Rufio, I have nowhere proposed that great apes are human or that they speak a human language. They can be shown to communicate using a form of sign language. It is not, I hope, an offense to humans who use ASL any more than it should be an offense to computer-users that computers are used in various animal-intelligence research projects.
I have been following the training of chimpanzees and gorillas since I was a University student studying animal behavior. I've studied the Liontailed Macaques at the Woodland Park Zoo and spent hours observing the Siamang (Gibbon) group which used to reside at the Pt. Defiance Zoo. I have also visited the chimpanzees at CWU and read the research that is readily available. I am certainly no expert if that is what you were wondering. I do have a respect and appreciation for the intelligence of animals. Their abilities can be stunning.
Starting in the late 50's, several people had some success with teaching symbolic forms to chimpanzees. For many, the chimpanzees were strictly animals and after the experiments, the chimpanzees would either be sold to medical research labs or sacrificed. A young chimpanzee used to be worth $15,000 or more... haven't checked the price lately, but they were considered extremely valuable and beyond the sympathetic purchase by individuals. The most successful research was done when the chimpanzees and other great apes were educated as though they were children (idiot children, perhaps) but when they were dealt with as individuals. Many researchers ran into ethical problems. In many ways this can be an ugly form of research. If the animals are not treated as intelligent individuals, then they cannot be taught as well. (Please see the link and quote at the end of this post.) At the same time once you see a great ape as an individual it is hard to sell it or kill it with your eyes wide open.
The military had some interest in an extraordinarily strong animal that could receive instruction... however chimpanzees are fearful and unwilling warriors and were not tractable in this way. Since the military (who is the main source of funding for large-scale projects of this kind) could readily see that there was no advantage to teaching animals who were costly and in serious danger of extinction anyway, they lost interest and quit funding most research soon after the chimpanzee space flights.
However, an incidental gain from the (Project Mercury space) program was the demonstration that the young chimpanzee can be trained to be a highly reliable subject for space-flight studies. (From
NASA History files.)
On another note, the military does maintain an active funding for dolphin and toothed whale research including the training of animals that can set bombs and tracking devices on selected vessels.
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from:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences Online
The Emergence of a New Paradigm in Ape Language Research
Quote:...we have to absorb the implications of the startling advances that have been made in ALR (Ape Language Research). In addition to the surprising number of symbols and syntactical patterns that bonobos have mastered, it is also important to note that they have demonstrated the ability to play games that are based on complex rules; engage in sophisticated make-believe and role-playing; solve complex tasks imitatively and creatively; perform remarkably well on match-to-sample tasks (even when the instructions are delivered through earphones or by different speakers); deal easily with simple Theory of Mind tasks; and even engage in normative behaviours such as justifying or explaining their own actions, or trying to teach or correct another ape's actions (see Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker & Taylor 1998; Shanker & Taylor 2001). One might object that such studies tell us little about natural great ape abilities, insofar as it is only human intervention that has enabled apes to rise to these cognitive and communicative levels (see Tomasello 1999). But then, that is surely the point of such studies; for by demonstrating the plasticity of great ape capacities, we are learning about the significance of caregiving practices for nonhuman primate development.
Taking all these factors together we can see how, far from being fixed and invariant, great ape communicative behaviours in the wild, as well as in research facilities, are carefully nurtured and culturally variable. In place of the information-processing model that has hitherto dominated the study of ape communication and ALR, therefore, we believe that it is imperative that we shift to a dynamic systems paradigm, which places the emphasis on the dyad rather than the isolated individual; which sees great ape communication as a co-regulated activity rather than a linear and discrete sequence; which focuses on the creativity of ape communicative behaviours rather than treating them as phenotypic traits; which is better able to account for both the social complexity and the developmental character of nonhuman primate communicative abilities; and which looks at how language skills emerge as a means of co-regulating and augmenting such primal activities as sharing, requesting, imitating, and playing.
