What can other great apes really do?

[Whateverist]

We've got a painting done by a gorilla around here somewhere. No where near as impressive as the paintings I've seen elephants do on youtube.

[Iroscato]

This single picture helped raise my consciousness about apes and their capability a few years back. These guys fell totally silent at the 'funeral' of an elderly female member of their family, with some resting hands on each other's shoulder in consolation. Shit, they showed more compassion than some humans I know...

[Hatshepsut]

I recall Clever Hans, an equine mathematician...

I wouldn't underestimate horses, either. They're very sensitive to tiny signals and have long memories. They can recognize human beings and other horses as individuals and develop bonding relationships with them. It takes a lot of intelligence just to do that.

Really we're putting apes in what is for them a highly artificial situation when we try to get them to use language. They're on our turf now and can't be expected to show a knack for it, and they don't. Many apes flunked out of language school altogether. A 3-year old human can beat the best ape scholar's lifetime achievements when it comes to language. Human cerebral cortices are three times as large as those of apes, with at least 50K years of evolutionary history in modern language-using environments.

But apes have shown themselves smart enough to "figure out" the rudiments of human language and apply this knowledge to novel problems. Some of the experiments you were asking about have in fact been done: Apes "talking" to other apes without a human moderator's assistance, for example. Operant conditioning, as used with Clever Hans, is of course found in rock pigeons, horses, and humans, the difference being the complexity of the stimulus and its target response. Young children won't learn language unless they are exposed to setting which rewards it.

I don't think apes use language in the wild. They don't normally share food, either, though there's an important exception where chimps will share the meat from a monkey one of them has hunted. Iroscato's photo shows that apes, along with elephants, have a peculiar awareness of death. They wouldn't gather around the fence like that if the people were just taking one of them out of the enclosure for a ride.

Christine Kenneally explores some of this in The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Penguin, 2007).

[Cyberman]

I wouldn't underestimate horses, either. They're very sensitive to tiny signals and have long memories. They can recognize human beings and other horses as individuals and develop bonding relationships with them. It takes a lot of intelligence just to do that.

There was a case I read about in which a racehorse developed a pronounced limp, which baffled vets because it didn't seem to have any cause they could determine. Then it was discovered that a stablehand had a gammy leg and the horse was imitating him.

[abaris]

I recall Clever Hans, an equine mathematician.  Took quite a while to figure out just what he was doing.   I'd advise extreme caution and very careful experimental protocol with the great ape communication tests.

Yeah, but Clever Hans lived in the early 20th century. Science has moved mountains since then and nowadays noone would be fooled.

[vorlon13]

We had a cat several years ago that almost learned the hard way not to put too much effort into trying to train the humans.

We noticed as the cat got older, when he woke up, he was taking longer and longer to get moving.  We started fussing, "oh, poor kitty!" and giving him more attention.

Well, the cat figured out the 'game' way faster than we did.  Pretty soon, he is dragging himself around the house, apparently paralyzed in his lower extremities.

Sadly, and with much drama, we had a family meeting, and I was nominated to take the kitty to the vet.

I get the carrier on the exam table, open the door, and the cat takes off like a shot, and escapes the exam room and runs the length of the hallway in about 1 second.

The vet looks at me and says "I don't think he is paralyzed".


Yep, we had trained the cat to be a paraplegic.


He almost got the needle for that trick.



so, I know how sneaky animals can be if they think they have you figured out.

[John V]

Like many others, I would really love if great apes could communicate with us to the extent some claim, but I am skeptical.

What do you all think, how much of this is hype and delusion, and how much of it is real?

After reading a transcript of an interview with Koko, I'm gonna say it's mostly hype.

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/kokotranscript.html

[Pyrrho]

[Hatshepsut]

After reading a transcript of an interview with Koko, I'm gonna say it's mostly hype.

And the hype is coming from language-using humans who declare that language use the gold standard of intelligence.

[ignoramus]

A while ago while on a learning frenzy, I watch a heap of ape docos.
Although they look promising, there are also some huge gaps in their ability to understand simple human concepts which even an infant takes for granted...
It come down to them being inextricably linked to their emotions and basically can never have objectiveness..
(not until another paradigm evolutionary change occurs anyway)