
What Can Bonobos Teach Us About the Nature of Language? - pseudolus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bonobos-teach-humans-about-nature-language-180975191/
======
tuna-piano
For a brief period in 2013 the facility was looking for money and allowed
public visitation. I visited during that time, and I loved the experience of
seeing these animals face to face (through glass) in person. Sue was not there
(supposedly sick... but perhaps looking back this was just an excuse). It was
a little weird how the staff interacting with the Bonobos were (I believe) all
related to Sue.

Few photos of my visit (felt a little like Jurassic Park while entering).

[https://imgur.com/a/RhbqWLy](https://imgur.com/a/RhbqWLy)

Another long article about Kanzi and another famous ape, Koko:
[https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-
lang...](https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-language-
research-criticism-of-working-conditions-and-animal-care.html)

Disclaimer: Like many things I've done in my life (visiting zoos and
aquariums, eating meat, etc) I'm not sure whether I made the right ethical
choice to visit. Certainly was a selfish decision, not sure I caused any harm
or if that harm was worth my enjoyment.

------
tsimionescu
I think the article misrepresents Chomsky's views on language to some extent.
It makes it sound as if Language is claimed to simply be some special organ in
the human brain and that's why bonobos can't have language, by decree.

In fact, no such claim is made. Chomsky's point is that, given how fast human
beings acquire language, we must have some special structure in the brain that
gives us this capacity, that we are born with. That doesn't exclude the
possibility that other animals also possess some form of this capacity, it
just excludes the possibility that Skinner's behaviorist model was right -
that a being without such an 'organ' could learn language, or at least that it
could do it with the speed with which humans do it.

However, Chomsky is rightly skeptical of animal language claims. One of his
main discoveries from studying Universal Grammar is that (human) language is
mostly a mechanism for thought, not communication. This is mostly argued from
the way many concepts are encoded into language in a way that is very
efficient to the one doing the encoding, but very inefficient for decoding by
someone who lacks the proper context - better suited to the thinking process
of the person who produced the phrase, less suited to communicating the
concept to someone else.

Because of the above, vocabulary is hardly worth studying as part of language,
especially when discussing concrete terms. If you truly want to claim an
animal possesses something similar to human language, you need to study the
way it creates phrases, and the way it can compose simple phrases into complex
phrases - that is where the key power of human language lies. An animal that
can recognize a million words and even basic syntax ("do A then B" != "do B
then A", which is already more than most animals have been successfully
taught) but that can't form novel phrases from simple phrases should not be
labeled to possess the same kind of capacity that humans do.

Note that none of this is to say that possessing the capacity for language
should be required to consider someone conscious or worth protecting! I
absolutely believe that apes and a vast swathe of mammals (and even animals in
general) posses enough consciousness that we should feel morally obligated to
not torture them (I do not believe that humanely sacrificing an animal and
consuming it's flesh is torture; raising a chicken in a coop where it can't
move more than a few cm for its entire life is, though;;; drug testing on rats
is a much more difficult moral matter).

~~~
geokon
> we must have some special structure in the brain that gives us this
> capacity, that we are born with

We have special faculties for things like recognizing faces. Correspondingly
there are people that have some damage/abnormality with this mechanism but
they are otherwise fully functional human beings. There doesn't seem to be an
equivalent phenomena with language. I mean, you have things like dyslexia..
but that's something that only applies to the writing word (which is kinda
bizarre if you think about it b/c writing is relatively new, evolutionary
speaking). As far as I know, people that can't process language at all are
deeply mentally retarded. If it was some complex hard-wired mechanism in the
brain then you'd expect to see functionally intelligent people that can't
process language at all - but as far as I know that doesn't happen. Or does
it?

~~~
tsimionescu
That could add to the idea that language is primarily the tool we use for
thought. If you can't have abstract thought without language (in humans), as
Chomsky claims, then that would fit perfectly with an observation that people
who are incapable of language are also incapable of 'higher' thought.

I'm not personally sure whether this observation is accurate or not.

~~~
simonh
I'm not generally persuaded that we think linguistically, my experience on
reflection seems to be that forming ideas linguistically is 'post processing'.
On the other hand the rigor of trying to express a thought or idea
linguistically can greatly aid the thinking process. If they are 'technically'
separate faculties, I suspect that in humans the specifics of the
implementations are extremely highly coupled and interdependent.

~~~
tsimionescu
To me at least, anything longer than 1 'idea' must be put together in
language. For example, I couldn't think of a mulți-step algorithm or a plan or
even a recipe without putting it in language.

Still, I think Chomsky's idea, as far as I understand it, is that there is a
level of language that is not immediately accessible to us, where basically
your mind constructs a concept tree that can be 1:1 mapped with the syntax
tree of the phrase that it could be used to represent. The strucutre itself is
the same, but the thought process works with internal concepts, while the
expression in external language works with English or Japanese words. The
brain would work with this tree internally, applying well-defined
transformations to it, merging it with other similar trees, embedding it etc.
; this would happen both consciously, semi-consciously and unconsciously to
different degrees. In the end, when a plan is formulated, it can be acted upon
directly, or it can be communicated to others, by encoding it in English or
Japanese or Sign Language etc.

Note that I am not claiming to have studied this seriously, so this is at best
a layman's understanding from watching a few lectures. Chomsky also is careful
to mention that his idea of language as the mechanism primarily for thought is
a fringe view in linguistics, though he strongly believes some version of it
will come to be accepted as correct in the future, as the field matures.

------
hyustan
This idea that only we as humans can think and feel in particular ways is
slowly being eroded and I think that scares us both intellectually and
morally.

------
p33p
Disappointing to see this talking about Sue rather than anything of actual
substance or new research.

Based on personal knowledge, I can say the apes are much better off without
her. She should be shunned from the scientific community for her practices
instead of any sort of praise that this article gives.

~~~
kerkeslager
With due respect, that doesn't mean anything--as far as we know, it's just the
unfounded opinion of a person who may or not be qualified to have an opinion.
What's your connection here, and what's your personal knowledge?

The article wasn't entirely positive on her, either, not that anyone seems to
feel they need to read the articles they're opining on on HN.

~~~
p33p
It wasn’t entirely positive, but it shouldn’t have been positive at all.

Does putting a diaper on a bonobo and taking it to a restaurant sound like
scientific research?

Sue hasn’t been connected with the initiative for many years and for years
after her leaving harassed the workers and organization such as by constantly
calling the police and reporting false animal abuse. It took the author until
nearly the end to begin mentioning similar items. The article in general is a
rehashing of previous articles on Sue and the bonobos. There is nothing new or
significant in the article worth mentioning. No new research.

You can take these as anecdotes. My opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme
and take everything with a grain of salt, but the scientific community should
have higher standards.

~~~
kerkeslager
> Does putting a diaper on a bonobo and taking it to a restaurant sound like
> scientific research?

Science isn't an aesthetic choice, so whether or not something "sounds like"
science, is completely irrelevant.

Science is asking questions, and trying to gather observations which answer
the question.

If your critique is that what she's doing doesn't _sound like_ science, that
just sounds like you don't know what science is. I'd have to know what
question was being asked to know whether bringing a bonobo in a diaper to a
restaurant is really a good way to gather observations on that question.

> Sue hasn’t been connected with the initiative for many years and for years
> after her leaving harassed the workers and organization such as by
> constantly calling the police and reporting false animal abuse. It took the
> author until nearly the end to begin mentioning similar items. There is
> nothing new or significant in the article worth mentioning. No new research.

Just because it's not new, doesn't mean it's not significant.

So far, your "personal knowledge" just sounds like a grudge which you would
benefit from working through. I'm not saying you have to like her or pretend
that everything she did was right and good, but you also don't have to go on
the internet and try to tear down the good parts of her legacy.

You don't need to persuade me she was a destructive and slightly crazy person
--that's in the article--and its clear that her presence had become harmful to
progress. But her earlier research does look pretty interesting, and it would
be a shame to not look at her earlier research because she became hostile
later. Sometimes assholes discover interesting things.

------
Ericson2314
The best paragraph

> In an email to me, Frans de Waal, the primatologist, described the case as
> emblematic of a deeper conundrum in the study of animal minds: “Work with
> Kanzi has always lived somewhere between rigorous science and social
> closeness and family life,” he wrote. “Some scientists would like us to test
> animals as if they are little machines of which we only need to probe the
> responses, whereas others argue that apes reveal their full mental
> capacities only in the sort of environment that we also provide for our
> children, with intellectual encouragement among loving adults. There is some
> real tension between these two views, because loving adults customarily
> overestimate what their charges are capable of and throw in their own
> interpretations, which is why children need to be tested by neutral
> psychologists and not the parents. For Kanzi, too, we need this middle
> ground between him feeling at ease with those around him and being tested in
> the most objective way. The conflict around Kanzi’s custody is a fight
> between both sides in this debate.”

What Sue is doing is quack science or engineering in the short term, but if
replicated in parallel, could be excellent science in the long term.

------
sradman
From one of the image captions:

> Kanzi blowing soap bubbles, demonstrating voluntary breath control, which
> apes were long said to lack.

Aside from the quality narrative surrounding captive bonobo research, this
demonstration of breath control alone made the long read worthwhile.
Completely unexpected.

------
jacobush
I think it's amazing that dogs can even "speak".

It's very limited, but still very funny and amazing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCi-
FwKsBDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCi-FwKsBDg)

------
gumby
Is it just me? I don’t want to have to skip over the irrelevant nonsense about
a yellow school bus and cottonwood trees to read an article about a scientist
when the headline it about the bonobos themselves.

I might well be interested in an article about Savage-Rumbough or her
travails. That’s an interesting topic in itself. But this is like an article
in a business magazine e.

Is this what Smithsonian readers want? To feel like they read about science
but not actually have done so?

Plus I’m still curious about what we’ve actually learned from this about the
nature of language.

~~~
kerkeslager
It's not just you, there's an entire community of people who have decided that
four sentences of introduction is too much--Twitter.

Writing that not only is aesthetic but informative, is exactly what I want
here.

> Is this what Smithsonian readers want? To feel like they read about science
> but not actually have done so?

That's simply not true, this article is definitely about science.

> Plus I’m still curious about what we’ve actually learned from this about the
> nature of language.

Then you'd have to read more than four sentences of the article.

"To some scientists, Kanzi’s intellectual feats demonstrated clearly that
language was not unique to human beings."

"The controversy masked an uncomfortable truth: No one agreed on what the
difference between language and communication actually was."

The article then goes on to describe a wide variety of events which explain
what happened with the Bonobos, highlighting events which might be indicators
of discoveries and difficulties with collecting scientific observations about
Bonobos and language/communication.

~~~
gumby
There’s a tremendous amount of such work not just in various primates but non-
primates such as birds, prarie dogs etc (not to mention a spectrum way down to
more autonomic systems such as eusocial insects and biofilms). I didn’t see
much science discussion at all in proportion to the filler.

(As a side point: though I disagree with you it seems unfair that you are
being downvoted (your post is greyed to me). I gave it an upvote — hth)

