Fuelled by a passion to discover how chimpanzees and gorillas communicate with
each other under natural conditions, an American sets out for West Africa.
He takes with him knowledge gleaned from experiments on monkeys at zoos in
New York and Washington, and research funds begged from private donors. His
plan is audacious: to settle himself and his cutting-edge recording
equipment inside a seven-foot metal cage, which is to be erected in the
middle of a forest. From that vantage point, he will record the apes’ vocal
calls as they go about their daily lives, in order to show that humans’ near
relatives have a language. When the research period concludes, the man
emerges from the forest. Back in the United States, a literary agent
succeeds in whipping the international press into a frenzy of interest, and
the traveller writes and speaks widely about his adventure. But scientific
scandal follows on the heels of fame. Questions emerge about whether the
ape-observer carried out the research plan he had vowed to conduct; a highly
visible and international public debate ensues.
That this tale sounds so very modern, with its evident foundation in
evolutionary thinking and its whiff of media-based sensationalism, is key to
Gregory Radick’s The Simian Tongue. Yet the ape-watcher was Richard Garner;
the tools of his trade were the camera and phonograph; and the time was the
early 1890s. The chronological parallel only goes so far. A product of his
time, Garner placed non-human primates on the lower rung of a hierarchy that
would lead up through “the lowest specimens of the human race . . . the
pygmies, the Bushmen” to “the Caucasian race”.
Born in small-town Virginia in 1848, Garner came of age reading Charles
Darwin. He vowed to uncover continuities in the “speech” of humans and other
primates, and thus out-Darwin Darwin: “Garner was not concerned so much to
explain the origins of language”, writes Radick, “as to show that language
had no origins, that language existed in higher and lower forms at all
points on the scale of nature”.
In his zoo work, Garner invented what we would today call the primate playback
experiment. From this starting point, Radick connects key events across
ninety years’ study of primate communication. He notes in the preface the
dozen years it took to bring the book to fruition. His effort pays off
handsomely; the ten-chapter narrative is a masterwork in the history of
science, flawed only in its final chapter.
Garner’s colourful figure enlivens the book. Using Thomas Edison’s new
invention, the phonograph, Garner recorded the vocalizations of zoo monkeys,
then played back the calls and observed the monkeys’ responses to them.
Through this innovative procedure, he deciphered, he believed, the words
used by capuchin monkeys for food, drink, sickness, storm, and alarm.
Garner vowed publicly to bring a phonograph with him to Africa as well, and
even announced that Edison himself was modifying the device for expedition
purposes. “The phonograph was at the heart of the enterprise”, notes Radick.
With it, Garner would not only learn the apes’ language, he would also
“record and analyze the tongues of the [African] tribesmen, and compare
these with each other and the ape tongues”. None of this plan transpired.
Garner failed to round up enough funds to purchase the phonograph at the
prices insisted on by Edison’s business partners in Britain. Writing in the
New York Times on the eve of his departure, Garner decried the “avarice” of
“a few men” that “makes science hide her head in shame, while they strangle
her babes and cut off her posterity”.
Once in the field, Garner dispatched reports of his progress, understandably
making no mention of a phonograph. Nonetheless, the non-existent phonograph
lived on in the media, as when the New York Times reported that Garner had
recorded ape calls during his time in the cage. “It is unclear”, Radick
notes, “whether Garner misled journalists about having had a phonograph on
his expedition, or whether the error of a careless journalist on the scene
then became embedded in the story.”
From here the plot thickens and tangles. The English journalist and politician
Henry Labouchere (“best remembered”, Radick says, “as a Victorian agitator
for the abolition of the House of Lords”) became obsessed with what he
considered to be Garner's tendency towards deception. Through his
best-selling rag, Truth, and citing apparent discrepancies in Garner’s
various speaking and writing engagements, Labouchere pressed for a full
accounting of Garner’s time in Africa. But the “blackest villain in Garner’s
tale”, as Radick puts it, was not Labouchere but a priest named Joachim
Buleon. Buleon travelled with Garner into the bush; when Garner fell
seriously ill, Buleon offered no help but only hindrance, even trying to
leave the ailing researcher and push on with the journey. Garner later
referred to Buleon as a “trickster and traitor” who tried to scuttle the ape
research because it, Buleon believed, went against the teachings of
religion.
These events, in Radick’s telling, at times spill over from the entangled to
the confused. What seems clear is that Buleon was not only loud about his
disdain for Garner’s work but also happy enough to charge him publicly with
fraud, for example with spending a mere three days doing research in the
forest cage. His words incited others who, in turn, fed ideas about Garner
back to Labouchere, the most vocal critic of all.
Radick, on the whole, exonerates Garner. That Garner spent a mere three days
in the cage is “surely false”, judging from historical sources, and on most
points Radick seems to find Garner’s accounts “persuasive”. What fascinates
Radick is not so much what did or did not happen in Africa. He focuses
instead on why, once Garner faded from the limelight, the playback technique
was virtually lost to science, and how and why it re-emerged to blaze a new
path of scientific investigation in around 1980.
This re-emergence is mainly due to the work of the British
ornithologist-turned-primatologist Peter Marler. After an early focus on the
songs of white-crowned sparrows, Marler became intrigued by the
communication of non-human primates. In the late 1970s, against a backdrop
of animal studies beginning to dabble in call-recording and playback, he
sent two post-doctoral students, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, to
Amboseli, in Kenya, to study the social behaviour of vervet monkeys and to
tape alarm calls given by these small green monkeys when they spied a
predator. Playback of the alarm calls could provide some interesting data,
Marler thought.
The Amboseli vervets made scientific history. When the vervets heard a
played-back call originally uttered in the presence of an eagle, they fled
into the bushes. For leopard and snake calls, they responded in distinct but
similarly adaptive ways. Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler proved that the calls
contained not just high-arousal cues but specific information about the
environment. Here was evidence that monkeys living under natural conditions
could communicate in sophisticated, even potentially wordlike, ways. When
the technical paper outlining the experimental results was published in
1980, it made headlines and ushered in a new era of playback-experiment
research.
Radick enfolds scientific results such as these, and debates that sprang up
around them, in a rich history of anthropology, ethology and comparative
psychology. He analyses nine decades’ worth of journal articles, popular
books, newspaper accounts, personal letters and revelations from his own
interviewing of key living figures; in parts, The Simian Tongue reaches the
status of a page-turner. For this veteran of a year’s research with Amboseli
monkeys, almost all of the book’s second half was crack-shot accurate and
absorbing.
Too thin by far, however, the book’s concluding chapter goes wrong. Radick
ventures his ideas only briefly and tentatively. He sets up the chapter by
linking the playback experiment to the “disintegrating ape language
projects”, by which he means the sign-language projects with apes like
Washoe and Nim Chimpsky in the 1970s. Some of the playback experiment’s
lustre, he contends, emerged from the ape projects’ failures: “Where the
project scientists had brought animals into the scientists’ world in order
to teach, the playback scientists had taken themselves to the animals’ world
in order to learn. The projects thus stood for failure born of arrogance;
the playbacks, for success born of humility”. When he veers into a poorly
defended argument that links the playback’s success with the decline of
saltationist or non-gradual evolutionary theory, the momentum is lost.
A few quibbles remain: Radick fails to distinguish clearly between monkeys and
apes. Apes include chimpanzees and gorillas and as a group show substantial
anatomical and cognitive differences from monkeys like vervets. More than a
taxonomic nicety, this point matters for any evolutionary analysis of
language in which our closest living relatives (the apes) play a key role.
My final complaint is at bottom just a greedy wish for more. Why did Radick
choose the year 1980 as endpoint for his narrative? That he had to stop
somewhere is obvious, but because the bonobo Kanzi was born in 1980, his
choice is flavoured with irony. Never trained in a stimulus-response
framework as were the sign-language apes, Kanzi has transformed the universe
of ape-language work through his intense immersion in human-ape cultural
routines, activities that he himself elects to participate in. He
understands a good bit of spoken English, and both produces and comprehends
utterances made via lexigrams or computer symbols. Images of Kanzi, sporting
a backpack and conversing with a human companion during walks over a
fifty-five-acre compound, have graced TV screens and conference
presentations for fifteen years now. Radick allows himself to flash-forward
past 1980 to consider the evolutionary linguistics of Derek Bickerton, but a
better choice would have been Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s and Par Segerdahl’s work
with Kanzi. We might then have learned whether the playback technique has
been integrated into this research, and with what significance.
Yet Radick’s book satisfies far more than it irks. It reminds us with stunning
clarity that science is a spiral staircase; new techniques and theories
emerge, not always in linear fashion, from the old. It shows, too, science’s
power to shape ways we humans think of, and act towards, our fellow
creatures. On this last point, Garner’s words resonate across the decades:
"A knowledge of their language cannot injure man, and may conduce to the
good of others, because it would lessen man’s selfishness, widen his mercy,
and restrain his cruelty. It would not place man more remote from his
divinity, nor change the state of facts which now exist. Their speech is the
only gateway to their minds, and through it we must pass if we would learn
their secret thoughts and measure the distance from mind to mind."
For Steven Pinker, the distance from ape mind to human mind, and from ape
communication to human language, is considerable. In his 1994 blockbuster,
The Language Instinct, Pinker declared that language apes are “highly
trained animal acts”. Even Kanzi was demoted by Pinker to a primitive
creature who aspires to language but only “bang[s] on visual symbols on a
portable tablet”. This reductive view derived from Pinker’s main thesis:
language is a unique human instinct.
For Pinker, children learn language because their brains are specifically
prepared by evolution to do so. The human brain is seeded with grammatical
rules prepared to become active as the child matures. On this model, the key
unit of analysis is the individual child’s brain. The rich emotional
interactions in which the child participates with her caretakers are mere
triggers for the embedded rules; when the pump of the language instinct is
primed by cultural routines, syntax emerges and language flourishes in the
child. Apes, lacking anything in the brain to trigger, are a priori shut out
of the language club.
All these years after The Language Instinct, Pinker, star professor at Harvard
University, veteran of the lecture circuit and op-ed pages, shines as
cognitive science’s leading light. With force and clarity he argues for an
innate human nature, and appears to enjoy provocation as much as
prognostication. Joining up with New Atheists like Daniel C. Dennett, Sam
Harris and Richard Dawkins, Pinker categorized religious faith in a recent
interview as akin to astrology or alchemy. No one, then, picks up one of his
books in search of an even-handed review of models of human behaviour. The
Stuff of Thought stakes out new turf in the arena of semantics, but the
framework is familiar. Aiming to discover “what we can learn about our
makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words”, Pinker
sets out to reveal our human nature.
For this task, he employs the tool of conceptual semantics. An archaeological
metaphor aids our grasp of his method: he wants to dig down beneath the
language humans use, to uncover bedrock concepts. “Linguists”, he writes,
“call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them
‘conceptual semantics’. Conceptual semantics – the language of thought –
must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on
when we debate what our words mean.”
In the cascade of examples that follow this definition, Pinker’s genius for
popular writing becomes clear. Whereas Radick in The Simian Tongue invites
you to care about his topic through indefatigable analysis of detailed and
sometimes obscure arguments, Pinker in The Stuff of Thought makes you care
about his from page one, by vivid case studies taken from people’s everyday
lives. Four hundred pages later you’re either impressed or provoked, or
maybe both, but not bored.
Over and over, Pinker lays bare human habits and capacities in search of an
underlying explanation. We say we snip the end off a ribbon, or plane the
edge off a board, but why, when these actions are not, in reality, possible?
Because our minds are prone to thinking of objects’ boundaries as if they
were themselves objects. Why do we swim in a lake, but never swim inside a
lake? Though it may be logical to think of swimming inside a body of water,
our minds insist on conceiving of water as two-dimensional. Why, driving
home from the grocery store, do we refer to a gallon of milk in our car, but
never a gallon of blood (even though blood circulates inside our body as we
sit there)? Because we conceptualize our bodies as solids rather than
containers. A host of “odd intuitions” like these points us towards the
human preoccupation with space, time, causality and substance, through which
in turn we may identify the deeper rules of conceptual semantics.
Consider two drawings, one sharp-edged and spiky, the other soft and
cloudlike, that grace a page of the book. Which is the malooma and which is
the takata? People tend to agree on the answer (the cloud is the malooma),
because our brains are prepared to make sense of sound symbolism. Now, think
up some euphemisms for the word bullshit. Why do they tend (like bullshit
itself) to be composed of two stressed words, with primary stress on the
first: claptrap, hogwash, horsefeathers, humbug, poppycock, tommyrot? For
this riddle’s answer, read “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”, a
chapter packed with more swear words than a high-school bathroom stall.
Planted mid-book is a readers’ key to decoding these examples and their
overarching thesis. Writing of Immanuel Kant, Pinker notes,
"Kant’s version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not
actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable
today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary
psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain
specificity. One could go so far as to say that Kant foresaw the shape of a
solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization of
experience, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible."
Here we have the sacred trinity – Chomsky’s linguistics, evolutionary
psychology and domain specificity – whose collective assumptions weight
every page of The Stuff of Thought. On this perspective, information is
inputted to an individual brain as to a computer.
The real subject of Pinker’s book is the same, then, as Radick’s: neither
speech nor language, but thought. Radick recounts how the vervet-watchers
Cheney and Seyfarth recorded and played back monkey vocalizations in order
to explore key aspects of the monkey mind, as Garner did in simpler form a
century before. Pinker, for his part, tries to show how an archaeology of
human speech can expose the processes of (literal, not figurative)
computation in the human mind.
Pinker’s conclusions, though, have consequences for his subjects more
far-reaching than the results of any playback experiment. The human brain,
for Pinker, teems with discrete modules, each shaped by our evolutionary
past and dedicated to some aspect of organizing the information-processing
that ensues. The human past constrains our present human nature because it
has so closely shaped our brain modules. Indeed, we must “pry our mental
models free of the domains they were designed for”. For, “left to our own
devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways”. The
way forward is through education, the goal of which “is to make up for the
shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and
social world”.
In writing about education’s potential, Pinker refers to “a scientifically
literate democracy”. Questions arise for the coherence of this view and
about its implications. How do architects of education harness and indeed
overcome the instincts that are their species’s birthright? Where in this
model is there room for the vast millions of people who share no investment
in the institutional study of evolution, engineering, or statistics
(examples that Pinker uses)? What happens in groups where youngsters learn
by a combination of oral tradition and one-to-one apprenticeship, or where
critical decisions are made by discussion and consensus, rather than by
hierarchical transfer of knowledge by a sage on a stage? Are these millions
“left to their own devices” and thus “apt to backslide” towards instinctual
response? How can this perspective fail to produce what amounts to a ranked
hierarchy, not of human potential but of human creativity, under present
global conditions?
Pinker occasionally back-pedals from the reductive abyss. He reassures
readers, for instance, that the patterned regularities he discusses are not
“necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains;
some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over
the course of human history”. For those who approach human behaviour by
working to understand acts of meaning-making between people, far stronger
support exists for embodied and distributed cognition than is hinted at by
Pinker.
One example comes from neuroscience, where research reveals the great
plasticity of the human brain. In a dynamic and iterative process that
unfolds according to each life’s experiences, our brain circuits are
sculpted and resculpted. Another example comes from a thought experiment.
What if we rigged up one of Richard Garner’s cages and settled inside, on an
urban street, in a remote rural village, or along a forest path, to witness
human interaction unfold? How far would conceptual semantics take us in
interpreting what we would hear and see? Anthropologists have been there,
and done that (minus the cage). Humans everywhere, they know, make meaning
together in song-laden sacred rituals, loud messy conflicts, or calm
conversations. It is in creative, contingent, unpredictable and emotional
meaning-making that our human nature truly lies.
Gregory Radick
THE SIMIAN TONGUE
The long debate about animal language
577pp. University of Chicago Press. $45; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£23.50
978 0 226 70224 7
Steven Pinker
THE STUFF OF THOUGHT
Language as a window into human nature
499pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 7139 9741 5
US: Viking. $29.95. 978 0 670 06327 7
Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist and Professor of
Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She is editor of The
Origins of Language: What nonhuman primates can tell us, 1999. Her other
books include The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal communication in African great
apes, 2004, and Evolving God: A provocative view on the origins of religion,
2007.
