Reviews by Hubie Goode: Clever Hans, Apes and Bees, and Communication Part 3

Clever Hans, Apes and Bees,
and Communication
Part 3

If you missed part 2 you’ll need to scroll down or select from the links on the side bar.

Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees

You can talk to these Monkees----->

The idea that apes have no linguistic ability is only a recent discovery compared to the overall history of the study. We now know that they are merely cleverly mirroring the human intelligence of their trainers. The breakthrough came when a young chimp named Nim was trained with sign language. In the beginning it appeared that the chimp was indeed using signs in a language form, but later when video taped alone by himself, it became obvious that the chimp was merely using signs when prompted by the trainer and the signs never appeared at any other time. The chimp also never added any of its own signs to the mix or developed them beyond the original programming.

You can talk to these Animals----->

This underscored the information obtained from the experience of Clever Hans. Animals have a unique ability to observe and interpret human expression, and this ability borders on the supernatural. The next time you see a stray dog and think in terms of whether or not they will “smell fear”, consider more deeply the effect that simple turns of your head or body may convey to the animal, and also even small expressions of the face. Can you convince a pit bull that you love dogs? You might need to one day. But hopefully not.

One must consider the extent of the educational advantage gorillas like “Koko” have had in learning the way that they do. When we think about over crowded classrooms for our children where there is one teacher to maybe 40 students and these apes have had teams of 30 to 40 teachers trying to teach them to use language, one can see how highly developed even a gorilla with a 40 I.Q. can become due to the ability to mirror human intelligence. Mentally retarded patients at the Georgia State Retardation Center were also given these same techniques and amount of attention, and it was noted that they were much easier to teach than the chimps.

The study of child language and the human brain has even gotten stranger in recent times. According to the website www.reversespeech.com, babies who babble are actually talking backwards and from the right brain. Not only this, but we humans actually have a speech that comes from our right brains which is only picked up in the subconscious and is received in reverse. I am not sure just what to think of all the findings of Doctor John Oates, who is developing this science, but the website is an amazing trip to go through, and that is all I will say.

And There’s More....

In the beginning, back in 1661 when Samuel Prepys first encountered a baboon, the idea of apes being able to developed language grew and became an accepted avenue of investigation for many years right up until the 1960’s and 1970’s. There were, of course, many false positives that came from the studies, including exercises where chimps were taught to communicate with one another. Their success rate reached an impressive 95%. But those experiments used word symbols with a computer and when turned off, the communication rate dropped off the map. Apes have no ability to form thoughts into language but a huge ability to mirror the communications of humans, and without the humans, there is no “Dr. Zaius”.

Ahh but what about Dolphins???? Doesn’t Flipper have clout???

In the early 1960’s this idea of an animal having language was also applied to dolphins. The simple mistaken intel about dolphins having a larger brain than most was another true revelation of man’s hubris. It was believed that perhaps size mattered when it came to brains and dolphins might even be smarter than mankind. (There are many New Agers who promote that dolphins are actually evolved Atlanteans or Lemurians from long ago in the Earth’s history.) There is no dolphin mystique, plain and simple. Dolphins speak to each other in the same way all animals do.

Due to apes being believed to be intelligent and capable of language, one has to wonder why they were never taught to clean their own cages. No apes have ever cleaned up after themselves, or even have been taught to do so, they are after all... animals. Animals only work, prepare food and clean up after themselves when they are directed to do so by humans. This is undeniable. Humans are able to force animals to work due to their God given dominion over the planet, and man's ability to retain and transmit information over time. One would think that this ability would have made a greater difference over the history of mankind, with respect to man’s basic internal self. We have trains, planes and automobiles, internets and space shuttles and more medical advancements than at any time in history, but man is basically the same as he has always been. The fact that animals who act like humans, because they do what they see humans doing, can be mistakenly given powers of intelligent language production, is further proof of an age old hubris that has blinded mankind for his entire history.

Animals are incapable of creating day dreams and imaginations. Humans alone have the ability to learn and understand information relegated to him from the past. We can certainly understand the story of Christ and also make a decision based upon the information gained within that story, despite the fact that we have never been to that point in time. Animals have no idea what any of that means, and that makes us superior to the animal. Mankind alone has the capacity for the “Word”.

Word Up

Why should man alone, among all known life forms, be the only one that can disseminate information from the past and then transmit that information into the future? There is an absolute disunion between ourselves and everything else on the planet. Your house cat is happy their entire life just being a cat. Your trees in the backyard never gain the desire to travel to the south of France. If man were not around, had never been around, the earth would indeed look like a different place today. Nature would own everything, there would never been imbalance, even death would just be part of the circle of life. And yet the earth is vastly different because of mankind’s presence. If he were just an example of evolution, then that balance would be maintained, nature would have it no other way. But man is made in the image of his Superior Creator, and nothing else is.

Is there any evidence that relates the distinctive attribute of mankind with the word and the creation of human beings? Mankind alone has a unique strand of DNA with a particular string of nucleotide bases which allows a unique informational specification. The language cortex in the left hemisphere of the brain from whence speech comes is a direct difference of mankind in relation to the rest of creation.

Humans also assign meanings to verbal utterances. This depends not only on the words used but also on the state of mind and knowledge of those using language. It has been discovered that at birth the human child has an innate ability to understand the spoken word. This ability is genetically traceable to the informational specification along the DNA strand which echoes human life which, therefore, came into existence at the time human life was created.

If the divine attribute of man’s creator is “The Word”, then the human capacity to perpetuate a moral code through time itself, from the past long ago and then into present day and then beyond, is itself an overlaying shadow of the moral image overlaying all generations of human life. Man is life’s singular moral species with access to an eternity. The “passport” is a message that only mankind can receive. Our ability to choose whom we shall believe among all information received is our solitary ability and responsibility that neither ape, horse, bee or dolphin can make.

Terrace H. et. al. “On the Grammatical Capacity of Apes” in Nelson K. ed. Children’s Language (1980) v.2 Gardner Press (NY)
Chevalier-Skolnikoff S. “The Clever Hans Phenomenon, Cuing and Ape Signing: A Piagetian Analysis of Methods for Instructing Animals.” Annals of the New York Academy of Science
Gardner B. & Gardner R. “Comparing the Early Utterances of Child and Chimpanzee.” On Child Psychology (1974)
Gish S. Quantitative Analysis of Two Way Communication Between Captive Dolphins (1979)
Romans 9:16