“We spent most of our evolutionary history surrounded by other beings, not having conquered the earth, and with a very limited material culture,” Stern says. “There are tremendous emotional costs to becoming the only act in town, costs that I think we feel in how we relate to one another and how we think about who we are. One way to look at these draconian, absurd experiments [on animals] going on all over the world is to see them as a symptom of that.”
In March of 2016, a group of scientists reported a discoveryfrom the forests of central Japan. Writing in Nature Communications, Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki and his team announced that compositional syntax, the property of speech that enables it to “express limitless meanings,” was not unique to human languages. It had been observed in the vocal system of a bird. The paper sparked a flurry of tweets. It was also picked up the popular press, and for good reason. Given the putative role of syntax in expressing higher order thought in humans, its presence in an avian vocal system suggested that when a bird sings it is not simply naming a stimulus in its immediate environment but, rather, expressing a thought.
“It’s amazing, the parts of yourself you can reach [writing fiction],” Stern says. “It’s an endless surprise, and that’s part of what makes it frightening.”
If you travel to Des Moines, Iowa and drive about 20 minutes southeast of the city center, you’ll find a large, unassuming cement complex with fenced in grounds. You’d never know it, but inside are five bonobos — including the world-famous 38-year-old Kanzi — thought to be the only remaining nonhuman apes capable of communicating verbally with humans. Not only have the bonobos in Iowa been shown to understand thousands of English words, but they are also capable of expressing wishes, plans, and opinions by pointing to pictograms developed by our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, as part of her extraordinarily ambitious thirty-year investigation into their minds. (Bonobos are humanity’s closest living relatives — an egalitarian, matriarchal cousin of the chimp, sometimes called the “make love, not war” ape.) The investigation has been polarizing among researchers who study language in recent years.
“We define humanness mostly by what other beings, typically apes, are not,” Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says. “With Darwinian theory, this idea that we were special because God created us special had to be put aside. And so language became, in a way, the replacement for religion.”
Our guest, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, is a primatologist who has received global recognition for her contributions to the field of animal cognition and psychology. She is the author or co-author of over 180 scientific articles and of eight books, including Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind and the forthcoming Dialogues on the Human Ape with Laurent Dubreuil. Her numerous awards include honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Missouri State University, recognition from TIME magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2011, and selection by the Millennium Project as the author of one of the 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century. She currently teaches at Missouri State University and serves as president of the Bonobo Hope Initiative.
