[This is an expanded version of an article originally published in a local newspaper in January of 2008.]
For many years now, my wife and I have been hosting a New Year's Eve party. At the stroke of midnight, we pop the Champagne, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and offer a series of toasts to “Absent Friends” - people of note who shuffled off this mortal coil during the dying year.
The honored dead are usually celebrities of varying degrees of renown along with, on a few sad occasions, folks who were part of what we refer to as our “Extended Family”. This year, though, was unique because the list included two celebrities who weren't people at all: Alex and Washoe.
Alex, an African Grey parrot, and Washoe, a chimpanzee, were notable for their abilities to use language in ways that most of us humans assume are unique to us. In doing so, they helped psychologists and linguists better understand how language works. They also reminded us Homo sapiens types that we may not be quite as special as we like to think we are.
Of the two, Alex presents the more remarkable history. Most parrots can mimic human speech and other sounds, but what set Alex apart was his apparent understanding of what his 150-word vocabulary meant. He could identify shapes and colors and, as noted in the bird's New York Times obit, “he could express frustration, or apparent boredom, and his cognitive and language skills appeared to be about as competent as those in trained primates.”
Alex's last words - spoken to his trainer/mentor Dr. Irene Pepperberg as she covered his cage the night before his death - were: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”
Washoe the chimp had been something of a celebrity for decades. I first heard of her accomplishments in a graduate school learning theory class. Adopted by psychologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner, Washoe was taught to communicate with the Gardners, their students and, later, with other chimps using American Sign Language (ASL), the dominant sign language used by the Deaf community in the USA.
The Gardners used ASL because they felt that chimps lacked the physical apparatus to produce human speech. If chimps could communicate via ASL, it would suggest (among other things) that Noam Chomsky's assertion that linguistic ability was “hard wired” into humans alone might not be accurate.
Washoe succeeded admirably. By the time of her death, she had a working vocabulary of 250 signs and had even begun to pass on her knowledge to her son Louis. She used them, moreover, in ways that suggested an understanding of the concepts underlying the words. She communicated, in short, in ways that were strikingly human.
Not all scientists agreed on the significance of the accomplishments of Washoe and Alex, of course. Skeptics included not only Chomsky but also the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker and semiotician Thomas Sebeok. And that's as it should be. A single case, striking as it may be, is significant only if it can be replicated; that's how science works.
And yet: those final words from Alex are haunting, and fraught with possibilities. If chimps, apes and even parrots are capable of something approximating human thought and feeling, what does the way we treat them say about us? Even more to the point: what are the moral implications of destroying their habitat for nothing more profound than our convenience and profit? Is it merely another form of “ethnic cleansing”?
We are not the captains of Spaceship Earth, only passengers. If Alex and Washoe are any indication, we should start treating our fellow travelers with a little more respect.
