There is controversy over how many meaningful and non-redundant words chimps can routinely put into a sentence. But there is no dispute that chimps (and bonobos) can manipulate hundreds of signs or ideograms taught to them by humans; and that they use these words to communicate their wishes. As we’ve discussed, the words can stand for objects, actions, people, other animals, or the chimp itself. There are common and proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Chimps and bonobos can request, and therefore are clearly thinking about, things or actions not now present—food, for example, or grooming. There is evidence that—like the Ameslan-literate Lucy and the lexigram-literate Kanzi—they can put words together in new combinations to make a novel kind of sense. Some of them invent and tend to abide by at least a few simple grammatical rules. They can label and categorize inanimate objects, animals, and people using not just the things themselves, but arbitrary words representing the things. They are capable of abstraction. They seem sometimes to use language and gesture to lie and deceive, and to reflect an elementary understanding of cause and effect. They can be self-reflexive, not just in action, as with their mirror images, but also in language, as when a chimp named Elizabeth was cutting an artificial apple with a knife and signed, in a special token language in which she was fluent, “Elizabeth apple cut.”
They know at best only about 10% the number of words in “basic English” or other minimal vocabularies adequate for everyday human life. This difference has been exaggerated—as by one distinguished linguist who argues that a finite number of human words can be combined to generate an “infinite” number of sentences, and an “infinite” number of communicable subjects, while chimps are stuck in their finitude.59 In fact, of course, the entire range of human words and ideas is, as for apes, resolutely finite. The laboratory linguistic accomplishments of chimps and bonobos are in addition to their own repertoire of signals—in gesture, sound, and smell—of which we understand, probably, very little. “The word,” the “use of signs” which Descartes denied to “brutes,” is plainly present in chimps and bonobos.
No ape has ever shown linguistic abilities approaching those of a normal child entering kindergarten. Nevertheless they seem to have a clear-cut, although elementary, ability to use language. Many of us would grant that a child of two or three who has a vocabulary and verbal dexterity comparable to that of the most accomplished chimps or bonobos—no matter how glaring their deficits in grammar and syntax—has language.60 It has been conventional wisdom in the social sciences that culture presupposes language and language presupposes a sense of self. Whether this is true or not, chimps and bonobos evidently have, at least in a rudimentary form, all three: consciousness, language, and culture. They may be much less repressed than we are and not as bright, but they, also, can think.
Most of us have a memory like this: You’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars! These powerful emotions are preverbal—as are much of our adult anticipations, passions, forebodings, and fears. Our feelings are present before they can be parsed into neat grammatical packages, to be dealt with and subdued. In those dimly remembered feelings and associations, we may glimpse something of the consciousness and emotional lives of chimps, bonobos and our immediate prehuman ancestors.
* Many of them would not have included the word “other,” and even today there are those who bristle at being called—even by scientists speaking generically and without affect—“animals.”* On July 14, 1858, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to Karl Marx: “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond economic forms of the animal world.”* For example, water buffalo in Southeast Asia, which are routinely castrated by crushing their testicles between two rocks.32* Watching themselves in the mirror wearing hats is also a wildly popular and apparently gripping experience.
Chapter 20
THE ANIMAL WITHIN
[T]he human brain is an imperfect instrument
built up through long geological periods. Some
of its levels of operation are more primitive and
archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has
learned, may contain weird and irrational
shadows out of the subhuman past—shadows
that under stress can sometimes elongate
and fall darkly across the threshold of our
rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the
eighteenth century in the enlightening power of
pure reason, for he has come to know that he is
not a consistently reasoning animal. We have
frightened ourselves with our own black nature
and instead of thinking “We are men now, not
beasts, and must live like men,” we have eyed
each other with wary suspicion and whispered
in our hearts, “We will trust no one. Man is
evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the
dark wood and the caves.”
LOREN EISELEY
Darwin’s Century1
We have now brought our story—our fragmentary effort to reconstruct some of the entries in the orphan’s file, to cast a little light into the shadows—to the threshold of the appearance of humans on Earth. It is time to take stock.
Many of the protective ditches, moats, and minefields painstakingly dug to separate us from the other animals have now been bridged or flanked. Those driven to preserve for us some unique, unambiguous, defining characteristic are tempted to shift the definitions once again and erect a final line of defense around our thoughts. If chimpanzee and bonobo language is limited, we cannot tell much about what they think or feel, what meaning, if any, they give to their lives. They have authored, at least so far, no autobiographies, reflective essays, confessions, self-analyses, or philosophical memoirs. If we can choose particular ideas and feelings to define ourselves, no chimp can contradict us. For example, we might point to our knowledge that all of us will someday die, or that sex is the cause of babies—matters widely understood among humans, although sometimes denied. Perhaps no ape has ever glimpsed these important truths. Perhaps some have. We do not know.2 But standing alone on such homiletic pinnacles is a hollow victory for the human species. These occasional insights are minor matters compared to the vaunted distinctions of humanity that have crumbled into dust as we have learned more about the other animals. At so fine a level of detail, the motives of those who would define us by this or that idea seem suspect, the human chauvinism manifest.