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from the don't-talk-to-us-you-d@mn-dirty-ape dept.
Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech.
In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko has spent more than 40 years living immersed with humans -- interacting for many hours each day with psychologist Penny Patterson and biologist Ron Cohn.
"I went there with the idea of studying Koko's gestures, but as I got into watching videos of her, I saw her performing all these amazing vocal behaviors," says Perlman, now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology Professor Gary Lupyan.
The vocal and breathing behaviors Koko had developed were not necessarily supposed to be possible.
The role of language in intelligence and the evolution of consciousness is fascinating. It's profound that apes can begin to learn it within the right social context. Still, humans do it quite innately.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @02:07AM
This PBS documentary [pbs.org] about an orangutan who spent 8 years at a college in Chattanooga is heart breaking. He developed amazing language skills, and the end result was that he was neither human nor orangutan any more. He referred to other orangutans as "orange dogs" because he couldn't communicate with them. But because we humans didn't know what to do with him, he ended up in a zoo where 99% of the time he has no one to communicate with.
A short summary of the video is here, [timesfreepress.com] but the entire show is worth watching. It's a little bit like a real-life flowers for algernon.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @02:28AM
College is like that for humans too, you see, because unskilled jobs require degrees, the vast majority of college students only care about money. Those who go to college to learn something will find themselves surrounded by human dogs who are not worth communicating with for any reason whatsoever.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @02:57AM
Hey, I saw a movie like that [wikimedia.org] too!
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Sunday August 16 2015, @05:41AM
Wow, reading that summery, it sounds so much like the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie, enough that one might think that they based the movie in part around this story, maybe even the character of Maurice who was also an orangutan that could use sign language, except of course that this documentary came out after that movie. Still, it's eerie. And yes moving.
Couldn't watch it online though. Something about me living in the wrong place. >:(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @09:35AM
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anonymox/ [mozilla.org]
Try this - you can be anywhere you want :)
(Score: 2) by TGV on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:29AM
If he couldn't communicate with them, that settles the question: apes do not have a language.
For the rest: Koko's linguistic skills are almost absent. So now she can make noises. But making noises to signal intent is not enough to speak a language. Apes are intelligent, no doubt. With enough training, they should be able to figure out how to communicate bits of information. The channel (speech, gesture) is not important. Apes just don't have our linguistic capabilities.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 16 2015, @04:54PM
That's a pretty small minded comment. What would you do if dumped in the middle of a country where you did not speak the language? You would gesture and make noises to try to get your point across, which will work for extremely simple things like asking for food or water or an object or something like that, but try to express even a simple idea like "tomorrow I want to have french toast" and forget it, you're screwed. What this shows is that by being separated from other orangutans, he didn't learn their language, much like how you being separated from humans in Myanmar means you didn't learn that language. Is orangatan language as rich and complicated as human language? Of course not, and also: so what? This attitude is why we will inflict massive suffering on other beings and feel smuggly satisfied while doing it.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Sunday August 16 2015, @05:29PM
If a human were dropped in Myanmar, (s)he could pick up the words for water and food within a day. There have been so many examples of people acquiring other languages without training. If an orangutan cannot communicate with others of his species, it's because they don't have a language.
However ... the assumption (that it's communication) itself is ridiculous. It's much more likely that Chantek (who, by the way, does live with others of his species, according to Wikipedia) saw himself different because he was taken away during an essential part of his youth.
> Is orangatan language as rich and complicated as human language? Of course not, and also: so what?
So what, indeed.
> This attitude is why we will inflict massive suffering on other beings and feel smuggly satisfied while doing it.
I draw the logical conclusion that apes don't have a language (from a probably false premise) and you accuse me of inflicting massive suffering and being smug? That's rather flippant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 16 2015, @09:44PM
What I find flippant is the notion that humans have the right to inflict massive suffering on other species because we are superior to them based on the fact that we are smarter than most. Yet we can't fly. We are slow. No built in cutting tools ... and so on. Yes we can apply technology to achieve most of those things but in a bare-handed cage match between a grizzly and a human, who comes out on top? Human superiority is situational and contingent on access to technology -- the vast majority of which none of us could recreate if we suddenly found ourselves naked in the tundra, desert, or even a nice verdant forest.
Considering this, it takes a lot of hubris to label ourselves as superior, but then, humans seem pretty deft at doing just that. We basically act like colonialists whose greater technology allowed them to systematically destroy and/or subjugate those who were "beneath" them, profit mightily, and feel ever so much more important, advanced, superior, and benevolent. We were bringing cilization to the savages after all, what's a little slavery/oppression/genocide between friends? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden [wikipedia.org] The exact same attitudes of the colonial age permeate our treatment of animals. I see that as human inferiority.
Are you saying animals do not communicate? Wolves don't share information? Orcas don't organize their hunts based on communication? Little peabrained birds don't find each other by communicating basic location data ("chirp, here I am")? The range of coummicative topics varies greatly between species, but to say that species don't communicate is just willful blindness. Seriously, if that's your position, we might as well just quit.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Monday August 17 2015, @08:15AM
Learn to read before you start using $10 words.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @11:57AM
Aspie fail.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 16 2015, @09:02AM
"flowers for algernon"
I thought that was pretty stupid - until I watched the video. Yeah, it's pretty appropriate. We showed him that there is a great big, exciting world out there, then we locked him in a little bitty cage for years, then finally moved him to a somewhat larger cage. Note that if he had free run of the zoo, it would still be dinky little cage, to any of us, or to him.