One-On-One With Our Closest Cousins
It was exactly 33 years ago that I first met of one of my oldest
and dearest friends. To this day, the most outstanding aspect of her
personality remains a quality I noticed the very first time I laid eyes
on her: She is one of the most caring and compassionate people I know.
She's also a chimpanzee. I first encountered Washoe during an interview
with R. Mien Gardner, Ph.D., an experimental psychologist at the
University of Nevada at Reno. Gardner was seeking assistants to teach his
young chimp American Sign Language (ASL); I was desperately seeking a
graduate assistantship to help fund my studies in experimental
psychology.
The interview did not go particularly well. My research background
in clinical psychology and my interest in philosophy--"soft" subjects,
according to Gardner--did not impress the tough-minded scientist, known
for his strict laboratory methods and mathematical precision. As Gardner
ended the meeting, he asked if I wanted to meet Washoe. I was sure I had
lost any chance of scoring the job, but I said yes nonetheless. Gardner
and I strolled across the Reno campus toward a play yard enclosed by a
4-foot-high chain link fence. Within, two people were playing with what
seemed to be a human infant. At first sight of us, the child began
running across the yard towards us. It was then that I realized that this
"child" was actually Washoe, a 2-year-old chimpanzee. She reached the
fence and, without breaking stride, leaped over the top, landed in my
arms and gave me a big hug. Gardner seemed as surprised as I was: Washoe
had chosen a complete stranger to embrace over her surrogate father. I
could think of no one who needed a hug more at that moment than I did.
That first glimpse of Washoe's seeming capacity for empathy not only
foreshadowed how much I would eventually learn about the complex inner
lives of chimpanzees. It also got me the job.
Chimps, Our Closest Cousins
In the past few decades, scientific evidence on chimps and other
nonhuman primates has poured in to support one basic fact: We have much
more in common with the apes than most people care to believe. Often
cited is the statistic that humans have 98.4% of the same DNA as chimps,
humans having branched off from chimpanzees just six million years ago on
the evolutionary tree. Research suggests that, like us, chimps are highly
intelligent, cooperative and sometimes violent primates who nurture
family bonds, adopt orphans, mourn the death of mothers, practice
self-medication, struggle for power and wage war. And that only makes
sense, because the chimp brain and the human brain both evolved from the
same brain-that of our common ape ancestor. The mental processes inside
these two brains have become specialized as they adapted to different
social needs over six million years, but they still share the same
underlying ancestral intelligence.
In the past year alone, numerous studies have highlighted our
remarkable likeness not only to chimps, but to monkeys and apes of all
kinds. A 1999 Columbia study conducted by psychologist Herbert Terrace,
Ph.D., showed that rhesus monkeys have rudimentary arithmetic skills, and
that they can think using symbols. The Yerkes Regional Primate Research
Center released a study in April indicating that capuchin monkeys work
together to gather food and then share the fruits of their labor; head
researcher Frans de Waal, Ph.D., suggests that this kind of cooperation
may be an essential element of human society. And a study published last
May in the journal Nature by famed chimpanzee researchers Jane Goodall,
Ph.D., and Andrew Whiten, Ph.D., shows that chimpanzees engage in more
behaviors than are necessary for mere survival, and that these
behaviors-which range from using rocks as hammers to crack nuts to not
using tools at all--vary geographically, sound evidence that chimps might
have region-specific cultures.
Washoe herself has been the subject of groundbreaking and seminal
studies on primate communication. She was the very first nonhuman to
learn a human language ASL. Cameras have recorded her signing with other
chimps with no humans present, and she even passed her second language on
to her adopted son.
But I don't need to read clinical studies or technical research
texts to see that chimps behave much like we do. After 30 years of
conversing with and observing chimpanzees--watching them closely and
interacting with them on a day-to-day basis-I'm more convinced than ever
that chimp and human minds are fundamentally alike.
Many scientists beg to differ. In March, for example, Drew Rendall,
Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Canada's University of
Lethbridge, and colleagues published a study in the Journal of
Comparative Psychology showing that baboons don't respond to each others'
calls--mother baboons don't even return the calls of their lost infants.
Rendall offers this as "proof" that nonhuman primates lack "theory of
mind," or the ability to infer another being's thoughts and feelings. The
problem with this logic: Scientists often attempt to compare ape, monkey
and chimp minds to human minds. When they don't match up, the researchers
assume that their intellects are completely unlike ours.
Certainly, humans and chimpanzees differ in intellectual ability.
But what differs is their degree of intelligence, not the kind of mental
processes they employ. There is no bold line separating human
intelligence from chimp intelligence.
