 are legendary. She's about to die, finally, a particularly favored grandchild says to her grandmother, you must tell us. What is the secret? You know, people have come from far and wide to eat at your table. What is it that you're doing and the grandmother just smiled? She's kind of weak. She isn't saying very much. The child keeps prompting and she's saying, is it this? Is it that? Is it the glaze? Is it the what? And finally, she says, grandmother, is it really? You always cut off the end of that hem. Is that it? And grandmother smiles and she says, it may be. Because I don't really know what there is about my hem. But what I know is that when my mother baked hams, she always cut off the end of the hem. And what she told me, as she was about to die, was that when she was a young wife, she had only one pan with which to bake everything in the house. And she had to cut off the end of the hem because it wouldn't fit into the pan if she didn't do so. That, in science, is what we call the third variable problem. There's something else out there that you didn't account for, that you didn't take into account that's causing the relationship that you see. Second story. Two psychologists, both of whom know this story, are designing an experiment together. They eat one once at one way, the other once at the other. One of them goes out to get a cup of coffee, comes back, discovers that the experiment has been done. The central experiment. She says to her partner, confound it. Why didn't you wait until I came back? And that's the time at which the word confound entered the lexicon. It means basically the same thing as third variable problem. It means that there was something out there that you didn't take into account that you should have. Usually it means something like error variance, something like this. It is my pleasure to introduce to you a research scientist who has done more to eliminate third variable problems in psychology than anyone I have read. Dr. Sue Savidrumba is professor of biology and psychology at the Georgia State University. She is the principal investigator of the language acquisition project with Bonobos at the language research center there. She is co-investigator on other projects with investigators foreign and domestic that explore the apes use of basic language capacities. Per pioneering work in the late 1970s with Austin and Sherman names you will know before this speech is over, know well. Chimpanzees demonstrated their capacity for basic semantics. That is their ability to think in terms of symbols and their meanings in order to determine the appropriate categorical assignment in which to place apples and oranges and bananas and those kind of things or some other category. In the late 1980s with her colleagues she ascertained that a bonobo, remember this second chimpanzee family, conzi by name had acquired the meanings of symbols not through training but through daily observations of his mother. Conzi was the first ape to acquire language skills spontaneously. I mean that is the first one we know about, the first one in the laboratory. We don't know what goes on out there. And to acquire them without training in a manner that is reminiscent and he acquired them without training in a manner that is reminiscent of language acquisition by normal children. In 1994 her research took her to Zaire to study the bonobos in their natural habitat and to initiate an effort to conserve their natural populations. Sue Savage and her husband Dwayne Rumba are the only husband and wife team to have been individually and on their own asked to deliver the most prestigious G Stanley Hall lecture for the American Psychological Association. Sue Savage Rumba has lectured in many other places with many other venues. She is a person who is changing the very definition of the words that we use in psychology and if she is to prevail you will find psychologists in another few years if not generations using a different language. Sue. For that very kind introduction I may have done something to approach the problem of the third variable but I'll tell you what happens after you do that. Then you start to have to work on the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and who knows how many there are. But before I actually begin my talk I want to extend my very greatest appreciation to the conveners of this conference for inviting me to speak. Surely it is a great honor but it is not the honor I seek. Rather it is the precious opportunity to share a message with such a large group of educated persons. Persons who are willing to honestly wrestle with the issue of what this new knowledge of apes must mean for the human race. And the second thing I want to do is just briefly show you what we call our keyboard or our cymbal board and explain how it is that our apes have come to use language with this board. Since in our talk we often tend to gloss over this in our attempts to present our results. This is a board full of painted pictures. Sometimes we can overlay it over a computer system and when you touch these symbols you can actually hear a spoken word. But we just carry this everywhere we go out in the woods everywhere and the chimps and I just point to it. And basically when I want to talk point to the keyboard and if the word that I want to say is on the keyboard I point to it as I say it. If it's not I just go right on talking. And there's no attempt made to force the ape to do this. The only thing the ape is asked to do is to listen and to look when I'm talking to them. So that you can understand a little bit about these symbols and what they look like. I'm going to ask Kyle if he'll just kind of pass it around the audience. It may not make the whole way while I talk but at least some of you will get to see it. And thirdly I want to tell you what I am about to do. Since you might start to wonder as I speak where science ends and where philosophy begins. During the past 20 years of seeking to teach and to understand language in minds other than our own. I have finally come to what I think is a full awareness of the deep and true power of symbols. I have seen in depth how it is that we always always communicate at many levels. Some conscious and some not. As this understanding has dawned in me there has emerged within me a profound admiration for the joined power of artful vision and word. A power to convey messages that neither alone can master. And it is for this reason that art rather than bar graphs and numbers graces my words today. For numbers you may read the scientific articles. But now I wish to speak with the eye of a true friend to the eye of your mind and to the seat of your soul. Since the time of Aristotle and probably even before scholars have debated the mental competency of animals. Views on this topic included those of the animists who believed in the transmigration of souls from animals to human beings. There were also the mechanists who claimed that both animals and humans were nothing. Nothing but biological machines acting as circumstances programmed them to do. And there were the vitalists who held that a continuity of some fashion existed between animals and man. Their position was given added legitimacy by the church with the emergence of a doctrine called the great chain of being. According to this view God created all forms in a finally graded scale from barely alive to sentient to intelligent to spiritual. And only man was permitted to occupy the final rung of the latter. The basic sentiments of these positions are echoed yet today. But now they have been enlightened so to speak by Descartes who drew a distinction between the mind of man and the body of man. This distinction permits man's body to behave in a mechanistic manner akin to that of animals. But it simultaneously permits man's mind to operate according to a principle called rational thought. But the idea of a great chain of being had to be revised following Darwin's publication of the origin of the species. Evolution it seemed did not proceed in neat steps with a grand design in mind nor were her forms immutable and fixed for all time. Whether or not souls were transmutable bodily forms clearly were and had done so repeatedly over time. But there is a critical difference that is shaping modern discussions of these issues. And this is the wide recognition of the existence of apes and the emerging awareness of the close similarity of many of their behaviors to our own. Human kind has during the past three decades discovered the ape. Last century European man in Africa found the ape. And even before that African man had known apes and had shared his forest with them for many centuries. African man had many myths and legends about the common origin of man and ape. And in those former times in the legends men and apes were said to have been brothers. In those African legends the ape is recognized as an intelligent being as are many other creatures of the forest. And in those African legends apes have language and religion. But European man did not share those thoughts. For him the ape was simply a fearful beast. A beast to be rid of or taken to a zoo. For all Europeans since the time of Aristotle animals and man have been conceived of as entirely separate creatures. Man along all by himself standing on one side of a great plane and all animals on the other with a giant chasm in between. This chasm has been our comfort for it has kept us from what we view as our dark side our aggressive tendencies. Our animal nature. But it has also kept us from an awareness of our true kinship the stuff of our genes. The legends encoded in our DNA through legions of time as humans and apes and other creatures have continually molded and manifest themselves in a variety of ever-changing forms across generation after generation. There is but a tiny tiny difference in the DNA of man and ape. Not more than one percent of our genetic heritage differs. The long history of our unfolding has been shared by a creature that was us and has only been not us for the blink of an evolutionary eye. The creature is still 99 percent us. We now recognize this as undisputed fact and we marvel and we puzzle and we ask why do apes seem so different from us? Why do we talk and live civilized lives in buildings with laws and with crops and with technology to assist us? Why alone has man hit the jackpot while they live in the jungle eating whatever they can find? Using only the crudest of stone tools. How is it that humankind has come so far so fast if they are 99 percent us? What is the magic of that small difference? What is planted in the mind of man that is not planted in the mind of the ape? These are the questions that haunt our times as they haunt our minds. They haunt us now because we of the modern world have moved so very very far from anything that remotely resembles natural life. They haunt us now because we know that whole civilizations have no means of turning back, turning back from their washing machines and their microwaves. They haunt us because we fear the parts of ourselves that we do not really understand. They haunt us because we fear our animal desire, the thing called lust, the thing that is so directly expressed in animals and so strongly held in check in modern man. They haunt us because we so long to understand who we are and where we are going. But to do so we need to know from whence we came and when we look toward the ape as Darwin taught us to do we feel a distinct sense of unease and simultaneously an intangible sense of fascination, intrigue and fear. We feel drawn by them and repulsed by them at the same time and yet we know deep in our hearts we know for certain that if we cannot understand them we have no hope of understanding ourselves. Not wishing to admit this though we devise many rationales for why we are different. We say we have a language and that it has a syntax and that it has rules in order and then we proceed to define these rules in such a way that an ape can never attain them or we may say only we have true empathy for one another and that only we can understand the views and the feelings and the minds of others in a way that's not possible for any other creature or we may say we have a sense of counting and mathematical and geometrical concepts and that these are not possible for any other creature and finally we may say that only we have souls a sense of the divine and aesthetic of beauty and art that and that can belong to man and man alone. These differences in man we exalt for they shield us from the dark sides of ourselves the bestialities that we fear but they keep us lonely as well. So lonely that sometimes we turn to the idea of aliens and spend millions of dollars to send radio signals out in space to we know not whom. So great is our need for kindred creatures to keep our lonely intellects company and so far have we turned our backs on the kindred creatures of our very own planet. But the infant discoveries of the last 25 years are going to change all of that. I say infant because we are barely at the beginning we are only starting to see that just as the African ancestor figures and African legends have told us all along man and ape are truly but slightly different physical manifestations struck from a common mold. All the differences we have cherished and amplified are beginning to melt away as we understand more fully. This will continue to happen until we finally realize that they are us. We thought it was biology that kept us apart. We are only beginning to understand that it is biology that links us to gather and culture that keeps us apart. True enough apes are not exactly men. Our brains are larger than theirs and we can remember more during that span of time we like to call short-term memory. But the differences in this capacity within our own species fully overlap the general range of difference between that which we call man and that which we call ape. We will see in due course that all the things that now seem to make us so different our bipedal stride our small jaw our freed vocal control are much more superficial than we thought. Apes are semi-human and we are semi-ape. By birthright we are brothers. The man ape distinction must fall with the dawning of this realization. Are we apes, men or angels? With the true discovery of apes man has opened Pandora's box. But I jump ahead too far, far too far. Those thoughts remain for the future. For today let us narrow our focus. Let us simply look at a few apes and a few of the things they can do. Once European man found apes some of them begin to wonder if it might be possible to teach those creatures to talk. Two psycho biologists first tried to do this in the 50s by raising a chimpanzee as though it were a human child. They attempted many means of inducing speech but all to no avail. They concluded that their ape Vicki was intelligent enough to talk but physically unable to speak. In the 60s Beatrice and Alan Gardner stunned the world by announcing that they had succeeded in teaching an ape to talk. By using sign language instead of talking they had circumvented the language barrier. By the 70s however their claims came under strong attack from Herb Terrace who attempted to replicate their work with a chimpanzee named Nim Chimsky. Terrace concluded that Nim tended to imitate his teachers and that Nim's utterances did not reflect comprehension of what he was signing. Terrace further claimed that the Gardner's database was tainted because they had not distinguished between signs that Washoe produced in imitation of her teachers and those which she produced on her own. So starting with two new chimpanzees Sherman and Austin I attempted to circumvent the issue of queuing and imitation by having two apes communicate with one another. These apes learned to tell one another what kinds of foods they wanted to eat, what kinds of tools they needed to get containers open, where they wanted to go, when they wanted to chase and tickle and play. But objection still arose even though queuing was no longer suspected or imitation it was still the case that unlike human children Sherman and Austin's communications were limited to simple one and two word utterances and these language skills did not come naturally they had to be taught but this work prepared the way for a very critical insight. This insight was that the most important aspect of language was not speaking but was instead listening and understanding. It was the comprehension of the utterances of others that permitted Sherman and Austin to fill their own utterances with intent and this insight paved the way for another ape named Kanzi to take language much much further. Kanzi was not a chimpanzee but a bonobo and Kanzi was not taught language as were all apes before him. Kanzi acquired language spontaneously as would a child by listening to its use around him. Here you see Kanzi as a baby being raised with his mother and gesturally trying to tell her where to go. He did this because when I carried him it worked with me and he couldn't quite understand why it didn't work as well with mom. Here you see Kanzi playing in the trees talking at his keyboard sharing freely his affection clowning around with us he has torn open a ball here and is using it as a mask and across time Kanzi got bigger and bigger and bigger. In Kanzi's case the language used around him was spoken English and it was represented in printed form by colorful printed symbols. Kanzi could not speak English but he could understand it and he could also read the symbols. All in his own Kanzi began to use these symbols to talk. He wrapped the symbols around his body and he wrapped the symbols around his mind and he put them in his head and he carried them away and he began to talk. But why did this happen? How did it happen? What does it mean that it happened and what is a bonobo anyway? To answer those questions I would like to show a little bit of videotape if we could start the tape now please. This is a bonobo. A bonobo with a smile on his face. Sometimes it doesn't. This is the Xayarian Congo basin the only place where bonobos are naturally found. They exist in the midst of one of the largest undisturbed tracks of rainforests yet left on our planet but logging and hunting are increasing daily and their numbers are rapidly dwindling. Unlike other apes bonobos live in large groups of from 30 to 100 individuals and they are best known for the fact that they seem to solve all manner of social discord by making love rather than by aggression. They feed in the trees and travel on the ground between feeding sites which are often several hours apart. Unlike other apes bonobo females are sexually receptive throughout their monthly cycles just as are human females. This is a gestural request to engage in a sexual interaction. Bonobos use sexuality to form display and maintain bonds of friendship. Such bonds are formed between males as shown here between females and between males and females. Because sexuality serves a strongly affinity function in bonobos it is frequently used to inhibit aggression. The old saying make love not war is the way of life among bonobos. What we would consider homosexual behavior is considered friendship between male bonobos and this behavior does not replace heterosexual behavior. The same holds true for female bonobos as shown here. In both sexes the line between sexual behavior and aggression is thin but bonobos are quick to select sexuality in place of aggression if given a choice and it is this capacity which permits them to live in large social groups. Bonobos not only share themselves freely they also share their food. Here a juvenile male picks up a bilingo fruit and carries it back to the others who deliberately split it into three pieces. Unlike chimpanzees who must beg others for food bonobos rarely beg. They share all their food by complex socially constructed rule systems that we are only beginning to understand. Bonobos can also more easily assume a bipedal posture than other apes and they move and they carry things in a most human fashion. Kanzi was the first bonobo to learn language. Here before any exposure to language he is seen with his mother Matata, his brother Akili and his father Losanjo. Though life in captivity is clearly stark compared to that in the wild nonetheless the scene displays another human-like characteristic of the bonobo. Bonobo males enjoy partaking in infant care. They spend much time each day with infants playing, grooming and sharing food. Here after being held by the adult male the mother gesturally asks the infant to come back to her yet the male playfully tries to hold the infant again. When we began language instruction it was not with Kanzi but initially we started with his mother because at that time Kanzi seemed far immature to learn. Here you see us trying to teach Matata the lexagram for juice. You see how attentive Kanzi was to the process. We generally gave him toys to keep his mind busy while we went about our instruction work with mom. Can we turn the sound down there? But when we had to separate Kanzi and his mother we found out that he knew all the symbols we had been working for two years to attempt to teach her and she had failed to learn. Without even paying attention Kanzi had learned. Therefore we continued working with him in a very free and spontaneous manner. Without any intentional attempts to teach him we simply used language and the keyboard around him and did as many things in the woods and at our laboratory as it was possible to do with the young and active ape. Can you turn the sound back up now? Here's Kanzi at a slightly older age going on a cookout. Kanzi didn't have to carry that backpack. He likes to carry his backpack and in it he carries his ball and a few rocks and some pine needles. I'm gonna help get some sticks. Good. I need more sticks too. I have a lighter in my pocket if you need one. You can get it out. I hope I have a lighter. You can use the lighter to start the fire. Kanzi wasn't taught any of these things. These are all things he's just decided to do on his own. Including dropping the lighter a little too close to the fire. Kanzi I need you to break this stick for soup please. Good. Thank you. Kanzi your job is to put some bread on the plates. On the plates that's right. Get some more bread for our hamburgers and put it on the plates. Some on this plate. Kanzi this is your plate. Here's your plate list. Yeah you're happy. We're very happy about this part. You gotta put some water on the fire. Do you see the water? Good job. Kanzi always forgets to zip his backpack up. Okay can you can you pause the tape? So Kanzi appeared to be easily understanding language. He even understood things we had never said before and in very novel situations. Was it possible that somehow we were being fooled? It is well known that chimpanzees and shows appear to understand things when they engage in a well-practiced routine. But in shows it really is the routine. Not their understanding of language that carries them through. Go ahead. Can you pause the tape? And not only was there that kind of potential queuing to have to deal with. There was also the language tutored ape called Nim. He appeared to know signs as well even though it wasn't a routine. But closer study had revealed that Nim was actually only imitating his teachers. Go ahead. Can you pause it there? And so not only was there the problem of the routine and the problem of imitation. We knew that even Sherman and Austin often appeared to understand language when we knew that in fact they could not do so. Go ahead. How does one tell whether the understanding of an ape is real as opposed to some clever or even unintentional queuing or some hidden routine? Well one way is to present the ape with tests that absolutely preclude these things. This can be done by making certain that the person who is administering the test does not know the answer and where the information is presented overhead from us. Austin's getting ready, Shelley. Here we'll see what happens with a test like this with Austin. The snake. The snake. That was Nim's. I need to listen through your headphones and see what it is. So I'm going to try now where we have an on-face interaction. Austin. Snake. Snake. Got that right. Very nice, Austin. Very nice. Apple. Apple. He gave the M&Ms. No? All right. Let me have your headphones and let me listen to Shelley. I take the headphones so I can see what he's been told to give. I have to listen. Oh, you got that one right too. Very nice. Can you pause the tape a second? So what if we gave these kinds of tests to Kanzi without any training or preparation? Could he pass them? The answer was yes. Easily and without training, Kanzi breeze through all these tests. Go ahead. We're all set. We're ready. Kanzi, give Sue the picture of juice. That's a bottle of Welch's grape juice. Kanzi, give Sue popsicles. That's the popsicles. Kanzi, give Sue bananas. Those are the bananas. Kanzi, give Sue ice. That's crushed ice in that picture. Kanzi, give Sue pears. Those are the pears. That's right. Can't miss the last one. Kanzi, give Sue potatoes. Can you pause the tape? Kanzi can do this with hundreds of pictures. He knows many more words than are on his keyboard because he can understand them in English. He can do quite as well too if you put the lexigrams out on little plaques instead of pictures. So if I ask for apple, he can hand you the lexigram for apple, as well as the picture. And again, he wasn't trained to do that. But not only could Kanzi pass these tests in a virtually arous manner, he could also pass much more complicated ones, tests which required that he understand very complex and completely novel, even very, very unusual sentences. Go ahead. I'm going to put a welder's mask over my face here so that Kanzi can't see any facial expressions on my face as I speak. Kanzi, okay? Can you hear me, Kanzi? Give the doggie a shot. This is give the doggie a shot. He's never been asked to do such a thing before. Good job. Okay, thank you. Put the key in the refrigerator. Put the key in the refrigerator. Again, a novel sentence and an unusual one. We don't generally keep the keys in refrigerators. Good job. Thank you. Very nice. Okay. Take the chow outdoors. That's a little bag of chow. Generally, the chow goes in his stomach. Good job. Thank you. Not not outdoors. Go get the ball that's outdoors. Very nice. Thank you, Kanzi. Kanzi, could you take off Sue's shoe? Could you take my shoe off, please? You might need to untie it. In a formal test, we gave Kanzi over 600 such sentences, but in other tests since that time, he's had thousands of novel sentences, and he generally shows a very high level of comprehension of spoken language under such circumstances. Now you can take it off. It will come off now. Okay, he did a good job, Karen. You want to take my sock off, too? Okay, can you pause the tape for a second? Was Kanzi's ability to spontaneously understand and use these symbols due to biology, or had we learned something important about some very specific aspects of early experience that led to the emergence of language? To answer this question, we had to repeat the Kanzi experiment with other apes, both a bonobo like Kanzi and a chimpanzee like Sherman or Austin. So we began again, this time raising two females, one a chimpanzee and the other a bonobo in a manner similar to that which Kanzi had experienced. Go ahead. I'm going to show our faces. Look. The face of the common chimpanzee is larger and generally lighter, the face of the bonobo is smaller. And particularly if they turn their heads to one side, you can see the very large brow ridge of the common chimpanzee and the very small brow ridge of the bonobo, the very... The differences between the bonobo and the chimpanzee are interesting because in all the ways in which they differ, the bonobo is more like ourselves and our australopithecine ancestors than is the chimpanzee. Although the bonobo, man and chimpanzee, all separated from a common ancestral form between four and six million years ago, the bonobo shares many more physical characteristics and mental traits with us than does the common chimpanzee. Here you can see the upright posture of the bonobo. The skull of the bonobo is more rounded. It sits more vertically on the spine. The gait is more naturally bipedal. The legs are longer. The jaw is much reduced. The ears are small. The nose is larger. The eyes are rounder. The lips are fuller and all facial expressions, but especially the smile and the frown of the bonobo are more human like. Tisha, like Candy, loves the words. This is Pambanesha being raised in a manner similar to Konzi. She takes Sue walking here just about every day. They stop to chat using the speech board, which is never far away. Chase, Pambanesha replies, demanding to be chased. Play chase is a part of their routine, but like a human child, Pambanesha quickly tires. Yes. This too is part of the routine. Pambanesha's command of human language equals Kanzi's, but she... Although shown here separately in order to introduce them to you, both Pambanesha and Pansi spent nearly all day together to make their lives and their experiences as comparable as possible. Both were exposed to the keyboard from birth, and both began to acquire language and symbols spontaneously as Kanzi had done, although Pansi did so six months later than Pambanesha, and she developed a much smaller vocabulary. Can you pause the tape? When Pambanesha and Pansi were old enough, we gave them the same tests that we had given Austin and Kanzi. Both passed, though Pansi had a little more difficulty than Pambanesha. Nonetheless, she clearly understood spoken English and she could identify photos and symbols just as had Kanzi, and like Kanzi, she acquired this knowledge without specific training. Pambanesha passed as well, doing even better than Kanzi. Go ahead. Pansi, Fanky. She's asked to find Pinky, and she's correct. Pinky is a favorite cartoon character and doll that they have. Pambanesha, find the coffee. Coffee, that's Folger's coffee. Pansi, find the hammer. Oh, Pansi's wrong here. She picked the white piece, so she gets a second chance. Find the hammer, the hammer. That's the hammer. Find the hot dogs. Hot dogs. The hot dogs. She has to shake the wrong one off to pick up the picture of the hot dogs, and she's correct. Find the popsicle. Popsicle. That's Pansi's favorite of popsicles. Okay, could you pause the tape again? To be certain, however, that we were truly dealing with a strong environmental difference. It was also necessary to raise another bonobo who was not exposed to language and symbols at an early age, but who was able to take tests and who understood something about the social nature of the contract between ape and man. This was done with Kansi's other sister, Tamuli. She remained with her mother, Matata, until three years of age, and then she received one and one half years of attempted language instruction. She learned to ask for simple things by gestures and to cooperate and take tests, but she never became receptive to spoken language, nor did she spontaneously acquire symbols. When she was old enough, we tested her in the same manner. Go ahead. She's a little more nervous before her test. We have to reassure her. Do you want me to listen to Shelly? She acts like the words give her a headache. Do you want me to say it? Okay, let me listen to Shelly. What? She wants to listen again. She's listening to the word clay. You can't hear it, but she's being asked to give the clay. Let's tell Sue what you asked for. Okay, so I'm going to see if it's possible to cue her. Shelly said, look at Sue. It's kind of hard. Would you like something? Well, if bonobos are so intelligent as to be able to acquire language in that kind of a setting, what is it that they're doing in the wild? I went to Zaire with this question in mind and found a very, very complex society in which individuals spent a great deal of time traveling between sites and they often seemed to come down and head in a particular direction with a very definitive sense of where it was they were going. But they didn't all come to the ground at the same time. Sometimes they came down in parties of five to 10 or 12 individuals and it might be a half an hour, an hour later before other bonobos came down. And they did most of their traveling, as you can see here on the ground. Following them in Zaire was not quite like following them in Atlanta, but there were many similarities. They could walk through the forest far more gingerly than I could, just as they can in Atlanta. And they could go in places just as they can in Atlanta that were inaccessible to me. Not only could they do that, they could go without leaving a trace. They could walk through the forest and it was hard for most people to tell that anyone had ever been there. They were very fearful, often times of strange places or places where they had to go out of the forest such as here in a clearing. And when they came to a large clearing, all of the subgroups would wait until everybody had collected together and then they would go through one at a time. This was one of the easiest ways if you encounter such a clearing to find out how many bonobos were actually in the group you were watching. Because when they're in the trees, it's really almost impossible to count them. The trackers often pointed out to me, as the bonobos would change direction, certain large plants that were smashed down. Knowing how easily they could walk through the forest, I was amazed to find many of these plants. Some of them were over four or five feet tall, and it really didn't seem as though a bonobo could walk past such a plant and accidentally smash it over when they could walk so well without leaving any trail at all. Here you see an example of what you'd have to do and how they walk, where they walk carefully through. And then you can see by putting your foot down and smashing and dragging your foot kind of along ways, you can smash down a large plant. And you create something that looks like this. So I began to take some data on the locations in which we found plants that were smashed in this way. And they seem to occur mainly at points where two trails would split. And the smashed plant seems to mark the direction to go. And in fact, if you follow that trail, you end up behind the bonobos. And if you go down the other trail, you tend to lose the bonobos and you have to backtrack. Another thing that they seem to be doing was breaking off very large branches as we just saw this adult male do. And drag it. Here, another male is dragging that branch back. The first male gets his branch and the other branch and drags them back and places them in exactly the same direction that he had before. When I looked at the directions the branches had been placed in and the directions that the bonobos left the area in, the branches were clearly indicating the direction of departure. So can you pause it one moment? We can see that bonobos can clearly learn language in the wild and that they may even have some form of little clearly learn language in the lab and that they may have some form of language in the wild. Is this cultural? Can it be passed on from one generation to another? Could Kanzi and Panbenesha, if they were to go to the field, teach other bonobos? To answer that, let us look at what is already happening in the laboratory between Kanzi, who has learned language, and his sister Tamuli, who can understand neither speech nor symbols. Go ahead. I'm asking Tamuli to give me some bark. Can you slap Kanzi? Kanzi's trying to show her. But she can't understand. Can you give Kanzi a hug? He's trying to show her again. Can you groom Kanzi? He's trying to show her what I'm saying. She still doesn't understand. Look, he's showing you. He's showing her about grooming. Well, here, you go ahead. You take that one little bite. Here, Kanzi. Thank you for showing Tamuli. Can we have the slides now? Arguments may continue to rage about whether apes can really do such complicated things, whether they really have minds, whether they really have language. But there can be no doubt of the final outcome. For those of us who have walked past the barrier already, and who live and talk daily with the apes, we know beyond all doubt that behind the face of an ape is a mind almost like our own, with the same complexity of feeling and subtlety of thought and intrigue of imagining that we humans experience. In passing between the line that separates ape and man, I have experienced directly, over and over, things that the current limitations of the scientific method, limited by now outmoded thoughts and egocentric perspectives, forbid me to prove, and sometimes even to say. But regardless of the outcome of any experiment, those who have crossed that line and walked and talked daily with apes, can no longer deny their direct daily experience. Any failure of science to find a way to prove that apes have minds or that apes have language will become such an embarrassment as more and more people begin to cross the line and directly interact with apes that science will be forced to re-evaluate the criterion by which it determines the validity of reality. This is the end of an age and our nascent understanding of apes is playing a pivotal role in the turning of time. We can no longer divide the world into animal and man, into instinct and reason. All of our old paradigms and assurances that everything will give way to the method of systematic proof and replication are vanishing. Complex thoughts, actions, imaginings, and interactings never repeat themselves with precision, yet they guide behavior. Our current scientific approaches to behavior seek explanation, prediction, and control, as though behaviors were molecules. We must abandon this approach. We must instead attempt to learn how to construct behavior and to do that, we must dare to tackle the role of symbols, religions, and myth within our lives. Our old methods of studying animals and why they behave as they do are far too simplistic and limited to begin to encompass the true nature of animal behavior. Our old questions about whether animals are just conditioned or not are worn threadbare and our attempts to answer them lead us in circles. These questions seem stale and ossified by contrast with the nature films that regularly project themselves onto the television sets of our homes. These images suggest to us that a very alive, coordinated, complex world exists out there. If we want to understand it, we must begin by experiencing it directly. Animals are not like so many grams of chemicals to be magically mixed together. Their behavior is free flowing within the cycles of birth, procreation, death, and rebirth. Their behavior is manifest in energy and in spirit and in synchronicity of movement. To understand them, we must begin to experience their existence at their level. We must share with them an understanding of what it is to be alive, to communicate, to coordinate action. We must begin to stand on common ground. Thank you. Thank you, Sue. I said that if we listen, the notion of the science and what it's about and how we do it, will change. Ever so slightly and ever so much. As the panel is collecting thoughts, I would like to pose a question to Sue that I've actually already asked her, but she doesn't know that I'm going to ask it now. I said to Sue, I have seen recently Bente the gorilla I have seen in some footage that we showed last night at the film fest here, Coco. If some of you are old enough to remember Coco, is the chimp who some 20 years ago was said to gorilla, gorilla, I'm sorry gorilla, I was thinking about the tear, the gorilla, thank you, who some 20 years ago had a tear in her eye when her kitten died. Well, she's now 20 years older. She's a good 400 pound. She's very solid. And I was watching her and I said, one of the problems, isn't it? One of the problems, isn't it? Is that at least in my household, my five and seven pound Siamese get out of the way when I walk in. What happens when you live with a large animal? Where are the boundaries for you? What is the fear? Can you live with these creatures, Sue? And when she asked me that question, I said I have no fear. Just as I have no fear of my fellow human beings, I have no fear of apes. And I think part of the reason is because one of the very first times that I was around apes, I lost the end of this finger. It was quite an accident. I didn't even know the ape was in the cage and another ape was under me and I didn't know it was there and it started grabbing my feet and I put my hands on the cage and suddenly this finger was being bitten off. And once you've had a bad bite like that, nothing else scares you. And all apes can really do to scare you is to try to bite you or something like that and as soon as they realize that you're not afraid, there's no difficulty. Thank you. A question. When were your tests conducted and are Kanzi, Tamali and the others still living? If so, where are they? The tests that I showed today were conducted between 1989 and 1995, different times because different apes were reared all through that period. And all of the apes are currently living at the Language Research Center. I didn't mention it in the talk but because as a graduate student in Oklahoma, I had seen what it's like when an ape is reared without access to other apes. I vowed never to rear an ape that way. So even though our apes have had lots of exposure to humans and to the symbol system, they're always kept during other parts of the day on weekends, evenings and many times just during the day with other apes. So all of our bonobos and chimpanzees identify with other creatures of their own kind and their primary social attachments are to them and they are housed in social groups. This would be a good opportunity for members of the panel, should any of you wish to raise a question or to react to Sue's presentation? Takers? On the panel? We're all sitting in awe. I'll take one. Go for it. I'm front is to welcome. My question is, what is the alternative to science as we conduct it? Because you seem to be sort of implying that we should get away from stringent testing of predictions and clear cut hypothesis. I think in your own work you have shown that you do have hypothesis and that you do test them in controlled situations. You wouldn't be putting up the mask, for example, if you weren't interested in controlling certain situations. So I'm not sure that there is an alternative to critically testing particular ideas that we develop. But you seem to be implying that you want to get away from science as we used to conduct it. We have to have critical tests and we have to have hypotheses. I don't mean to get away from that aspect of science. The aspect of science that I think is problematic in behavior is the observer stance that we can study behavior from the outside rather than from being an interactant. And an animal such as Kanzi could not have been created if I did not interact with Kanzi. It was because I interacted with him that he learned to understand spoken language and I then was able to learn something about him. And I was able to change my understanding of bonobos in general and because of that when I was an observer in the wild I was able to see things and look at things with a new eye. So I think we have to give the interactant more of a role than we have in the past but we still have to have some method of validating the kinds of things that we're seeing. I'm not saying that we need to eliminate that entirely. Another question from the audience. Have you ever tried communicating with apes using music? No, but we hope to do that in the future. I have to say that working with apes has been a constant education for me. I've consistently underestimated their capacities. When we began with Kanzi and his mother Matata we were only trying to teach six symbols and Kanzi's first keyboard had six symbols on it and we added them a few at a time. And any of you seeing the keyboard now knows it has hundreds of symbols and that still isn't enough and where I had to start over I probably should use a phonetic system. But what you do very, very early on has enormous consequences later. So if the chimps are exposed to those symbols from the time they're babies by six months or a year they can visually recognize all those symbols on the board. They can tell them in any location they can easily tell them apart. If they're not reared with visual exposure and auditory exposure to those symbols and you try to get them to differentiate between two of those geometric symbols from the time they're four or five years of age it takes hundreds, thousands of trials to make that visual discrimination which comes without effort if they're exposed to such symbols at infancy. So now I wish there were opportunity to expose the young ape to music to art to all kinds of things that we formerly considered uniquely human but I think it's probably not best to do that with Kanzi and Pambanesha but to start with young apes. And I have somewhat of a conflict in my own mind now about such rearing experiments with young apes. How do they, I think we mean Kanzi or Sherman or Austin deal with instruction that can't be carried out such as being told to find a picture that isn't on the table? Sometimes they guess. Sometimes like you saw Tamoli do they refuse to do anything. Sometimes they hand you one that's kind of like the right one. There's no clear and simple way. It's very hard here to be sure one has heard correctly what was said by somebody just one space over because of the sound system is hard to appear in front but if I heard you correctly Sue you said you are experiencing conflict about some of the training and so on that you are administering. Would you talk about that a little bit more? What I have in mind is it seems to me that probably you, well not probably even it seems to me obviously you are bringing out of these apes. You are bringing these apes into behavioral possibilities that they would not have otherwise had. It's an educational process for them. So that's the positive side. What's the conflictual aspect of that? Why does that give you, what worries you about that? What makes you uncomfortable about bringing them to a stage that they would not otherwise be able to have on their own? Because they can't actualize that stage when they become adults because they're considered apes. So for example we have 50 acres of woods around our lab but Kanzi can't roam freely in it not because he's ever left it not because he's ever done anything wrong but because he might do something wrong because he's an ape. People are asking is it really proper for me to even take Kanzi and Panbenesha out on a lead in the forest because now they're so big and certainly I shouldn't take the two of them out together they might overpower me not because they've ever done anything wrong not because they've ever ran away but because they're apes. So increasingly as they get bigger they become confined by how we view them not by their actions and this is unfair and to raise other apes and to bring them to that level of understanding of human beings is hard. They look at us and they wonder why we treat them the way we do now when we gave them so much freedom when they were young and I don't have any good answer to that question. Problem is ours. How long have humans known about bonobos? They were first identified by Schwartz in 1929 I think. The first real information came in the very early 70s when Dr. Kano of Japan established a field site in Wamba and I began some research on them at the Yerkes primate center. So really only I guess in the last 20 some years have we started to discover the bonobos. Your research with Kanzi and his mother suggest critical periods in language development. What is your understanding of the limits of language development and the critical periods for language development? In our lab if the apes are much older than three they seem to have a great deal of difficulty picking up the English easily or discriminating between two symbols that look alike. We have found that with continued effort now two of the young apes, Tamolia Nima who weren't exposed at an early age, have begun to pick up a few symbols. They know three or four symbols now and can understand three or four words but this is in dramatic contrast to Kanzi and Paminisha. It can understand hundreds or probably thousands of words. The best fix we have on it is that the first two and a half to maybe three years of life seem critical. Are any attempts being made to teach bonobos or chimps in a language other than English? No, I wish that there were. They make more vowel-like sounds. They have difficulty making consonants and a language that has tonal changes such as Chinese or many vowel sounds such as Hawaiian might be something that could be more easily acquired or at least more easily produced by a bonobo than English. With Pansy and her companion could a different could different pictures of a hammer be recognized? That is, did you find generalization? Yes, different pictures, pictures in any angle easily can be recognized the first time they're seen and we usually use 10 or 15 pictures, different pictures of each item. Do the animals recognize you as a female and thus treat you so according to their law if I translated correctly? Yes, they clearly distinguish not only me as a female but all individuals whether they're male or female and males are typically responded to with more rough and aggressive play and females are typically responded to with smiles and quieter grooming kinds of interactions. This question might equally well be addressed to Dr. Kaufman. I'll give you first crack. Is it, it is conventional to say that only men in quotes knows that he will die. Is there any evidence that apes understand death the way humans understand death, Sue? Apes in our lab have not had a lot of opportunity to experience death. They have unfortunately had a lot of opportunity to experience being anesthetized with LSD like drugs because that's what the vets use. So I'm not sure that they understand the difference or that they understand when an ape is drugged and carted away. They don't like it when that happens and they make lots of fearful vocalizations. Also apes sometimes are just taken to another place for no reasons that they can understand. Maybe decided that they should be moved to another institution. Such decisions happen completely beyond my control. So our apes don't have a natural environment in which to understand death and I think that question has to be asked by the people who work in the wild and I think Jane Goodall's examples of flow and flint are the best that I know about this kind of thing. Obviously it's not correct that I could as well have been addressed to me as to Sue because I really don't know anything about how animals might respond to death. But one thing that has struck me is how well she may reject this I don't know but how well the picture that she presented to us this morning fits into the one that or fits with the one that I was presenting yesterday afternoon that it is our extensive long historical cultural development that is the primary difference. In fact as Sue said something of that kind that it was culture that distinguished us rather than biology so much. And what what Sue is doing it seems to me is beginning to give these animals with which she works a cultural base which could become a historical base with over over some generations and a kind of animal culture might an animal history thus of a similar sort to ours might come about. Would you respond to that making a sense to you Sue? Does that seem to or am I misrepresenting what you're doing? Well no I don't think you're misrepresenting it. Our bonobos have a different history in a different culture than bonobos in the wild. Bonobos in the wild have a history and they have and they have a culture and bonobo groups probably differ with their histories and their cultures. All our work does is show that the bonobos have the capacity though not as extensive as that of humans they have the capacity for those things. Panel members? Anything, Duane? I'd just like to make a comment with regard to capacity. We can think of reinforcing responses for those of you who want to take a traditional behavioral framework but you can't think in terms of conditioning a capacity. A capacity might be cultivated, it might be nurtured but it can't be put there by reinforcement. You could never condition me or a canary to be competent let's say as a homing pigeon so it's important to differentiate between the depositing of a potential, a capacity as being then something that can be cultivated to provide for these kinds of behaviors. Is kissing a natural behavior of bonobo chimps bonobos or chimps or was it taught by humans? Dare we anticipate this afternoon speakers? I think Fran showed a slide yesterday of chimpanzees kissing. Chimpanzees kiss and bonobos kiss and I don't think it was taught by us. Well bonobos are special in that they don't kiss and certainly we don't teach them that. We're trying to hear exactly what he said, it seems very... It was a bit naughty, I'll repeat it. That's the promise I was fishing for, Fran. Thank you, thank you. Any man that can talk about missionaries with such eloquence must be listened to with great care. By the way, let me make clear that if I have said anything that might be construed as suggesting that science should veer away from tough-minded consideration of key questions, that is not what I had in mind but the subject objectivity distinction that we have made and the sort of atomistic way that we have come to describe learning as only stimulus response conditioned could be broadened just a little. So it's not the methodologies of science but the mythology of science, if you will, if I can introduce that word that I think will have to change as one or that is changing. I'm sorry, that's a better word, is changing. The whether or not we humans would allow ourselves to even recognize that animals had feelings was I suspect part of the rejection of Coco's tear in the scientific community some 20 years ago and we're still not sure as a human society whether we want to admit that. It's not a matter of science so much to demonstrate that as our willingness to attribute certain kinds of meanings to words and concepts. Any last things from the panel? We will reconvene, I haven't let you go quite yet. Oh, I should, before I say we'll convene, may I make an announcement, a very, very important one. There was an album of photos of a Bonobo colony in Milwaukee that has been removed from the exhibit by the people who have come from Milwaukee. This was an error, it's a mistake, somebody has it in their possession, perhaps not even realizing that they have it. Can you please return that or if you know of anyone who has seen a photo album of Bonobos to return to the exhibit from Milwaukee, the student who needs those must be leaving for home very, very soon. So would you please look around, check in your belongings to see if by chance you picked this up and return it. This afternoon we will be talking a great deal more, I think, though I haven't asked specifically about Bonobos in the wild. It turns out as I hinted earlier there are people whose research is not even well known in the United States, it should be, it's beginning to be and I promise you a continued exciting afternoon. Remember also the art exhibit at the Gustavus Gallery, basically the very south end of this campus. The art department has put together a very interesting program. See you this afternoon, 1.30 or before.