Farewell to Nim Chimpsky

[Gordon Wells]

Following up on Robin Campbell's note, (and his paper, which I read
on-line), I should like to report briefly on a plenary presentation by Sue
Savage-Rumbaugh in Vancouver last Sunday at the annual conference of the
American Association for Applied Linguistics.  Her talk included several
extended video-recorded episodes of interaction between humans and
bonobos.  Although these bonobos produce no recognizable speech, they
clearly understand what is said to them about familiar objects and actions
in the cultural environment they share with their human interactants.
They can also communicate their wishes and interests by constructing
utterances on a symbol board.  One example that was particularly striking
occurred when Sue asked one of the bonobos, in a normal conversational
manner, to take off her laced-up shoe.  When the animal couldn't pull it
off, Sue suggested he(?she) first undo the laces, which s/he did.  Having
removed the shoe, s/he wanted to remove Sue's sock too, but desisted when
told not to.  Another very convincing example was in one of the theory of
mind tasks where, in the presence of the bonobo, a packet of m&ms was
moved from the place where the stooge had put it while the stooge was out
of the room.  The bonobo correctly answered the questions as to where the
stooge would look for the m&ms and where s/he her/himself would go to find
them.

In the abstract for the presentation, Rumbaugh and Savage-Rumbaugh write:
"Biological continuity, but not psychological continuity, between animals
and humans has been long recognized because of the mistaken belief that
our language competence makes our psychology unique from animals.  But now
.. we have solid evidence for psychological continuity between apes and
humans: apes are capable of complex learning, symbolic thought, speech
comprehension and other basic dimensions of language, basic numeric
skills, planning, and culture."  The video recordings provided convincing
evidence for (most of) these claims.

Thinking about the session afterwards, I found myself wondering: If
bonobos are capable of agentive participation in Savage-Rumbaugh's
naturalistic research, presumably they should also be required to give
their informed consent to video-recordings of them being shown at
conferences.  This raises some interesting ethical issues, don't you think?