Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Page B

University, had been expressing strongly negative views on ape-language research. And in May 1980 he organized a conference under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences, which made his position brutally clear. The conference was called “The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People.” Clever Hans was a horse that performed apparently amazing arithmetical feats in nineteenth-century music halls. The putative equine genius would tap its hoof the appropriate number of times in response to a puzzle asked of him by his owner, Wilhelm Von Osten. Unbeknownst to the innocent Von Osten, however, a barely perceptible movement of his head when Hans reached the right number cued the horse to stop tapping. The phenomenon, besides revealing how extremely sensitive animals can be to body language, showed how easy it is for a human to cue an animal unwittingly, thus shaping its behavior. Useful in the music hall, cuing can disrupt the objectivity of research on animal behavior.
    Ape-language research is prey to the Clever Hans effect, or worse, opined Sebeok. The results of the research are to be explained as a result of “unconscious bias, self-deception, magic, and circus performance,” 3 he said six months before the New York conference. Conference participants included experts on the tricks of animal performers and a magician, the Amazing Randi. It was “a celebration of deception in all its varieties,” a reporter for
Science
noted. “It was amazing that any ape-language researchers should even have considered stepping into such a lions’ den.” 4 Many such researchers, having accepted a preliminary invitation, dropped out when the tenor of the gathering became obvious. Step into it Duane and I did, however, mainly at his insistence. He wanted to demonstrate that not only did we have courage, but we also had good data. We would stand on our data, our research methods, and our convictions.
    It didn’t matter how good our data were, however. The atmosphere was so very negative that the issue was effectively prejudged. For instance, the first speaker, Heini Hediger, of theUniversity of Zurich, declared it “amazing” that anyone would seriously consider that nonhuman animals might display elements of human language. In his presentation, Sebeok suggested that funding for the work should be halted, and perhaps dispersed to more worthy causes, like cancer research. There was even a move, fortunately thwarted, to have the conference vote for a ban on the research. This was reminiscent of a ban on the study of the origin of language, instigated by the Linguistic Society of Paris, in 1866.
    Sebeok, with Jean Umiker-Sebeok, had circulated a manuscript that was highly critical of all ape-language research and contained much that was inflammatory. “Thus we find the ape ‘language’ researchers replete with personalities who believe themselves to be acting according to the most exalted motivations and sophisticated manners, but in reality have involved themselves in the most rudimentary circus-like performances,” they wrote, a remark that
Science
noted was “hardly best calculated to brush up their colleagues the right way.”
Science
was right. We were further brushed the wrong way with the following: “The principal investigators themselves, of course, require success in order to obtain continued financial support for the project, as well as personal recognition and career advancement. . . .” 5
    At a press conference at the end of the meeting, Sebeok expressed his view most stridently of all: “In my opinion, the alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by [Herbert] Terrace.” Pressed by reporters, Sebeok declined to present any evidence to substantiate his accusation of fraud. Whatever motives lay behind such remarks, and behind the initiative for a vote to ban the research, they hardly