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

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Clever Hans, Apes and Bees, and Communication Part 2

Clever Hans,
Apes and Bees,
and Communication

Part 2

If you missed part 1 you’ll need to scroll down or select from the links on the side bar.

Damn Dirty Apes

What really happens if animals DO learn some sort of language? In this case it means that human intelligence has succeeded in releasing animals from instincts they received at birth. This of course also leads to the possibility that animals could eventually learn to use this language to communicate with one another. If enough time is allowed, it is not hard to imagine that animals could indeed begin to resemble humans in the way that they communicate. Then, after this fact, the animals could begin to inform us of how their present state of affairs is the result of “adverse” evolutionary circumstances. If conversation then became common, laws against discrimination and in favor of equal opportunity could then be developed to protect animals from environmental factors that victimize them into a disadvantaged position relative to human beings.

They’d acquire rights.

Despite the fact that humans differ on many levels from animals, it would be easy for people to be blind to the fact that a division between man and animal was God given. Many seem to feel that except for human culture and education, it’s man’s mind that is indeed not so different from the apes, not the other way around. If indeed an ape was exposed to human culture, would the natural progression be an ape that has acquired human qualities? This kind of reminds me a little bit of “King Louie” from the Disney movie “The Jungle Book”. Interestingly enough Louie’s complaint was that he didn’t know the secret to fire; fire being a kind of power in this instance, and that does indeed sound like a human trait. But that’s NOT science, people.

The factual content on this matter is hugely diverse from what would be popular culture and wishful thinking. I seriously doubt that any orangutan in any zoo sits around all day imagining any other relationship between man and ape than the one he enjoys everyday. Imagination often leads to invention, and we’ve seen no inventions from the ape species - ever! If there is any difference between the two minds, that of man and that of ape, then it is by human choice and not by necessity. Science today will tell you that there is no common ground between ape and man that can be bridged naturally. Monkeys haven’t changed in all the time of their existence and yet mankind has landed on the moon in the same period of time. The belief that special circumstances produced a difference that can now be overcome with special engineering is to invent happenings of the past that are in fact unknown, and still unexplained and also beg to be accurately reproduced as only the superior mind of man can accommodate. This special circumstances belief is also a direct contradiction of the current evidence on the subject.

Primordial Snooze

Up until the 1980’s it was believed that apes could indeed be taught a language eventually. Many experiments had been done before this time with apes as varied as Austin, Sherman and Lana. They were taught to label different foods and tools. The fourteen year old chimp, Sarah, was said to be able to congnitize specific problems and even think her way into a solution. There were also six wild born chimpanzees that were said to prove an affinity for spatial memory organization. Paper marking tests were devised three years after “social conditions” were believed to determine the rates at which the chimps approached “hidden distant goals”. Language between chimps and children was at this time believed to be comparable.

How new indeed is the idea that animals can acquire language? It’s actually a very old concept. In 1661 Samuel Pepys wrote that it was his opinion that apes could indeed be taught a language. He devised this information from his first time encounter with a baboon. In 1885, Sir John Lubbock wrote that rather than trying to teach animals our ideas, it might be a better idea to produce a code of signals that allow the animal to impart his ideas to us. Twenty years later, and influenced by the academic antics of a horse named Clever Hans, a psychiatrist revealed that animals can think in human ways. They can also express ideas in human language.*

* Lubbock J. Note on the intelligence of the dog (1885) British association for the advancement of science.
Prepys S. in Marx J. (1980) op. cit.
Wolff G. Die denkenden Tiere von Elberfield und mannheim :456 (1914) Suddeutsche Monatshefete, Berlin

Just the Facts Mam’

Due to the fact that science is all about observable data, and any data that is not observable is something else entirely, and not science, the only facts we can truly devise from all this is that animals consistently prove that they are indeed organic machines energized by instincts. In the absence of human intelligence, animal behavior expresses itself under a dictatorial genetic system that imposes common controls from generation to generation. This is why the language experiments required training so structured as to be logically equivalent to teaching a child to swing through trees while supporting him with cables, harnesses and nets. The idea of training animals to complete tasks for rewards is not all that new at all. This has been successfully done with pigeons and even worms. This does not however lead to any kind of language use. All sign behavior can indeed be so mechanistic that it can be duplicated on a computer.

The language of the chimp, Lana, is attributable to only two basic processes called paired associate learning and conditional discrimination learning. Therefore as a practical matter, a computer can be programmed to simulate the alleged language of the chimp. This in turn reveals the mechanistic behavior of the animals themselves. Animals never act illogically against their programming unless mankind sticks his nose in the mix. (Of course, I speak of healthy animals.) Any animal rights person will inform you that elephants never sway back and forth while they stand in one spot, and yet you can witness this in any zoo in America. This “swaying” is actually a mental/emotional problem brought on by captivity.

A Horse is a Horse is a Horse of course

All of this brings up a very good question: Why are there so many highly intelligent people who believe that apes have the ability to use signs in a way that is characteristic of true language? How were these folks influenced into believing that animals can do things they really can’t do? This is mostly due to an ability that animals DO have. Believe it or not, apes have actually fooled human beings, really smart human beings, too. Although, the apes are not actually cognizant of their ability to do so. But there is a trotting horse called Clever Hans who can illustrate this idea for us.

Clever Hans couldn’t speak like the Mr. Ed of TV fame, but his owner was so captivated by his seeming intelligence that he went so far as to give the horse the benefit of a high school education. People came from all over the land to see the horse perform his amazing intelligence “tricks”. Clever Hans could solve very complex mathematical problems, and this astounded audiences. He could also solve non-math problems as well.

When given a math problem, Hans would paw the ground with his hoof. Yes and no answers were solved with a shake of the head left and right or else up and down. (yes and no). He could also name colors. If asked to find the color red, he would pick up a red rag, or a green rag for green and so on. Many people of the day investigated the horse; the owner, the people who had seen the horse perform. No one could discover the source of the intelligence that the horse displayed, this included Calvary men, psychologists and well known scholars.

One day however, after years of amazing feats by the horse, a person asked a question of the horse whose answer was unknown by the questioner or anyone physically close to the horse. Suddenly Hans was an idiot. Not only did he not know the answer, but it became alarmingly obvious that he had never known any answer to any question ever given to him.

Years of constant familiarity between the horse and his teacher enabled the horse to pick up the slightest signs and movements of the trainer’s head and body. At each demonstration, when asked a question, the horse was able to view, with his “jungle” eyesight and wider visual scope, the slightest unconscious movements of his trainer’s body. The trainer knew which rag was red and would naturally face the red rag in some small way either with his eyes or his head or his body, and therefore the horse would then grab a red rag. If asked a math question, the trainer would lean slightly forward while the horse pawed the ground and then when the correct number had been reached, the trainer would relax. All this happened imperceptibly to the humans in the surrounding viewpoint. But animals see these things. (In much the same way as a cat or dog knows a human who likes or dislikes a cat or dog.) Likewise with head movements, the horse might see the trainer blink, or move his head slightly, perhaps even a raising of the chin, and this would tip off the horse to answer in a pre-trained way to either a yes or no question.

Animals see things you and I do not, and it has been discovered that head movements can be perceived at well under a hundredth of an inch. Without the seeming superior intelligence of mankind, animals have been given an almost superpower advantage that man knows only a little about. The interpretation of this gift in human terms has lead many to believe that similarities between man and animal are only a bridge that needs to be gulfed, but in essence, they possess something quite different than what we assume they must have.

Cats and Dogs, cats and dogs. I was just thinking about dinner tonight.

About this time, as you can imagine, pet owners everywhere were revealing their special family members as being oracles of wisdom. In the next thirty years after Hans, there were as many as 70 pet owners who appeared on the popular circuit hoping for a chance at stardom with “Arnold” the pig and such. The problem behind each of those animals was the ubiquitous presence of its master. Without Jimmyjo Bob or Peggy Sue, Arnold knew nothing. This was something new, the connection between masters and their pets, and science moved forward to study this effect with the removal of the human element involved. An animal’s ability to recognize and interpret a human’s smallest movements due to its ultra sensitive and unseen perception fueled the so called discoveries of language possibilities that were then reported. Animals know their trainers and owners and also their expectations. They then combine this with their superior sensory organization and history is made.

But what happens when we pull the human element out of the equation?

More on this in Part 3.

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

Clever Hans, Apes,
Bees and Communication

Whether we realize it or not, we are all cognizant of a rather unique talent that is inherent in mankind. Namely that mankind is capable of receiving, supplying and transmitting the written word. This has been going on for thousands of years. We’ve seen temple walls embossed with hieroglyphics, drawings along the sides of inner walls of caves, and lunar calendars engraved on bones. These are all evidence of humans synthesizing abstract elements and placing them into ordered composites, to be followed by written records that contain and communicate information that would otherwise be unavailable.

Mankind has this talent to lift himself up and outside of the time frame of his birth, and many would feel that this is indeed a unique circumstance germane to mankind and only mankind. If this is so, then how can we explain experiments that offer evidence of an ability in animals for the capacity for language, mathematical concepts, and even forming simple sentences? Haven’t we seen the fact that dolphins are capable of language? Haven’t we seen the videos of chimpanzees forming simple sentences with plastic symbols, or computer generated tokens? If the “word” is unique to mankind, then how can animals also posses it?

The ability to pass on information beyond one’s own locus of control and into the next generation is an ability that belongs solely to mankind. There has never been an animal that gathered information beyond it’s hard wiring and then passed it along to their descendants. Yet in recent years there are those who have made some impressive strides and amazing claims in the field of animal communication. Even orangutangs have been described as being “all too human”. This would seem to imply that if we were to give monkeys the benefit of human education and culture, that human qualities would be further developed.

There once was an ape named “Lana” who is said to have done this back in the 1970’s. A computer based language was developed that was targeted at seeing if indeed an ape could learn language. It was all very basic, symbols were created for a keyboard, and Lana had to type the symbols in an order to receive a banana, or some such thing. The results of this study seemingly proved that indeed an ape could use symbols in communicating its wants and needs.

That's NOT Lana --->

Sarah was a chimpanzee who preceded Lana and was given plastic symbols to organize into language. Evidence suggested that indeed Sarah could really form sentences out of the arrangement of plastic symbols. Scientists even went so far as to report that Sarah had a vocabulary of about 130 words and her work revealed actual sentence structure.

Supposedly, Sarah understood the use of verbs, adjectives, conditionals, and even compound sentences. Until the 1980’s, these concepts were considered canon. But in latter years the research has been shown to have been premature, and today we now accept that apes are indeed NOT capable of language. To understand this, let’s contrast their so called language with the waggle dance of the scout bee.

Say it ain’t so, Doctor Dolittle!

Honeybees are genetically able to perform rapid movements known as a “waggle dance”. A scout bee finds food outside of the hive and then returns and relays the information to the rest of the hive. It does this by moving in a circle if the food is less than 300 feet from the hive. It moves in a figure eight motion if the food is more than 300 feet from the hive. (Studies have been done!) The faster the bee moves, the farther away the food is. Also, the direction of the scout bee’s body with respect to gravity inside the hive reveals the direction that the bees must fly outside the hive with respect to sunlight. (Stop laughing, see for yourself.*) If the scout bee’s body is pointed upward, the bees fly toward the sun; if his body points downward, they are to fly away from the sun. So what happens on cloudy days you might ask? The bees have a back up mechanism. The bees remember the sun’s previous diurnal course in relation to landmarks that are local to the hive. The shape of the pattern traced out in the dance, together with the speed of the bee and the orientation of its body with respect to the gravity inside the hive, all serve to communicate information to the other bees as to the distance and direction of the flight they must take to reach the food. (Face it, for this to be explained by evolution is impossible since it would have taken so long for this system to develop that bees would have died out long before hand.)

* Dyer F. & Gould J. Science (1981) 214:1041 nov 27.

The important thing to take away from all this is that when a scout encounters a flower, the waggle dance is not something that it intellectually assimilates. A bee can see through 8,000 individual lenses in its eye with which it sees in all directions at once. Its reporting to the hive is totally an instinctual act where it automatically does the waggle dance. This act of communication is the direct result of DNA preprogramming which contains the information the bee needs to make the whole hive survival possible, and this includes knowledge of gravity and the presence of the sun. The bee doesn’t make instant cognition of this, of course, it just simply is the way things are for them.

Keep in mind also that every time a bee leaves its hive, it only takes as much honey with it as it needs to reach the flowers that the scout bee has reported. To return alive to the hive, they must use the sugar from the flower that they find. No 401K plan for these workers. If you see a bee limping along on the sidewalk, you are looking at a doomed creature who didn’t receive the message properly or was interfered with and will soon succumb to starvation.

The instructions for the waggle dance are imbedded inside of the bee’s genes. Even young bees raised outside of the hive understand the waggle dance. Despite its sophistication, the waggle dance actually exists of a small number of moves.

Consider for a moment the parallels here of the message of God. Only one bee comes from outside the hive with information on how to get to the flowers that will provide continued life for the hive. Any other bee with information will not be correct and will doom the whole hive. If an Eagle were to be flying over the flowers and then transmogrified into a bee in order to give the proper information for reaching the flowers, you would then have a “re-telling” of the Biblical story.

What did the Elephant say to the Ostrich? Apparently nothing.

In all places among the animal kingdom, communication is shared among members of the same species with no interference from mankind at all. In the case of apes, however, the new ingredient is added, namely: humans. Human intelligence is used to interpret if indeed apes are capable of using language. Necessarily, the studies are done in such a way that requires apes to interact over periods of time with human intelligence and expectations.

Where the scout bee tells other bees in the hive where the food is with genetically controlled body odors in conjunction with instinctive body movements, in the language experiments human intelligence attempts to teach apes the use of language with words created by the use of tokens on a computer screen or plastic symbols. But the ramifications are profound if you and I engage in such activity and actually teach these animals “language”.

More on this next time.