Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But now, suddenly, nonhuman personhood is more than an academic possibility, but an issue of such overwhelming importance that we devote not only this editorial of unprecedented length, but the entire Science section to the question.

  Out of Africa comes a mystery named Thursday. The flabbergasted scientists who at first denied that she could possibly exist now have conceded that much. They are busily redrawing humanity’s family tree, and eagerly studying Thursday for clues to our own past appearance and behavior. These are laudable efforts, but they sidestep the main question, to wit: Is she a person?

  Thursday is not a human being. So much is clear from a glance at a photograph of her, or a cursory examination of the Gowrie skulls. But as we have noted, the modern world has long since conceded that a nonhuman could be a person. Therefore, her non-humanity is no bar to personhood.

  It has been demonstrated that she can think and reason, that she can understand; that she can use and learn language to a limited degree; that she can use tools, that she shares with us a whole constellation of communicative gestures, expressions, and sounds. Are these enough to make her a person?

  There is no debate that her general intelligence and her language abilities are far below human-normal levels. But there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of mentally disadvantaged human beings whose abilities are far below Thursday’s, and yet these unfortunates are unquestionably one with ourselves—they are us, they are people.

  No newborn human baby can reason or speak, and senility robs many elders of their faculties, and yet no one could or would deny the right of all these people to be called—and treated as—persons. Can we claim Thursday is not a person because she, too, lacks such skills? Obviously not.

  Indeed, there is no objective measure of personhood wherein a bona fide human being could not be found who scored lower than Thursday. Is she, therefore, a person? Is she one of us—strangely different, but imbued with that spark a less secular age would not hesitate to call a soul?

  The outside world is beginning to deal with Thursday and her species. Already, new expeditions have been dispatched to Gabon and the tribe that breeds these creatures. We must deal with them. But deal with them as what? As apes that walk upright, or as persons whose intelligence is somewhat limited and of a different nature than our own?

  All human beings are persons. It has taken untold bloodshed—the catastrophe of the American Civil War, the war against Hitler, and a thousand other battles large and small, to force humanity to accept that idea. Recent history, from Ethiopia, where the starved were driven like cattle, from Cambodia where entire generations were destroyed, to Central America and its bestial violence, to the Gulags of the Soviet Union, to the United States and the hate-addled ravings of the Ku Klux Klan—that simple idea is still challenged, still fragile. Now it might face new danger, posed by a new question: Are all persons human beings?

  To put that question in sharper focus: Is Thursday a person?

  Our answer will affect every field of human activity from biology and psychology to religion and philosophy, from politics and labor policy to the civil rights movement and education. It is an answer we cannot afford to get wrong.

  The world has learned of the strange incidents in Mississippi in 1851, and of the western world’s first contact with Australopithecus boisei. That contact came in the midst of slavery and the degradation of human life; in short, in the midst of treating humans like animals. What upheaval awaits us if Thursday is a person and we treat her kind with such arrogance? And yet, if she is an animal, what storm gates of hatred might we open by treating her like a person? It is too easy to imagine how the hatemongers might use the precedent to claim, as our ancestors did, that certain human beings were not people.

  Is Thursday a person?

  A more delicate and dangerous question in human relations can scarce be imagined. Misjudge Thursday’s personhood, and we threaten our own.

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  Amanda Banks reached out once again to take Thursday’s hand, gently moving the fingers into the correct position one more time and then held up the object under discussion. “Ball,” she said, and signed the word with her free hand. “Ball.”

  Thursday drew her lips back from her teeth, the very picture of concentration, and made the sign herself. “‘Awl. ‘Awl,” she said. Barbara watched intently, and patted Thursday on the shoulder to reassure her. Thursday turned to her and repeat the sign without trying to speak. Ball.

  “Good, very good,” Amanda said, echoing her own words in sign language. “Thursday learn fast. More next-day.”

  “‘Ore.” Thursday agreed. “Kood, ve-ey kood..”

  “Bye for now. Bye bye.” Amanda forced a smile and stood up. Thursday and Barbara both took her cue and rose from their chairs.

  “Dr. Marchando, could you stop back here after you see Thursday to her room?” Amanda asked. “There are a few things I’d like to ask you about.”

  Barbara nodded, her face betraying no emotion at all. Leading Thursday by the hand, she left the room. Amanda closed the door behind them and instantly scrabbled in her pocketbook for a cigarette. It was tough to find the time and place where it was socially acceptable to light up around the people she worked with back in Atlanta—and even more so with this crowd up in Washington. Amanda was a language specialist at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, on a road trip to work with this new-type primate, Thursday. Amanda liked to think of herself as a tough cookie, hard to rattle, but this crowd got her nervous. It was just as well they had gotten space at Saint E’s—they ought to be in a loony bin. She finally found the cigarettes and dug them out. She put it to her lips, flicked her lighter, and found she needed both hands to hold the lighter steady. Great. Now she had the shakes.

  Hell, the atmosphere around here was enough to drive anyone nuts. Amanda had sometimes worried that she and her fellow primatologists were playing God or Frankenstein with their apes—teaching them language, capriciously reshaping their behaviors just to see what would happen. But compared to what was going on here, the Yerkes crowd wasn’t involved in any issues at all. Amanda had arrived a week after Thursday made her debut. The pressure on these people—a lot of it self-imposed—was enormous. In the last few days maybe, just maybe, it was all starting to let up a little. Perhaps humanity was getting used to the idea of its new relations.

  Amanda considered herself in the newly replaced one-way mirror. Since Thursday clearly understood that the people on the other side could see her—she waved to them—Amanda couldn’t quite see why they had bothered to fix it. She took another look at herself and wondered why she had bothered herself. She glared at the mirror, cataloging her flaws. There was something wrong with the buttons on her white lab coat, and it kept falling open to reveal the baggy jeans and sweatshirt underneath. Her luxuriant red hair was once again escaping from the tight, professional-looking bun she was trying for. She had dispensed with makeup again today, and her pale face seemed a featureless blank under the unforgiving fluorescent lighting. And, of course, there were the usual ten or fifteen pounds that she could do without. Not what the teacher of a new race was supposed to look like, but what the hell.

  The door squeaked open behind her and Barbara came back in. “You wanted to talk, Amanda?” she asked, her voice flat and neutral. She looked bad, Amanda thought, worse every day. She had stopped losing weight, but she hadn’t gained any back, and she had stopped paying much attention to her appearance. Her clothes were often wrinkled, her hair was mussed, and she wasn’t worrying about makeup anymore. Amanda had never put much stock in such things, but she knew it was a bad sign when someone who thought they were important gave up on them.

  “Yeah, Barbara, I did.” Amanda hurriedly stubbed out her cigarette into the ashtray she carried around and sat down in one of rickety wooden chairs. “You’re the boss here, but your group brought me on board to do two things—to find out how significant Thursday’s language abilities were, and to teach her as much langua
ge as possible. When it’s time for language lessons, this is my shop—and you’re getting in the way, to put it bluntly. I am trying to teach Thursday a simplified American Sign Language, and you’re slowing the process down, simply by being here. I teach her a sign, she tries it and then she looks to you for approval. You don’t know ASL. You nod yes and tell her very good when she’s done it wrong—and she’s picked up a new bad habit to unlearn.”

  Barbara sat down facing Amanda and grabbed the seat of her chair on either side, as if she were afraid of being pulled off it. She twined her feet around each other and looked down at them for a long time. “But I need to learn it, too,” she said at last. “If Thursday can talk, I need to be able to talk to her.”

  “But you’re a—” Amanda stopped herself. She had been about to say her “you’re a person, a human being,” but there was no point in starting up that argument again. “You’re aware of what a language is,” she went on smoothly. “Thursday isn’t. As best I can tell, what she learned back with the Utaani was on the level of commands you’d teach a dog. ‘Come. Go. Fetch.’ More sophisticated than that, but not by much. She has to learn how much more language is capable of—which is something you already know. When you learn ASL, you’re just learning a new set of symbols that closely match up with what you already know. The ideas of grammar and syntax and word order are burned into your head already—and since ASL is patterned on English, you don’t have that many new rules to learn. Thursday has to start practically from scratch. Not just words, but the idea of words, the idea of abstractions. I can just show you the sign for ‘love’ or ‘justice’ or ‘danger,’ and you’d be all set. It might be months, or years, before Thursday has enough vocabulary to understand those concepts—if she ever does learn that much. I don’t know that she is capable of it.

  “But that’s another issue. You, and all the other workers here, could learn more, better, faster, by letting me hold a regular, daily, ASL class—a class designed for people who can hear and understand English. You’d be doing Thursday more good that way. She’d learn faster if she just had one teacher, and no one distracting her.”

  Barbara didn’t say anything.

  “A separate class. Is that okay?” Amanda asked, as gently as she could.

  Barbara nodded absently. “Yeah, sure. But can’t I stay here with her for her own classes with you?”

  Amanda sighed and found herself wishing for another cigarette. This was getting to be like the old days, back working in special education. “Barbara, I know what you want for Thursday. You want her free—you want to find some way for her to stop being a laboratory animal. You know she’s been a slave, a work animal, all her life. But you can’t teach her to be free and still walk around holding her hand every moment. You need to let go. Leave her in class with her teacher, and trust me.”

  Barbara shrugged, and seemed to relax a little. “Okay. I—I know, intellectually, that you’re right, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I brought her into all this, and I just feel so responsible for her.” She paused and then spoke quickly, as if she were afraid of the question she was asking. “Do you think she’s smart enough to learn?”

  Amanda cocked her head to one side for a moment. “Slippery question. Language—language is a window on the mind. There are cases of normal, even brilliant men and women, losing all ability to speak or communicate. They were still as smart as they ever were, but a stroke or accident had taken out the parts of the brain in charge of talking, reading, writing. And there are plenty of idiots out there who can talk, God knows. Thursday could be smarter, much smarter than we think, and yet not have the tools to tell us about it. She could be full of fascinating insights we’ll never hear about.”

  “Amanda, don’t get into philosophy,” Barbara said, her voice urgent. “Tell me straight, without the grey areas—how much can she learn? Is there any chance she can learn enough for meaningful communication?”

  “Christ. That takes me back.” Amanda stood up and started walking around the room. “Before I got into this line of work, I used to work teaching special ed—mentally disabled kids—except back then it was okay to call them retarded— deaf kids, bright kids with learning disabilities that meant they couldn’t ever read past the first-grade level. Kids who were brain-damaged in accidents, dying kids. And they all had mothers. Mothers who wanted to know, ‘How much can he learn? Will he ever have a normal life? Can he learn to dress himself and tie his shoes? If we keep trying will he start to remember . . .’ And, except for the parents who finally accepted the reality of their situations, none of them really wanted straight answers, would accept straight answers—or even hear the straight answers. They wanted hope. They wanted some tiny little shred of a possibility that Timmy might wake up tomorrow and be a normal, perfect kid.

  “And the way they got that from me, the way they forced me to give that hope, the way they forced me to give them the cruel, unfair, unrealistic hope they needed, was to find something unknowable. So, finally, I’d have to admit that yes, the tumor might respond to treatment, or yes, he might regain motor function, or yes, the hearing loss might be temporary. After all, they’d tell me, you don’t know what caused the problem, so how can you say it will never be cured?

  “And now you come in here like one of the saddest of those parents, and ask me that. And I know and you know that any answer I give you might be wrong, because I can’t know for certain. After all, we’re dealing with a whole new species here. How could I know?”

  The hell with it, Amanda thought. She pulled the cigarettes out of her purse and lit up. Filthy habit. “On the other hand. On the other hand. Besides my special-ed work, I’m fresh from Yerkes and all sorts of work on language ability on apes—real hands-on stuff, years of study and experience concerning language and learning among primates. And now I’ve had a month working with Thursday, enough to get a feel for the situation, enough for a reasonable assessment. And that assessment will in large part determine what kind of life Thursday will have, what kind of life she is capable of. Will she be a lab rat or a very rare and special kind of person? If she can demonstrate intelligent use of language, we have no right to treat her as an experimental subject. But if she can’t demonstrate that intelligence . . .” Amanda shrugged. “So do you want the tenth-of-a-percent hope, or the ninety-nine-and-nine-tenths truth?”

  Barbara shifted in her seat and didn’t speak.

  Amanda grinned. “Yeah. Loaded question. I wouldn’t answer it either. So I’ll tell you the truth anyway. She certainly understands a large number of spoken words, more than any other non-human could. She has some problems with retaining what she has learned, but that shows signs of getting better. I can’t say whether or not she’s got good enough vocal folds or a good enough larynx for forming speech. Her speech apparatus is certainly not like human-normal, but I’ve seen people who learned to talk with worse equipment. However, teaching her to use the vocal equipment she’s got is probably not worth the effort. Forming speech is an extremely complex process, and at best it might take her years of very slow progress to get much past where she is. She tries very hard to speak, yet it’s clearly difficult for her.

  “But if she doesn’t know how to use her voice, she does know how to use her hands. Simplified ASL is probably the best bet, because hand-signals should be simpler for her to learn. Unfortunately, she seems to have some sort of resistance to learning a signed language, and prefers spoken word-symbols—though that behavior might just be starting to break down. You may have missed it, but she didn’t try to vocalize ‘ball’ the last time she signed it today—which is the first time for that.

  “So there is hope that she can learn more words. But can she learn language, something that goes past learning responses and parroting them to get a hug or a treat? Rover the dog rolls over and plays dead in order to get a dog-bone. Does that make the roll-over-play-dead movement the doggish word for dog bone? Obviously not—though it took us years to realize that the chimps who learned to ask
for a cookie weren’t connecting the sign for ‘cookie’ with the object. Mostly, they had learned that the gesture would be rewarded—with a cookie. Just about all of their gestures could be linked to that kind of reward training or pain-avoidance. There’s good evidence that the chimpish language ability past that—chimps inventing words, for example—was really the human researcher imposing his interpretation on what the chimps were doing.

  “Can Thursday go past that? I don’t know. I can say for certain that she will never, never, never be as smart as you or I. She will never have a large vocabulary. She just doesn’t have a brain big enough to hold many words. She also doesn’t have the brain structure, the sophisticated language centers we have. In some ways she behaves like a patient with partial aphasia—partial speech loss. She reminds me of patients whose languages centers— Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and the smaller speech loci—have all been damaged somehow. Those patients can improve, but they can’t come all the way back.

  “Her brain isn’t really built for speech, for language. Can she overcome that? I don’t know. Can she get past asking for cookies? Can she express an idea? Someday, she might. Never as well or as clearly or as complexly as we do, but she might do it a little. I don’t know. I really don’t know. Maybe she can. And that’s an honest, fifty-fifty chance maybe, not a million-to-one shot.”

  Barbara smiled, for what looked like the first time in a long time. “I can’t ask better than that.”

  Amanda tried to smile back. But she could see that look, that tragic look of a parent who has found hope—pointless, unfair, unfounded and sustaining hope—in Barbara’s eyes.