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).
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.
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).
I highly recommend people read HCF 2002 (and its follow up HCF 2005) to see what precisely Chomsky thinks on this subject. I tracked down a copy if anyone is interested in reading it:
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You make very interesting points. Where does this leave animals that are able to vocalize human language like parrots that talk?
That is well known to not mean almost anything. It is just a spectacular feat of mimicry, similar to birds that imitate chainsaw sounds or camera sounds. It is also similar to the ability we have to learn a song in a language we don't understand in any way - it's just a faithful imitation of sounds you hear, perhaps with slight context.
Chomsky may be right. The FOXP2 gene has been associated with language development in humans although there's still debate about the extent of its importance [0].
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Could you even guess what this article was about from the first four sentences?
> One spring day in 2005, a yellow school bus carrying six passengers turned onto a freshly paved driveway seven miles southeast of downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Passing beneath a tunnel of cottonwood trees listing in the wind, it rumbled past a life-size sculpture of an elephant before pulling up beside a new building. Two glass towers loomed over the 13,000-square-foot laboratory, framed on three sides by a glittering blue lake. Sunlight glanced off the western tower, scrunching the faces pressed to the windows of the bus.
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.
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)
Few photos of my visit (felt a little like Jurassic Park while entering).
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...
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.