having never actually spoken to an ape before.

But Kanzi was pointing to a box of candy that I was sitting near. That is the surprise that he wanted.

I'll just bet that was the surprise Kanji wanted. And far from all this sounding "beyond belief", I would be really surprised if, having been pestered this way since infancy, Kanji could not have managed at least this much communication. Dogs do it regularly.

I myself taught a cat to recognize and respond to a number of words in 1964. And the cat, like the ape, could be relied on to choose the point at which she felt she should be rewarded for her cooperation and to identify the location of any reward she was being offered. For their prudence in such matters, I commend both the cat and the ape.

But the whole experiment points up the fundamental problem identified by Jonathan Marks in What does it mean to be 98% Chimpanzee?: The ape hasn't anything to say, in particular, that requires a high level of language skill. If he is under your control and you force him to learn some routine for a box of candy, he must comply - whether you are operating a circus act or a lab. But beyond a certain point, it all sounds like cruelty to me.

The people involved mean well - they want to protect apes. Then why couldn't they just let them be apes?

And what a naive thought! - that apes can really help us understand the fundamental riddles of human existence. As if I could make that long-departed cat understand the motivations that caused me to teach her some sit and rollover tricks.

(I was refuting the claim made by some acquaintances that cats cannot be taught to respond to simple words. They can indeed be taught to respond to simple words, if motivated, but they are hard to motivate. The cat's native senses are far better than the human's, and the cat - who, unlike the dog, has no great delight in obedience - is readily distracted by other interests.)

Here are some linguists' thoughts on these perennial talking animals stories and why they don't pan out.

*Apes' vocal cords do not seem to permit speech, so experiment in communicating with primates rely on signals of various types.