What was actually going on in her head when she made the gestures for “not teeth?” As if that weren’t inscrutable enough, one of the guiding principles of scientific investigations of animal intelligence is what’s known as Morgan’s Canon: Scientists must not impute a higher mental ability if a behavior can be explained by something more primitive, for example, simple error.Īnalogously, about 50 years ago, on a pond in Oklahoma, Washoe saw a swan and made the signs for “water” and “bird.” Was she simply noting a bird and water, or was she combining two of the signs she knew to describe an animal for which she had no specific word? The debate continued for decades and was unresolved when she died. “Koko, you lied.” But what was Koko’s intent - a central issue when it comes to proving a lie.
“Bad again Koko bad again,” Koko admitted.
Penny wasn’t buying it: “Koko, you lied.” Even if a scientist accepts one of the definitions of language that do exist, it’s nearly impossible to test it in animals because what is being examined is inherently subjective, and science demands objective, verifiable results. There remain a number of scientists who don’t think Koko and Washoe accomplished anything at all. The problem for science remains unresolved: 3,000 years into the investigation of signal human attributes and we still don’t have rigorous ways to define language and intelligence that are agreed on and can be empirically tested. It threw the scientific world into a tizzy, implying that sentience and languagewere not ours alone, that there was a continuum in higher mental abilities that linked animals and humans. In the 1960s and ’70s, they learned to use American sign language, and they came to understand that words could be combined to convey new meanings.
I knew the two great apes when I was young and they were young, and I”ve closely followed the scientific, philosophical and moral upheavals they precipitated over the last five decades. Koko and Washoe have made it much more difficult for us to treat animals as commodities, in any way we wish. Their accomplishments inaugurated deep soul-searching among us humans about the moral basis of our relationship with nature. She and a female chimpanzee named Washoe (who died in 2007) played an outsized role in changing how we view animal intelligence.
0 kommentar(er)
