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Apes, language, and the human mind
SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH, STUART G. SHANKER & TALBOT J. TAYLOR New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998
In his diary entry of August 24th, 1661, Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Admiralty, recorded that:
By and by we are called to Sir W. Battens to see the strange creature that Captain Holmes hath brought with him from Guiny; it is a great baboone, but so much like a man in most things, that (although they say there is a Species of them) yet I cannot believe but that it is a monster got of a man and a she-baboone. I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind that it might be tought to speak or make signs.
It seems likely that Pepys had met a chimpanzee. In his Man a machine (1748), Julien de La Mettrie, who thought language the sole significant difference between human and ape, proposed such an experiment, presciently suggesting a young chimpanzee and the use of techniques then employed to teach deaf humans how to communicate. Professors Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor champion the continuity between humans and chimpanzees, especially the more docile bonobos, and, more generally, between humans and mammals (especially domestic pets) and, perhaps, animals in general. The penultimate sentence of their angry and accusatory book reads "[Language] enables man to put himself above the 'beasts' simply by the act of saying to himself, `God gave man dominion over all the creatures that walk the land and all the fish that swim in the sea"' (p. 227). But the biblical God was rather more sweeping than that, in the same sentence also giving man dominion over things that "creepeth over the earth," plants of all sorts "for his bread," and the non-living earth as well. (La Mettrie, as his brazen title suggests, insisted on a much more audacious continuity-indeed, he wrote Man a plant and took to signing his letters "Mr. Machine" as well.) Descartes, whom the authors cast as chief human chauvinist villain but who was nonetheless devoted to his pet dog, noted that we are all prone from an early age to ascribe human like cognitive states to certain attractive mammals but that he could see...