Perhaps you've been wondering lately about the state of research into demonstrating the close kinship between apes and humans by teaching apes how to express themselves in language.
If so, you might be interested in an article by Clive Wynne in Skeptic. Wynne concludes that, contrary to popular misconception, all attempts to teach genuine language to apes have failed.
He notes that:
[T]he French philosopher Ren� Descartes observed that, "it is very remarkable that there are none so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same." Descartes' opinion had survived three centuries unthreatened by possible contradiction....
But then researchers set about in the 1960s and 70s to teach apes to express themselves using signs and symbols. The hope among some was that if apes had the ability to develop language skills of some sort it would provide evidence of our evolutionary relationship. After some initially exciting results enthusiasm subsequently waned, and Wynne concludes:
Descartes was right, there really are no beasts, no matter how fortunately circumstanced, that can make known their thoughts through language. Next time you see [an ape] on a television documentary, turn down the sound so you can just watch what he is doing without interpretation from the ape's trainers. See if that really appears to be language. Somewhere in the history of our kind there must have been the first beings who could rearrange tokens to create new meanings, to distinguish Me Banana from Banana Me. But the evidence from many years of training apes to press buttons or sign in ASL (American Sign Language), is that this must have happened sometime after we split off from chimps, bonobos, and gorillas. Since then we have been talking to ourselves.
The problem is that apes can be taught to manipulate symbols but they cannot be taught (or have not been taught) grammar, which is the essence of language. This appears to be a uniquely human capability and thus the distance between us and our alleged anthropoid cousins seems to widen the more we learn about both them and us.
As we've noted before, it must be frustrating to be a Darwinian materialist nowadays. So little of what science is discovering about the world seems to support that view.
RLC
