Cartesian Delusions

Gorillas, Woodland Park Zoo

"Back To Africa", the final chapter in Roger Fouts', Next Of Kin extends many challenges to humanity. The foremost being, the inclusive expansion of our moral universal sphere. Encouraging us to give up the illusion of godlike superiority, Fouts, like Goodall before him, sees chimps and other great apes as the means to breakdown the barriers we humans have erected in order to better the circumstances, not just for chimps, but for all the species of the world as well. 

Speaking with genuine sincerity and compassion, Fouts expertly persuades the reader to reconsider some very ingrained assumptions. I often have difficulty when reading about captive apes. In all honesty, it makes me cry. When confronted with the overwhelming evidence of language in chimps, I find it very difficult to see how linguists like Gnome Chomsky can even think of refuting it. Sorry Chomsky, THEY TALK!! 

As  Washoe's original caregiver, Dr. R. Allen Gardner put it,

Truly discontinuous, all-or-non phenomena must be rare in nature. Historically, the great discontinuities have turned out to be conceptual barriers rather than natural phenomena. They have been passed by and abandoned rather than broken through in the course of scientific progress. The sign language studies in chimpanzees ... have neither sought nor discovered a means of breathing humanity into the soul of a beast. They have assumed instead that there is no discontinuity between verbal behavior and the rest of human behavior or between human behavior and the rest of animal behavior -- no barrier to be broken, no chasm to be bridged, only unknown territory to be explored. (R. Gardner et al. 1989, p. xvii)

and that's all I really have to say about that.