We can make attributions, but those are very, very suspect. He wrote his own book about Project Nim, and he's the person you would talk to about the science of the project and his conclusions.
But I put his actions in the context of the people who were doing most of the work, and therefore looked at those power relations between him and women such as Laura Ann [Petitto] and Joyce [Butler], and how those played out. In my telling of the tale he has an equal status with the other people, and that's how it should be. But it wasn't. He was born in a cage in Oklahoma, in a breeding facility for chimpanzees. Very shortly afterwards, he was abducted from his mother.
The whole premise was that if you brought up a newborn primate of intelligence with humans, could you essentially inhibit his primate behaviour and give him human language?
There were lots of children. Stephanie was an experienced mother. She brought him up for around 18 months, in her home, as if he were a human child, but Stephanie quickly understood that Nim's nature was way more powerful than anything we could do to inhibit it. Within a couple of months he could scoot around the house, and in a few more months he could climb the walls.
And yet he had nappies and was vulnerable and needed to be fed. But very quickly, his physical attributes emerged. Though he wasn't a human baby he was certainly treated as one, and that's the whole idea, to find out if nurture of an alien species would make him like us. Does that work? Well, I think the answer is in the film. For the purposes of the experiment, he wanted Nim to be a sterile box being drilled with language.
And she said that's against his nature, why don't we try to find some middle ground, but she didn't prevail, and he was taken away from her. I think that she was trying to get with what Nim is, as opposed to what others were trying to make him. I have a lot of time for her approach. You can laugh at giving him a beer or a puff on a joint, or letting him scoot around on a motorcycle.
But at the same time that felt like it was more in his nature than putting him in a classroom and teaching him language. He embraced those things much more!
The family did not limit their communications to sign language when Nim was present and La Farge did not even begin to communicate with Nim using signs until he was three months old—an inauspicious start, given that infant chimpanzees develop more rapidly than humans.
In other respects, Nim was treated as a new human addition to the family, dressed in human clothes, fed what the family ate, and most importantly, loved and cuddled as a human baby would have been. Once the teaching began, Nim did pick up some signs. LaFarge and Petitto obviously did not get on. Nim was moved to a large mansion owned by Columbia University, where he had plenty of space, and where Petitto and two other teachers and carers could also live, while others came as visitors, giving him regular signing lessons.
But Nim was getting stronger, and at times, quite aggressive. He attacked Petitto several times—in the film she shows the location of one bite that needed 37 stitches, and of another that hit a tendon. That may have made her think of leaving, but as she tells the story to the camera, it seems that a brief romantic involvement with Terrace—and the abrupt way he then ended the relationship—was the most significant factor.
She detached herself from the project, and was replaced by Joyce Butler, who had come to the project to write her undergraduate thesis on Nim. Now she became his third surrogate mother.
That, combined with difficulties in raising further funds, led Terrace to decide to end the project after only four years.
Terrace called the group together and told them that they already had ample data that needed analyzing and there was no point in continuing. But where should Nim go? From the time he was taken from his mother, he had never known another chimpanzee. He had lived with humans, worn human clothing, and eaten human food. When sorting photos of humans and apes, he placed his own photo among the humans. He had never lived in a cage. Yet Terrace sent him back to the primate research center in Oklahoma.
Terrace visited Nim there a year later for a pre-arranged photo shoot. Winter came and I did not see Nim for a long time. I tried to visit him on my own with my larger dog Harvey in tow by sneaking through the grand gates at the Delafield Estate after a snowfall.
It was a foolish move. Harvey nearly drowned in an icy pond as he desperately tried to hold on to the sides with his paws. Someone from inside the house came and helped us and sent me and my nearly freezing dog home.
But I was not deterred from wondering what had happened to Nim. As time went on, I was told Nim was too old to play with me safely. As a teenager these things do not register. In our one and only attempt, however, someone from the house came out and discovered us and we fled for our lives. We knew it was our last rescue mission and I never saw Nim again. I was in such visceral pain as I watched his journey into hell after having been raised as a human child that I wondered if the human race had lost its collective mind.
I was inconsolably crying, keening. At age 47 I was diagnosed with an extremely rare disease, a form of periodic paralysis that sometimes renders me entirely helpless.
The behaviorists led one camp, and said that language could be taught and learned by other intelligent, non-human species. The opposing camp, led by Chomsky, insisted that language was a human product and there were parts of it that non-human species could never ape. Terrace, who still does research on primate intelligence at Columbia, had heard stories about another precocious chimpanzee named Washoe, who lived with her scientist "parents" at the University of Nevada in Reno and had been taught to communicate through American Sign Language.
Terrace wanted to raise young Nim among people, just as Washoe had been brought up, but scrupulously log his progress and learning abilities. If chimpanzees could in fact master elements of human language, he wanted to be sure how they did it, and how well they picked it up.
It wasn't speech that Terrace was after: The vocal cords of chimpanzees weren't designed to replicate human speech. But if the behaviorists were correct, chimps, our nearest genetic relatives, should be able to learn and communicate using the grammatical rules and expressive elements that American Sign Language and spoken languages shared if they were brought up among people. So, at the age of 2 weeks, Nim Chimpsky was put in the foster care of Terrace's student, Stephanie LaFarge, who lived with her family in Manhattan.
LaFarge, who even breast-fed Nim, would be the first of a string of chimp-sitters who tried to teach him American Sign Language. Laura-Ann Petitto, then an undergraduate at Columbia, would be next. She raised Nim from the time he was 3 months old until he was 4 years old.
At first, the results were astonishing. Nim learned quickly, and his caretakers — Terrace's small army of students — carefully recorded reams of video and pages of notes describing Nim's signs and behavior. In all, Nim learned words, and used them to communicate with thousands and thousands of phrases.
0コメント