Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind

282 Pages·1994·2.84 MB·English

by  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

KANZI
KANZI
The Ape at the Brink
of the Human Mind
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Roger Lewin
This text is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 1994 by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the
1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for
permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter
covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional
services. If legal, accounting, medical, psychological, or any other expert assistance is required, the services
of a competent professional person should be sought.
Photographs on pp. 62, 141, and 182 © Language Research Center, Georgia State University Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. Sue.
Kanzi : the ape at the brink of the human mind / Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-471-58591-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-471-15959-X (paper) 1. Kanzi (Bonobo) 2. Bonobo—Psychology.
3. Chimpanzees—Psychology. 4. Learning in animals. 5. Animal communication.
I. Lewin, Roger. II. Title.
QL737.P96S26 1994
599.88’440451—dc20
94-9038
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is dedicated to my mother and father, who gave their entire lives
selflessly to their seven children, with never a thought that any parent might do
otherwise. They worried over us, they prayed for us, and they tried tirelessly to
set the best example they knew how, too often feeling they had fallen short.
My father taught me to value life and honesty and always to give my best to
both. My mother taught me that the qualities of grace and kindness may not
come easily, but they must constantly be sought, for they form the nexus of all
relationships.
When I first began to study apes, they wondered why. When I first was bitten,
they asked why. I hope that now—they will know why.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 On a Beach in Portugal
2 The Meaning of Words
3 Talking to Each Other
4 An Uncommon Ape
5 First Glimpse
6 Inside Kanzi’s Mind
7 Childside
8 Pan, the Tool-Maker
9 The Origin of Language
10 At the Brink of the Human Mind
References
Index
Preface
This book really began the day the first joint of my right index finger was
severed by an ape I didn’t even see. Up from the bowels of a dimly lit cage she
raged and parted me from the first joint of my finger. Was she angry at me? She
didn’t even know me, nor I her. I had just come to the Oklahoma “Chimp Farm”
to learn about the signing apes, the ones that were supposed to talk to you with
their hands. Little did I know that most adult chimps living in social groups are
not kindly disposed to strangers, viewing them as something of a threat to be
dealt with immediately. This was long before Jane Goodall had learned that apes
kill members of other groups in the wild.
I had begun to study apes only a few months before this bite, but already,
within three days of meeting them, I knew that the rest of my life would be spent
studying apes. So like us they are, and yet so distinctly different in some ways. It
had not taken long to see that human beings could learn a great deal about
themselves and the kinds of creatures they might once have been, by studying
apes. How much of the ape was left within us and how much of what we had
become resulted from the complex society we had managed to build? I was
fascinated with this question and knew that many of the keys to its answer lay
hidden within these animals. It never occurred to me to stop studying them
because I was bitten, either then or on the many occasions that followed. Each
time I learned more about what can prompt aggression and grew grateful for the
insights, if not for the injuries.
With something of a passion, I set about to find out how apes become apes.
Does it just happen naturally or do they need to be taught how the world works
just as human children need to be taught? This book is about one ape out of the
eleven that I have studied. This ape, a bonobo named Kanzi, began to learn
language on his own, without drills or lessons.
The collaboration that resulted in the telling of Kanzi’s story began late one
afternoon with a phone call from Roger Lewin, not long after Roger had come to
the Language Research Center to see Kanzi for himself. Roger greatly enjoyed
his visit, but I was feeling discouraged because in response to everything I had
asked Kanzi to do, he either refused, appeared to have no clue as to what I was
asking, or did exactly the opposite to what I had asked. Kanzi didn’t really like
being watched by strangers. When people came to “see Kanzi for themselves,”
he often tried to determine what sort of a reaction he could get from them by
startling them at unsuspecting moments. Kanzi does not like strangers in his
space because he cannot understand why they want to come and stare at him. I
knew that Roger was thinking of writing a report on the work at the Language
Research Center for the New Scientist, and given Kanzi’s lackluster
demonstration, I feared the headline might read, “Brilliant Ape Experiences
Memory Lapse.”
Having one’s scientific findings painstakingly collected over decades thrown
into question by the “attitude” of an ape toward visitors has been something that
I have had to accept as a consequence of daring to study what is called “ape
language.” Actually, I never intended to study “ape language” at all. I started out
in the late 1960s as a “behaviorist” hoping to discover “principles whereby
behavior could be controlled” but came to conclude that “control” was not only
an elusive goal, but a dehumanizing one as well. I shifted my focus to attempting
to understand the development of the mind in very young children, as it seemed
that if this were elucidated, perhaps our society could use such knowledge to
build better individuals from the start.
Sometimes the problems of our society are blamed on poverty, other times
they are blamed on lack of crime control, and on other occasions they are said to
arise from lack of tolerance. We do not yet understand why one individual born
into an unstable, lower socio-economic family becomes a president and another
becomes a criminal. Is it really just “bad genes”? Or could there be experiences
that would enable any child to reach inside himself or herself and pull out the
best instead of the worst, as both come packed into each human being?
It is not possible to rear human children experimentally in such a way as to
look for answers to this question. Nor can one “watch and see” as children are
raised. Twenty to forty years are required to follow children from birth to
adulthood. Even when psychologists are prepared to put their careers on hold for
this length of time and even if they are able to obtain money for such work, they
cannot really watch what happens inside the family. They find themselves
limited to interviewing people briefly, giving “standardized assessment tests,”
and perhaps videotaping some standardized interactions. But since we don’t
really know why one person succeeds and another does not, we don’t know what
to “test for.” Our tests measure what is easy to measure, whether or not it is
relevant, and at the end of such studies, we are still left only with
“measurements.” We must search to correlate these in a quest to determine
which “variables” are related to success, assuming that the recipe for making a
person may lie, for example, in the degree of correlation between income and
maternal time in the home.
No one in modern societies watches what happens as kids grow up except
their parents, and often they do not. In apes, as in “primitive” societies, everyone
watches the kids grow up; indeed, everyone is responsible for everyone else.
Over the past two decades I have had the opportunity to watch some apes
grow up—apes of different species and very different backgrounds. One thing
stands out among a panoply of events: Rearing experiences make a difference.
Exposure to people and language does not turn an ape into a human being, but it
does result in an ape that can remove itself much further from the exigencies of
the moment and reflect in greater depth on the possible consequences of its
potential various actions. Such an ape can also understand the intentions of
others as expressed through language, though the nonlinguistic expression of
intent must match the linguistic one or the words will be ignored.
The first two years of an ape’s life are something of a magical time. During
this period, if exposed to brightly colored geometric symbols, apes learn to tell
them apart as easily as if they were looking at different kinds of food. If exposed
to human speech, they become responsive to the phonemes and the morphemes
so that spoken language no longer sounds like a string of noises. If they watch
television, they come to see the patterns on the screen as representations of other
people and other apes in different places, rather than just flickering images. A
sense of imagination and narrative begins to emerge, so that they become as
interested in “TV” stories to which they can relate as are human children. They
grow interested because they can “make sense” out of what they see and out of
many of the words they hear. They especially like to watch interactions—
interactions between apes as well as interactions between apes and humans.
Themes of danger and danger resolved rivet their attention.
When they do not have these experiences, they encounter great difficulty in
distinguishing different geometric symbols, in telling sounds from words, and in
following an imaginative narrative depicted on a television screen. Often, even
extensive training attempts cannot compensate for the lack of such early
exposure.
What do observations such as these, and apes like Kanzi, tell us about
ourselves, our society, and the early experiences of our own children? The