by Huss, John
Anne and I don’t need to withhold judgment about whether Cecep was communicating because we know him, and we consider his pantomiming behavior in the context of the other things we know about him. When we make an inference to the best explanation, we have to take all available evidence into account. So let me tell you another story about Cecep.
He was one of the leaders of the little group of forest school orangutans, and the babysitters nicknamed him The Policeman because he often broke up fights and seemed to want to keep the peace. Aldrin, one of the other orangutans in the group, wasn’t doing very well. Aldrin didn’t run around the forest with the other orangutans; instead he would sit and hug a babysitter, and whimper if no one would cuddle him. He only once climbed a tree when I was there, and the other orangutans usually ignored him. But one day things were very different: the babysitters found a turtle. Now, as a human reader, this might not sound terribly exciting, but orangutans are terrified of turtles—something even Darwin remarked on. When the orangutans, including Aldrin, saw the turtle they all fled into the trees in terror. Later that day when it was time to head back to camp, the babysitters realized that Aldrin wasn’t with them. They never saw him come down from the tree. Then the babysitters noticed that Cecep wasn’t around either. When they went back to where the turtle had been, they found Aldrin and Cecep perched in different trees. Cecep was up in a tree in front of Aldrin’s, and he looked back at Aldrin, caught his eye, and then moved on to the next tree. Aldrin followed Cecep, who led Aldrin from tree to tree until they reached the path back to camp. Though Cecep had been looking back at Aldrin from time to time, when he got down to the ground he just scampered away, joining the rest of the group. And Aldrin followed. That’s just the kind of guy Cecep is.
When we see only one incident of a behavior that looks as if it was done for a reason, a mentalistic explanation may not be very well justified. But as we gather observations of incident after incident that cries out for an explanation in terms of reasons for action, we become more and more justified in our interpretation. While the mentalistic hypothesis is only weakly supported by each individual incident, the overhypothesis that explains the large set of data is much stronger. As the philosopher Nelson Goodman defines it, an ‘overhypothesis’ is a hypothesis used to justify a set of more specific hypotheses, and it is a basic tool in human reasoning that allows us to form generalizations. It is one of the amazing features of human beings that we are able to learn so much starting from so little, and much of this ability is due to our powers of induction.
To justify the interpretation of a behavior via induction, we need more information than just the description of the behavior. We need to know what happened before the behavior, and what happened after. It also helps to know the idiosyncratic history of the behaving individual, as well as the normal behavior of the relevant species. No behavior occurs outside of a larger context. So we shouldn’t interpret any behavior without taking its context into account.
They’re All Tame Until They Take a Chunk Out of You
Context plays an especially important role in the interpretation of behavior insofar as minds have evolved in—and are naturally designed to work within—particular contexts. If our environment affects our minds, then in order to know the natural ape mind, scientists need to gather inductive data about ape behavior in natural ape environments. Most cognition research is done with caged animals. Think about how unimpressive Taylor is in his cage, or how well the scientists understand Caesar’s mother Bright Eyes in hers.
Now think about how much mental work you offload onto your environment, and imagine trying to get by without the information in your phone. Try doing your taxes without a computer or even a pencil and paper. We have good memories because we write things down in our calendars. We are organized because we have to-do lists. We know how to do many things, from getting to work to buying dinner, because we live in the same kind of environment in which we learned these skills. Elderly people with dementia can often live surprising well in their own homes, because they let the house serve as part of their mind. Take this person out of her home, and she often deteriorates quite quickly. We all need our environments to help us think, and we all need familiar tools to show off our skills. A tailor is useless without thread and needle, just as an orangutan may be useless without trees to climb and build nests in.
Experiments on great apes can help us find out what apes can do, but we can’t count on them to tell us what apes can’t do. We especially can’t let them tell us that apes can’t do something when we have access to a body of observations that together force us toward an explanation in terms of that very ability. Imagine trying to understand what great apes can do while only studying the apes at the San Bruno Primate Shelter, or the apes at Gen Sys. Or imagine the intelligent simians of Planet of the Apes trying to learn about all the things twentieth-century humans can do by studying Taylor alone in a cage without clothes or a voice. When you’re in a cage, you act caged, and a tame animal is a compromised one. Since caging and taming changes the individual, we need to study uncaged wild animals if we really want to know what they’re thinking.
2
Just Say No to Speech
SARA WALLER
In the beginning, there was the word of Taylor. Our hero’s loneliness in space is captured in language, a soliloquy spoken to an empty galaxy. He asks, “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor’s children starving?”
Taylor’s language in the opening scene of Planet of the Apes (1968) conveys not only intelligence, but empathy and hope that future humanity is better than the humanity he left hundreds of years in the past. He wants to speak, and to be heard, which is precisely what he cannot do alone in space, or after being shot in the throat. Language—wielded by humans or by apes—seems to endow its possessors with superiority and moral worth, allows space travel, religion, and science, and lets us confess: “I am lonely.”
And with language, we have made ourselves lonely, as we often seem to have empathy only for other creatures that speak. Language becomes a weapon in its ability to indicate thought, and its absence is easily construed as an absence of intelligence. For creatures without language, we have a great variety of measures that can be used to bestow, or reject, their intelligence. Once intelligence has been dismissed, it seems that rights, personhood, and respect are gone as well; our empathy is reserved for our intellectual equals.
Tyranny of Language
The word ‘barbarian’ is a clear example of how language can be used to prop up prejudice and oppression. To the ancient Greeks, other languages such as Persian sounded so much like ‘bar bar bar bar’ that ‘barbarian’ came to mean ‘one who is brutish’ and ‘one who does not speak the language of the civilized’ (that being Greek, of course). The word served to diminish anyone who spoke differently, both in intellect and in moral character, and so, in our moral concern for such a person as well. After all, who would go to great lengths to protect or care for a strange foreigner who is crude, hostile, threatening, and babbling? And the barbarians cannot defend themselves from this charge, for all they can do in return is say ‘bar bar bar bar’ thus proving their inferiority. We see this prejudice play out across the Planet of the Apes films. Dodge Landon, the cruel chimp keeper in Rise of the Planet of the Apes mocks the intelligent and imprisoned chimps mercilessly, imitating the sounds Caesar makes and calling him “stupid monkey.” And in the original film, Dr. Zaius remarks of Taylor how amusing it is that a man would act like an ape, mimicking speech.
We know the Planet of the Apes films present us with metaphors for racism as well—and racism is often reinforced through linguistic oppression. America’s voting restriction laws of 1894 present us with another good example of the tyranny of language as the measure of minds. These laws prohibited anyone who could not read or write in English from approaching the polls. A wonderful device for those who were wealt
hy and educated, the law effectively kept the lower classes from casting votes and thereby gaining advantages such as education and literacy. These laws were in many cases abused by whites in power telling potential black voters that they had failed the test—not because they had really failed to answer the questions, but because it was in the interests of racists to implement any effective method of oppression.
Tell a potential minority voter he has failed the test, and not only has his vote been blocked, but he might also believe that he is illiterate and uneducated, and so unworthy of protesting or fighting back against the majority and their elegant language skills. Giggling at animals such as Taylor and saying ‘human see, human do’ is also effectively demoralizing, not to mention hosing them down and subjecting them to ridicule.
Standard IQ tests in use today may be accused of similar bias. The two most accepted tests are the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test. If you know your IQ, it is because you took one of these tests (probably while you were in middle school). The basic format of these tests is a conversation between an examiner and the person being ‘measured,’ and the examiner asks questions focusing on vocabulary, mathematics, and ability to recall information. The results of the test depend on the ability of the examinee to understand instructions and respond clearly. But the structure of the test itself seems to double the importance of language skill in taking the test. The most crucial part of the test—the part that most reliably determines one’s overall IQ—is the vocabulary section. Indeed, IQ tests have been criticized for bias precisely because those who speak a dialect of English may receive a lower IQ score simply due to a difference in response to certain words that appear on the test. Speakers of creoles, and people who have learned English as a second language, all risk being assigned a lower IQ because their responses are non-standard. We measure your mind in a test made of the language, by the language, and for the language.
Poor Taylor’s mind gets measured, and dismissed, in much the same way. It seems that ape psychologists followed right along with this human linguistic prejudice. Zira, perhaps the most empathetic and charitable of the ape researchers, cajoles the imprisoned humans to do more than peer and grunt. “Well, . . . And what do we want this morning? Do we want something? Come on, . . . speak.” She’s thrilled with “Bright Eyes” precisely because he seems to be attempting to speak (or perhaps pretending he can speak), even though she is met with skepticism from her colleagues. Once the prejudice against non-speaking humans is in place, there is nothing Taylor can do to prove himself smart—much as there is little or nothing the ‘Bright Eyes’ in Rise of the Planet of the Apes can do to persuade her human keepers that she is merely protecting her child, or that Caesar can do to appease the next door neighbor who is convinced he is vicious. Muteness, human or ape, seems a sure way to become oppressed. Even Taylor is not immune from the tyranny of language as he gazes at the beautiful Nova, and wonders aloud if she is capable of love, given her lack of speech.
We’ll Start with the Wisconsin Multiphasic
Once a language barrier has been established (between Greeks and barbarians, humans and apes, researchers and studied animals), we can try to understand the mind of the other through non-linguistic tests. Dr. Zira immediately muses about how Taylor might do on the “Hopkins Manual Dexterity Test,” no doubt a Hollywood version of the real Minnesota Manual Dexterity Test, in which one must nimbly put discs in holes as quickly as possible. While dexterity is a far cry from an indicator of intelligence (Stephen Hawking, for example, would fail such a test), it’s easy for us to read into these test results, thinking that those who are smart are also dexterous, and vice versa.
In Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Dr. Zira and Cornelius arrive on twentieth-century Earth and are subjected to testing. They have agreed not to divulge their ability to speak without gathering some information on how the humans might react. Since they seem mute to the curious humans, tests seem the right way to investigate these apes-gone-astronaut. The first test is called the “Wisconsin Multiphasic” in homage to two well-known and well-respected psychological tests: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. In the real Wisconsin task, subjects are asked to identify and respond to patterns presented in cards, and the more aptly they do it, the more they are said to have good executive function. Akin to outright intelligence, executive function is the ability to plan, solve problems, work through steps of a problem, and complete a logical sequence of events or tasks. The Minnesota Multiphasic is a completely different kind of test. It is a several-hundred-question-long psychological survey aimed at discovering the inner workings of your personality. Are you depressive? Neurotic? Your score on the MMPI will tell you.
Amusingly, the fictional Wisconsin Multiphasic test that Zira is subjected to seems to be a simple memory task. But it’s given in a way that is standard for much psychological testing. She sits opposite the examiner, and is allowed to see objects presented by the tester. Then, a shade is drawn between them, and the examiner adds more objects. She must select the old objects and ignore the new ones, showing she can remember what was first presented. When she succeeds at this, the human psychologist presents her with the container for all the objects—with holes cut in the right shape for every object. Lightly insulted, Dr. Zira completes the task without effort.
The human psychologists are very pleased with Zira’s results, and present her with a classic task first given to chimpanzees by researcher Wolfgang Kohler in 1913. In this task, as in the film, a banana is suspended out of reach, and the hungry chimpanzees have to find a way to obtain it using things in their environment, such as boxes. Kohler’s famous studies showed that chimpanzees did not have to use trial and error in order to learn and solve problems: that is, they could solve such a problem on the first try, using insight, a clear mark of intelligence. In the movie, the boxes have almost Tetris-like shapes, made for easy stacking. Kohler’s original task was a bit harder, with ordinary boxes that were not so easily stacked. Dr. Zira, who probably learned about, if not performed, similar experiments with humans as she pursued her doctoral work in psychology, stacks the boxes in a familiar and deliberate way, and then sits with the banana easily in reach, gazing at her human examiners. Why doesn’t she take it after completing the task? “Because I loathe bananas,” Dr. Zira shouts. And with that, just as with Taylor’s “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape” in the original movie, and Caesar’s exclamation of “No” in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the notion of the “animal,” and its intelligence and moral status, is forever changed.
Delightfully, Dr. Zira’s exclamation is accurate to real ape preferences in comparative psychology laboratories—everyone who works with chimpanzees recognizes that they prefer grapes. Indeed, recent studies by Frans de Waal show that chimpanzees who receive cucumbers for completing a task, but can see that their companion in the neighboring cage are receiving grapes for the same work, first become enraged and shake the cage, then throw the cucumber back at the experimenter, and finally refuse to do the task altogether until the grape is given rightfully and equally to both working parties. DeWaal’s recent TED talk entitled “Moral Behavior in Animals” reveals some delightful moments of these experiments and can be found on YouTube.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens with “Bright Eyes” completing “the Lucas Tower,” which is modeled on a well-known and often-employed real psychological task called the Tower of Hanoi. Composed of three small poles and a series of discs of decreasing sizes, the object of the task is to move the disks from the left hand post to the right hand post without ever placing a larger disc on top of a smaller disc. It’s considered a task of “executive function” because it demands that the subject plan ahead so as to never misplace the discs. Bright Eyes is doing amazingly well at the task, completing it in twenty moves. Caesar later masters the same task in fifteen moves at a young age, with a plot line that mirrors the research
of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. This researcher worked with bonobos (a chimp-like ape species), and trained the mother of the famous bonobo, Kanzi, on a symbol board, hoping to get her to associate symbols with meanings and thus use the board as a proxy for speech. The mother of Kanzi never did do well on the symbol board, but Kanzi did, suggesting that a young brain is indeed more amicable to training than an adult brain—and that a young monkey can indeed benefit intellectually from experiencing the training aimed at its mother.
Finally, in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, young Caesar exhibits intelligence as he swings about the kitchen, steals a cookie, and swings back to replace the lid on the cookie jar in order to cover his tracks. In doing this, he passes a well-respected “deception task” in comparative psychology. Animals that can fake out other animals through deception are thought to be intelligent because they must understand that the animals being tricked have mental states—specifically, beliefs—and that these beliefs can be manipulated in a variety of ways.
Ravens, for example, will steal the fish from the lines of ice fishermen, and then carefully place the line back in the water so that the unsuspecting human does not know he was robbed. Likewise, an octopus in a west-coast aquarium would slither from its tank at night to eat the luscious salmon and crabs in neighboring tanks, slither back into its own tank, and shut the top. The baffled humans lost several shipments of crab and fish before they installed a camera in the aquarium to find out what was happening at night. This story marked the beginning of serious consideration of octopus intelligence by comparative psychologists. No wonder Caesar is shown stealing cookies at an early age—he’s portrayed as exceptionally bright every step of the way.
