Customer Reviews

Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind

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This is an important, if somewhat defensive book. I would have been much more interested to read more about Kanzi's day to day behavior and to see some actual scientific data instead of the story of the investigator's scientific publishing woes. Nevertheless, this book should be read widely and it's message that we humans are not as unique as we like to think needs careful consideration by all scientists and the general population.

This wonderful book by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin forces the reader to reevaluate what it means to be human. Kanzi is a remarkable ape that has revolutionized our understanding of how our closest relatives think, how our common ancestors may have evolved, and why we may not be as different as once supposed. Roger and Sue's collaboration is very readable and conveys the excitement of Sue's scientific research and Kanzi's remarkable talents

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (born 1946) is a primatologist most famous for her work with two bonobos, Kanzi and Mulika, investigating their apparent use of "Great Ape language" using lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. She is also the co-author of Apes, Language, and the Human Mind. In this 1994 book, she and science writer Roger Lewin have summarized her research at teaching chimpanzees to use a specially-designed keyboard to communicate with trainers.

She writes of her early concerns, "This absence of full comprehension in language-trained apes was, I felt strongly, a more fundamental criticism of ape-language research than the absence of syntax, as demonstrated by Terrace. Cooperative comprehension is fundamental to language, and two-way communication that does not reflect comprehension is not language, no matter what other attributes it may possess."

She details her reaction to an attack on such ape language work by behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, who "explained that, although the sequence of events might look like 'sustained and natural conversation,' it was in fact the result of strict conditioning procedures." She writes, "One issue that undoubtedly had provoked the behaviorists' attack was my conclusion that Sherman and Austin were exhibiting conscious intentionality during their communication--a clear red flag to those who believe behavior should simply be viewed as responses to external stimuli. As a result I became labeled a cognitive psychologist."

She writes that "Kanzi was clearly doing this (i.e., comprehending language). For so revolutionary a scientific claim as this, a persuasive body of data would be required, and as yet, I had only my notes of what Kanzi had done. Would anyone believe those? Would anyone believe anything without a number of detailed blind tests? I doubted it. I knew that convincing others would be a difficult task, but I also knew that if I were to focus too intently on proving everything Kanzi said or did, I would lose his natural engagement in the language process."

She concludes, "The ease with which Kanzi acquired a facility for symbolic communication not only tells us something about humans, and the assumed uniqueness of the human mind, but also something about apes and their cognitive competence in their natural state... The boundary wall between humans and apes has finally been breached."

As heartbreaking as it is eye-opening, this is an account of trying to conceptually reinsert humans into nature as much as it is the story of remarkable apes. Savage-Rumbaugh convincingly presents not only the bonobo Kanzi, but also his sister Panbanisha and the common chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, as persons in every sense but the arbitrary one of species. Tragically, the author provides a sense of the rich life our cousins lead beneath our noses at the precise moment any opportunity to know these people called apes in their own milieus is being exterminated. Read the book and pass it on.

Animal intelligence is a huge interest of mine. I have read many books about the intelligence of primates, ocean mammals, and birds. This was one of my favorites. Although the author talks about her background and inspiration for a bit longer than I wanted to read at the beginning of the book, she really does a good job in describing her experiences with common and bonobo chimpanzees. The book is a pleasent read and describes both anectodal and scientific based experiences. The anecdotal bits really give you an insight into interactions with chimps and make you feel as if you know the individuals.

This book makes plausible claims that some bonobos have learned to handle language in a way that is approximately as sophisticated as that of a two year old human. But their anecdotal evidence is somewhat hard to evaluate, and they didn't quite convince me that they were careful enough to rule out the possibility that their biases caused them to overestimate the sophistication of Kanzi's understanding.
The book is a bit long-winded about research that Savage-Rumbaugh did before working with Kanzi, and I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't provide more of the anecdote about Kanzi that made the book worth reading. But those anecdotes convinced me that much more is going on than some authors such as Pinker had led me to believe. I still hope for better evidence that will help clarify how much bonobos can understand. But that will be hard, and I don't know how it should be done.