by Emma Byrne
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* It takes all sorts, I suppose.
† All names here are pseudonyms.
‡ Considering how many of these it is possible to commit while being English, it’s a wonder we don’t have a word of our own.
§ The companies as well as the individuals have pseudonyms.
* * * * 5 * *
“You damn dirty ape.”
(Other) Primates that Swear
When did swearing begin? Were swear words part of our first vocabulary or was bad language a later invention, an expansion pack to this ability called language? Sadly, we can’t go back to observe our early ancestors to see how swearing developed. Prehistoric cultures don’t leave written records and, by the time writing comes along, swearing always seems to be well established already.
It’s my hypothesis that swearing started early, that it was one of the things that motivated us to develop language in the first place. In fact, I don’t think we would have made it as the world’s most populous primate if we hadn’t learned to swear. As we’ve seen, swearing helps us deal better with our pain and frustration, it helps to build tighter social groups, and it’s a good sign that we might be about to snap, which means that it forestalls violence. Without swearing, we’d have to resort to the biting, gouging, and shit flinging that our other primate cousins use to keep their societies in check.
If we can’t observe the development of swearing directly, what we need is a society with brains and social structures somewhat like our own, but that are only just beginning to use language. Thankfully, at least one example does exist, in the shape of the chimpanzees who have been taught to use sign language over the years.
Professor Roger Fouts, founder of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Washington state, has spent his career adopting chimpanzees and studying their behavior. He taught an extended family of chimpanzees to use sign language, and watched as they passed that language on to their children in turn.
It was this extended family of apes that first convinced me that chimpanzees can do more than simply communicate; they spontaneously learned to swear. These apes were taught language (and toilet trained) by Professor Fouts. In the process of picking up both language and taboos about bodily functions, the sign they used for excreta took on a special power. Like the human swear word “shit,” the sign DIRTY and the idea it conveyed became taboo. At the same time, DIRTY became a sign that the chimpanzees used emotionally and figuratively, also like the way you or I might use “shit.” If Roger made them angry they would call him “Dirty Roger,” the way we might say, “Roger, you shit.” Unlike their wild cousins, these chimpanzees would throw the notion of excrement instead of throwing the stuff itself.
But it can be hard to convince people that chimpanzees can communicate with humans, let alone swear. And that’s partly because of one of the most famous chimpanzee experiments of all time.
Project Nim
When people think of chimpanzees who have learned sign language, they tend to think of Nim Chimpsky. He’s largely famous because of the 2011 film based on his experience, and in his short life he was much publicized by Herbert Terrace at Columbia University, the scientist who studied him. Project Nim was designed to be as rigorous, as clinical, and as measured as possible, which might well have been its downfall.
Behaviorism took psychiatry out of the wishy-washy world of Freud and Jung and put it on the same modern, abstract, quantitatively sound lines as physics or chemistry. When Terrace designed Project Nim in 1974 he was determined that the entire experiment would be a clean break from the unstructured chimpanzee fostering experiments that had been taking place for almost a hundred years by that point.
The advantage of these sorts of experiments was obvious: with a stopwatch and a clipboard and an endless supply of both rats and patience, it’s possible to keep measuring performance. The conditions (and the rats) could be varied systematically by adding an extra turn in the maze here or an extra electric shock there. Research teams could look at particular variables—the size of reward, for example, or the age of the rat—and draw clear, statistically valid conclusions about the effect of each individual variable on how easily the task can be learned.
To be fair, some of those historical experiments had been pretty naive, treating chimpanzees like hairy human babies. This all began in the 1880s when George Romanes, a naturalist working at London Zoo, noticed the close relationship between one of the zoo’s chimps and her keeper. The chimpanzee was able to follow quite detailed instructions from her keeper and, Romanes wrote, “she resembles a child shortly before it begins to talk.”1
This claim—that chimpanzees and humans weren’t so different after all—outraged many. The very notion seemed to back up Darwin’s claim that humans are just one member of a diverse family of species, rather than being somehow special among all living things. Nevertheless, in the 1920s, psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkes fostered Chim and Panzee. He worked for months to get them to talk before finally admitting defeat. Chimpanzees’ brains might be sophisticated enough for communication but they just don’t have the same vocal apparatus as we do.2 “Perhaps they can be taught to use their fingers, somewhat as does the deaf and dumb person,” he eventually concluded.
Many scientists stressed the importance of a humanlike environment if chimpanzees were to learn that most human of skills, language. In the 1930s, in a rather daring experiment, married couple Winthrop and Luella Kellogg decided to raise a chimpanzee called Gua in their New York home as if she were a child. “If [a chimpanzee] is led about by means of a collar and chain, or if it is fed from a plate upon the floor, then these things must surely develop responses which are different from those of a human. A child itself, if similarly treated, would most certainly acquire some genuinely unchildlike reactions,” they wrote.3 They brought Gua home when she was seven months old and their firstborn child, Donald, was just ten months old. Sadly the experiment was curtailed after just nine months, when little Donald started imitating Gua as much as Gua imitated him.
That all changed with Project Nim. Herbert Terrace was determined to be far more rigorous than these cosy “chimp in the family” experiments. There would be no treating an ape like a baby in his lab; in Project Nim the researchers weren’t allowed to treat their charge like a child, or even to comfort him if he cried out at night. Nim was an abstract behavioral subject, to be treated with as much detachment as a rat in a maze. Terrace wanted to quantify exactly how much reward would be required to teach a chimpanzee grammar. The experiment didn’t lead to elaborate sentence structures or an understanding of tenses. Instead, it mainly led to a tragically maladjusted chimpanzee who had been taken from his own kind, but never made to feel part of the human world.
All of Nim’s learning was carried out through a rather cold and formal process of demonstrating a sign to be copied and rewarding him only if he got the correct answer—that is, if he repeated the sign exactly. It was behaviorism at its most measured, and absolutely nothing like the way in which humans learn to communicate. There was no intrinsic reward for signing, no joy of communication. Nim had over sixty teachers who came and went fairly rapidly as well as around 150 other people who spent just a single session with him. Some of these people did at least try to make conversation, but most of them just grilled Nim with questions like WHAT THAT? WHO THIS?4
Imagine trying to teach a child to communicate in this way: offering a treat for saying a word correctly but ignoring them otherwise. Unsurprisingly, Nim didn’t learn to do much except repeat signs for treats. Unlike Roger Fouts’s adopted chimpanzees, Nim never learned to talk about his life or the important things around him: he was rarely given the chance to have a real conversation.
Terrace noticed that Nim would grab for a treat after he’d performed a sign, even if the sign was halfhearted or badly executed. Offering treats for signs is as behaviorist as it gets: stimulus goes in, response comes out. But that isn’t the way that children lea
rn. Instead, they witness communication that goes on around them and includes them. Herbert Terrace believed that Nim’s behavior showed how unlike a child he was, when actually it’s a pretty good sign of how smart—and how humanlike—chimpanzee behavior is.
Had Herbert Terrace focused more on social psychology and personality studies—something that probably seemed hopelessly soft to a man of his hard behaviorist credentials —he might have considered that human children really do behave in the same lazy and halfhearted way as Nim, just as soon as treats enter the equation. Not because they’re stupid, but because they have a surprisingly smart appreciation of basic economics. Give most children crayons and paper and they’ll happily draw for the fun of it; the intrinsic reward of doing something creative keeps them happy and interested. But as soon as you pay children for their art, their drawings get sloppy and less detailed. They also don’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing anywhere near as much when they are offered a treat in return for each piece produced. In studies, children who know they will be rewarded for their drawings spend only about half as much time playing with crayons as those children who aren’t offered a reward.5
In fact, the exact same behavior had already been observed in the 1960s with chimpanzees in the wild. Desmond Morris, a man with “surrealist painter” and “children’s author” alongside “world-renowned zoologist” on his CV, observed that wild chimpanzees stopped drawing for its own sake as soon as they learned that drawings earned treats. Those drawings that they could be persuaded to produce were made with less time, care, and attention. “Any old scribble would do and then it would immediately hold out its hand for a reward. The careful attention the animal had paid previously to design, rhythm, balance and composition was gone and the worst kind of commercial art was born.”6 But Morris, with his eclectic career and his messy and naturalistic observations of chimpanzees in the wild, was definitely not of the rigorous, “objective,” behaviorist school and his ideas never made it into the design of Project Nim.
That’s a tragedy, both for us and for Nim. Nim’s life was definitely one of a research animal rather than a member of a society, let alone a family. Terrace’s experiments were designed the way they were with good intentions: if you’re going to capture and train a wild animal, then the data you collect should at least be indisputable, right? But Nim never got the chance to be himself, and we never really did learn what he might have been capable of.
Living with Humans: Project Washoe
Lab trials like Project Nim might be rigorous, but they’re also limited. Even if there were no ethical concerns about keeping a conscious and self-aware creature in such spartan conditions, counting stimulus-response pairs can never answer the most interesting questions: Are chimpanzees like us? Can they communicate? What do they think about? If we want to know how chimpanzees fare in humanlike tasks, it’s necessary to give them as humanlike an upbringing as possible. Chimpanzees that are raised in cages, with little stimulation and no social structure, are never going to learn to communicate. What the hell would be the incentive, when making signs gets you treats but trying to have a conversation gets you nowhere?
What’s worse is that these lab environments harm chimpanzee intelligence. We now know that chimpanzees raised in sterile laboratory conditions actually begin to lose intelligence over time. Younger chimpanzees who have only recently been captured from the wild tend to outperform their older fellows. Without a rich and varied environment, the rich and varied intelligence of chimpanzees withers and fades.
With this in mind, Beatrix and Allen Gardner, researchers at the University of Nevada, decided to run an intensive and detailed study of the kind that Robert Yerkes and the Kelloggs had first attempted. They gave over the yard of their home to a succession of young chimpanzees who experienced something like a suburban American family life. The Gardners’ first fosterling, Washoe, was captured at around ten months old in Africa and arrived at the Gardners’ home in summer 1966. She was given a trailer of her own in the back of the Gardner’s one-story faculty house in suburban Reno and over the next four years she learned to drink from a cup, eat with a knife and fork, dress and undress herself, and use the toilet.7 She also liked to play with dolls, bathing them and feeding them, and learned to be pretty handy with screwdrivers and hammers. Washoe wasn’t a pet; she was raised as much like a child as possible at all times.
The Gardners then fostered four newborn chimpanzees, Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar, between 1972 and 1976 and taught them in the same way they had taught Washoe: the same way you or I would teach a child. They called the chimpanzees’ attention to things around them—dogs, people, food, toys—and showed them the signs. The Gardners and their team of “nannies”—research assistants on the project—asked the baby chimpanzees questions and responded to their requests. In short, they “taught” language by having lots of conversations.
But behaviorism hadn’t gone away. One of the country’s leading behaviorists, B. F. Skinner himself, criticized the Gardners’ approach as being too woolly. After seeing a documentary about the project in 1974 that showed the research assistants acting as friends and caregivers to the cross-fostered chimpanzees, Skinner felt moved to write to the couple to tell them just where they were going wrong: “I was quite unhappy about your new recruits—the young people working with the new chimps. They were not arranging effective contingencies of reinforcement. Indeed they were treating the subjects very much like spoiled children. A first course in behavior modification might save a good deal of time and lead more directly to results.”
But of course, treating the chimpanzees like humans was exactly the point of the Gardners’ research. Human offspring were the only primates known to learn language, so the same learning methods should be used to teach language to a chimp. “Effective contingencies of reinforcement” have nothing to do with babies’ first words! Human children learn to talk because it’s the way our families and our societies work. And human children learn to swear because, in human society, we experience conflict and friction. Chimpanzee society is also rife with conflict and friction and—as soon as they obtain the gift of language—chimpanzees spontaneously invent swearing.
Why Teach Chimpanzees to Sign?
The “why chimps?” part of this question has a simple answer. The similarities between them and us are remarkable, especially when it comes to their ability to learn.
Chimpanzees are surprisingly close cousins of ours. The evolutionary record shows that they are more closely related to us than they are to either gorillas or orangutans.8 They are also similar to humans in that they have a long childhood. Most animals are born with almost all the behaviors they need in order to survive—we call these “precocial” species—but chimpanzees and humans are both “altricial,” which means that we spend a very large proportion of our lives totally dependent on adults before we are able to survive on our own. This might not seem like a huge advantage, especially not from the point of view of a helpless infant, but a lengthy childhood is one of the reasons why chimpanzees and humans have such adaptable intelligences.
Whatever environment, whatever challenges we happen to be born into, we learn from those around us. This makes both humans and chimpanzees capable of assimilating new information for many years. We do this most rapidly in childhood, but both humans and chimpanzees continue to learn throughout their lives—which for chimpanzees can be as long as sixty years in captivity, or forty in the wild. A helpless childhood is a small price to pay for a lifetime of learning.
But if chimpanzees are so similar to us, why did the Gardners teach them to sign rather than speak? That’s because—as Robert Yerkes suspected—they’re physically unable to copy our way of talking. Despite their ability to vocalize, chimpanzees just aren’t equipped to make the same range of sounds that we use in speech. Chimpanzees have a thin tongue and high larynx, making it hard to make human sounds. What’s more, chimpanzees aren’t particularly vocal in the wild. According to Roger Fouts, who founded Proje
ct Washoe, chimpanzees are keen to imitate our actions but show very little interest in the sounds we make.9 They save vocalization for purely emotional signals instead.
In the wild they make very little noise at all, and use gesture to communicate. According to Allen Gardner, “Chimpanzees are silent most of the time. A group of ten wild chimpanzees of assorted ages and sexes feeding peacefully in a fig tree makes so little sound that an inexperienced observer passing below can fail to detect them.”10
The image we have of chimpanzees chattering to each other, which comes from films and TV shows, is nothing more than Hollywood mythmaking. In fact, the sounds we think of as chimpanzee talk are, in reality, miserable distress calls, usually recorded off-screen while some unfortunate production assistant harasses the even more unfortunate ape. According to Allen Gardner, anyone familiar with real chimpanzee vocalizations finds listening to these sounds as disturbing and distressing as hearing human cries for help: “It is easy to imagine the unpleasant scenes that evoked these high-pitched, nattering cries,” he says.11
Primatologists know that chimpanzees vocalize only when they’re in a state of extreme emotion—they make pant-grunts and pant-barks when threatened, and screams or whimpers when frightened or distressed. Allen and Beatrix Gardner wanted to understand when the chimpanzees in their care would use vocalizations and when they would stick to signing, so they ran an experiment. They would tell the chimpanzees Tatu and Dar about things that were exciting (such as going out or being given ice cream) or upsetting (like having a favorite toy taken away). They noticed something surprisingly human: when the emotional event being talked about was a long time away in either the future or the past, Tatu and Dar would sign with the humans around them. However, when the event was actually taking place they would use emotional cries.12 Think of a human analogy—imagine watching a soccer match. Your team comes close to scoring and you cheer. The ball is deflected by the goalie and you groan. But when you talk about these things afterward, you might swear and rant and rave but we tend to use our words rather than our cries to talk about the game’s events.
