Talking apes, Whale clicks and painting elephants
Do animal have rational communication
Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's monumental book "Only Man Bears his Image"
This is one of 4 articles on the role of animals in the coming deception.
- Animal mediums and communication with humans
- Animal personhood refutation
- Are dancing bees rational?
- Talking whales and apes, elephants that paint (this article)
Innumerable claims circulate today insisting that various animal species truly display the ability to reason and freely choose, thus giving “evidence of their personhood.” A rigorous application of scrutiny to each will either reveal the source of the deception or will reveal that the claimant (perhaps the animal’s trainer, the scientist undertaking the study, the pet’s owner, etc.) is not allowing scrutiny applied to the very point of contention that would need to be shared in order to justify his claim.
Elephant that paints picture(s)
A YouTube video of a painting elephant currently has 22 million views. We reviewed several hundred (over 40,000) comments to get a sense of where most people stood after watching the clip. Most viewers (who did not simply express ridiculous outrage that an elephant was being “enslaved”) only stood in awe of this animal’s “intelligence.”
Of the hundreds of comments we reviewed only one perceived the deception and wrote,
“I would like to see what the handler is doing whilst the beast paints.”
Indeed, the video’s angle (which, incidentally, also appears to be the only angle from which the crowd was allowed to watch) was quite convenient. The handler stood directly adjacent to the elephant, but in such a position that he could not be seen, with the animal blocking the view. Now, clearly this elephant was very well trained and had “painted” this picture many times before.
More clearly still, however, is that this trainer was simply continuously, if subtly, guiding it to generate the curves which he had trained the animal to obediently trace out in response to various pressures he exerted on the animal’s head. The brush may well have been stuck into the end of the elephant’s trunk, but the design of the picture that emerged had its origin purely in the mind and deeds of the trainer. There was not the slightest hint of creativity, reason, or will, being displayed by this “painting elephant,” nor are these qualities displayed by any other animal in any other circumstance.
Silly viral videos are one matter, but the academic and scientific charades used to promote the Animal Personhood Deception are quite another. They are much more subtle and often involve not merely sleight of hand but downright fraud, conspiracy, and decades of collaborated deceptions. As talking (language) is among the most obvious indications that humans possess reason while animals (lacking language) do not, most academic efforts to argue animals are persons centralize around linguistics.
Koko the talking gorilla
Most have likely heard of the supposedly talking (that is, sign-language-using) gorilla, Koko—the whole affair was extraordinarily well publicized and very strategically orchestrated to give the impression of authenticity. What far fewer are aware of is that the whole thing was a charade based almost entirely on the testimonies of the animal’s handler, Francine Patterson, who “interpreted for the gorilla” (which, in reality, was not unlike a small child “interprets for” his imaginary friend). Patterson, however, had a PhD, and she published several academic articles about this “intelligent” and “language using” gorilla, and virtually every mainstream publication gobbled up her nonsensical “academic” claims. Most people today appear to remain under the delusion that Koko really did employ language and really did rationally use this language to convey its “thoughts.”
TIME magazine, for example, gushed that this ape and its handler supposedly proved that humans are only special in that “evolution spotted us the hardware of speech: vocal chords, a palate, a tongue and lips,” and that other animals could also make their “thoughts” known if only they were taught sign language, so as to reveal their “extraordinary minds” to us.[410] And just as with “painting elephants,” so with this “sign language using” ape, YouTube videos supposedly giving evidence for such claims have racked up tens of millions of views. (The comments on them are too predictable to relay here.) Robin Williams shared his encounters with the gorilla on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Koko even made an appearance on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. The “talking” ape was a sensation.
Yet, when the gorilla died in 2018, world-renowned linguist, Dr. Geoffrey Pullum, addressed the deception in an article entitled “Koko is Dead, but the Myth of Her Linguistic Skills Lives On.” He began it by bluntly observing:
One area outshines all others in provoking crazy talk about language in the media, and that is the idea of language acquisition in nonhuman species...[when the gorilla died] Many obituaries appeared, and the press indulged as never before in sentimental nonsense about talking with the animals. Credulous repetition of Koko’s mythical prowess in sign language was everywhere...[But] as always with the most salient cases of purported ape signing, Koko was flailing around producing signs at random in a purely situation-bound bid to obtain food from her trainer, who was in control of a locked treat cabinet. The fragmentary and anecdotal evidence about Koko’s much-prompted and much-rewarded sign usage was never sufficient to show that the gorilla even understood the meanings of individual signs... Just watch video of a [human] sign interpreter for a minute, and then view some of the available footage of Koko’s alleged signing. There is no resemblance at all.
Dr. Pullum proceeds to point out how even the most supposedly remarkable of Koko’s signed “sentences” (none were actual sentences) were utterly bereft of meaning—even if we take Patterson’s word for what transpired.
Now, as any dog owners knows, animals will, over time, associate certain sounds with certain realities. Soon, the owner will find the dog going wild with excitement when it hears the word “walk!” They can follow commands when trained and even remember various impressive tasks. Equally obviously, animals can seek to relay their desires to their owners. Dogs manage to “ask” their owners to be fed, to be taken outside to urinate, etc.
This is achieved purely by way of correlating one thing with another—much like how AI-driven LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) operate. However, just as AI lacks all understanding and reason, so too animals have no such faculties. At most, animals can mash together multiple desires at a time in what they relay to their owners—like LLMs mashing together text they have scraped from databases to form paragraphs. But in neither case is there any rational reflection upon the meanings of terms, or any understanding of what the circumstances demand, or any intellectual formation of a response. Instead, with animals it is always pure instinct (even if carefully trained instinct), and with AI it is always pure algorithm (even if carefully programmed algorithms).
Dr. Pullum concludes his article with a diagnosis of the present feverish desire of the masses and the mainstream to be told animals are persons:
Koko never said anything: never made a definite truth claim, or expressed a specific opinion, or asked a clearly identifiable question. Producing occasional context-related signs, almost always in response to Patterson’s cues, after years of intensive reward-based training, is not language use. Not even if it involves gestures that a genuine signer could employ in language use. [Unfortunately, however,] neither journalists nor laypeople will ever be convinced of that. Such is their yearning to believe that Koko had mastered language, and had things to say, and shared those things with Penny [Francine] Patterson. They want to believe these things, and they will not be denied. Moreover, they will accuse me ... of being an arrogant, hyperskeptical, human-biased speciesist, contemptuous of ape abilities. But I would love to learn about the experiences and opinions of nonhuman primates through direct conversation with them. Unfortunately, all that was established by Penny Patterson’s years of devotion to training Koko was that we are not going to have that opportunity.
Here we have a secular scholar who openly professes (contrary to Christian truth!) that he would “love” to learn of the “opinions” of apes. (In fact, apes have no opinions.) No one, therefore, can claim his stance is merely ideological. This scholar simply takes his field of study seriously, and from that posture of intellectual honesty, he has discovered how deceived is the entire movement which treats even the most advanced of animals as genuinely language-using creatures.
Let us turn to another scholar of similar persuasion. While there are plenty of devout Christians whose writings I could defer to in demonstrating the present thesis, I am instead drawing from entirely secular experts in these fields—just as I did with respect to the ET and AI Deceptions—so that no one can accuse me of promoting “academically inbred” conclusions. The truth is that even if we leave aside Christian teaching for a moment, any honest and rigorous application of purely secular scrutiny will reveal the thoroughly fraudulent nature of supposing that either AI or animals exhibit reason. Dr. Stephen Anderson is a leading researcher and professor of linguistics who has taught at Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere.
He has been professionally active in linguistics since 1969. Ideologically, he appears an entirely typical modern secular scholar. I have found no trace of Christianity in particular, or God and religion in general, in his writings. His worldview is based not on acknowledging God’s design, but rather on pretending evolution generated the various species we see in the world. Nevertheless, he took his field of study seriously. And from even his insights—deriving from one who has no “incentive” whatsoever to argue for human uniqueness—we see demonstrated the futility of pretending animals can display that fundamentally and uniquely human trait of language. Note that the tone in the passage which follows clearly evidences one who sees no principled a priori reason to categorically distinguish between humans and non-humans. (He merely comes to the conclusion that humans are unique.) He appears (wrongly, of course) entirely open to the proposition that animals use language, yet after a careful application of academic scrutiny to even the most extreme cases, he concludes there is no evidence of this. Dr. Anderson writes:
Most of the ape utterances of which we have any serious record are certainly instrumental: they are ways to get food or treats. Sue Savage Rumbaugh stresses the fact that Kanzi [another supposedly language using ape] asks to have other people chase each other but, as Joel Wallman suggests, either bonobos have a more diffuse sense of reward or Kanzi is simply ‘‘a chimpanzee with strange tastes.’’ In most cases, Kanzi’s utterances too are intended to get something.
Kanzi’s ability to use manual gestures and his keyboard, and also to recognize spoken English words, is extraordinarily impressive; but the utterances he produces still do not involve comments on things that have (or have not, or might have) happened, questions, and so on. Reported instances of signing and keyboard pressing (or in Alex’s case [a supposedly language using grey parrot], vocalizing) when alone, which abound in the literature but remain anecdotal, are minimal exceptions...Both Kanzi and Alex, and to some extent a few of the chimpanzees, express their desire for things that are not in fact presently visible. This is still a long way from an animal’s telling us a story about another animal she met last week, or even about the one we both know is in the next room. The ability of any animal to use symbols in a way that is completely independent of the presence of what they refer to has not been solidly established to date... The fact that some chimpanzees indicate tickling of someone else by making the tickling sign on that individual is a matter of making it more iconic in a way that does not correspond to what happens with signs in any natural signed (human) language... we have no reason to believe that any ape has ever picked up on this or any other systematic aspect of the internal structure of signs... it is precisely syntax, in this open-ended, unbounded, recursive, fully productive sense, that no ape, parrot, dolphin, or any other animal has been shown to control—either naturally, or with arbitrarily extensive training... many key aspects of the syntactic systems of natural languages are significantly underdetermined by the evidence available to the language learner. These properties are nevertheless found universally—not just in some languages, but apparently in all, and not just after exposure to education, but in unwritten languages as well. The most plausible assumption, to my mind, is that these are aspects of the cognitive organization human children bring to the task of language acquisition. Since no other species seems to be able to do the same, it appears that the syntactic principles of Universal Grammar are a part of specifically human biology ... [it is] a uniquely human faculty...Humans are indeed unique...[411]
Now, Anderson charts out a view wherein he grants some animals the ability to—with intensive human training—understand abstract symbols, but not use language in a meaningful sense because of their inability to manage syntax. While I certainly grant the latter, I do not intend to voice any agreement here with the former. My only purpose in quoting Dr. Anderson is to highlight his deft refutations of animal language in general, not to endorse all the aspects of his own solution.
Another popular claim made with respect to so-called animal languages is the “Dance of the Bees.” Many claim bees really do rationally comprehend matters, and relay their understanding to other bees (e.g., regarding how to find certain flowers). This, as with all animal-language claims, is thoroughly false. We have an article on dancing bees here.
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