Return to the Planet of the Apes

By R.Z. Sheppard

LOOK WHO'S TALKING! by Emily Hahn

Thomas Y. Crowell; 168 pages; $8.95

Since the Fall it has been one rude truth after another. Copernicus elbowed us from celestial stage-center with his observation that the earth revolves around the sun. Darwin opened the closet of evolution to introduce family skeletons that further questioned our singular divinity. Under the damp side of civilized behavior, Freud found the perpetually rutting id.

There was still one salvaging grace: the act of language that distinguished mankind from what Descartes called the bete machine, the instinctual and mechanistic animal unlit by the powers of abstraction or speech.

Or is it? In her 48th book, Emily Hahn surveys the evidence leading to this question and cautiously alights on the side of the monkeys. It is something of a miracle that in Look Who's Talking! she does not end up talking to herself. For the controversial subject of communication between humans and animals can be one long semantic rabbit hole down which any curious Alice can easily lose her orientation. Definitions of language differ among physiologists, behaviorists, linguists and philosophers, with the gloomy Ludwig Wittgenstein once suggesting that even if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Sapient quadrupeds and "talking" lesser primates could also challenge a sacred precept of Western culture: that man is superior to nature.

Hahn keeps her professional distance and differentiates between communication that is characterized by animal instinct and communication that is conceptual and learned from humans. A parrot that asks for a cracker is only mimicking a human or another parrot. But a chimpanzee who can "speak" in Ameslan (American sign language) or Yerkish by striking combinations on a keyboard of color-coded symbols seems to be creating syntax, a property of human language. It is not the voice but the process that is critical.

Yet the process has been difficult to identify. At the turn of the century, a horse called Clever Hans gave demonstrations of reading and factoring. By nodding and shaking his head and by tapping his hoof, Hans answered questions put to him by his owner, a German mathematics teacher. The animal's fame spread, until an examining board of skeptics discovered that Hans was cued by the gestures of his trainer. It appears that he made inadvertent movements whenever Hans reached the correct number of nods or taps, and that was enough to tell the animal to stop.

According to one of the author's informants, a psychologist named Michael Fox, about 80% of all human communication consists of nonverbal gestures. Dogs are ever watchful of their master's changing stance and expression, a genetic inheritance from their wolf past when subtle shifts in packmates' ears, eyes or tails communicated fear or aggression.

In Arizona, Hahn learns how not to communicate with a cat. "Because the aggressive posture of the cat is the locked-eye gaze," she is told, "cats will transfer this reaction to humans, and when the stranger says 'Hi!' a cat will, according to its nature, back away or make a threatening gesture or merely ignore." At Ringling Brothers Circus, Animal Trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams soothes his tigers with a friendly "Wuzza, wuzza, wuzza." "I have this feeling," he says, "the animal knows how nice I am when he hears me; it's not the words but the sound of it." Gebel-Williams has little use for bears because they don't look you in the face, and chimpanzees because "all the time they have their minds on how to get the upper hand."

Researchers who train chimps in sign language and the manipulation of word symbols called lexigrams have often found this to be true. A full-grown chimpanzee has great strength and must be respected. Says one scientist: "If I get into an argument with Billy or Washoe or some of the other chimps, I try to change the subject." Earlier books on the subject report that some simian students are eager to join the human club. A female chimp placed a photo of herself in a pile with Eleanor Roosevelt but a snapshot of her own father with the four-legged beasts. A chimp with a degree in Yerkish or Ameslan exhibits the ability to form concepts from his store of word symbols. The Indian who called a gun a "fire stick" or the remote tribe who named an airplane "steam chicken" seems to have employed a conceptual process similar to the chimpanzee who termed a duck a "water bird" or a radish "cry hurt fruit."

But who can be sure? As an experienced journalist who has contributed to The New Yorker for more than 50 years, Hahn balances her enthusiasms for the unknown with a reverence for facts and, when necessary, the lack of them. "Though total silence still holds between the two species," she writes of chimps and men, "the linguistic exchanges now happening will serve to underscore the close biological relationship between the two." Still, like the upwardly mobile chimp who thought she was human, there are humans who seem more willing to believe in the possibility of communication with superior extraterrestrials than in a probability of a common bond here on their own planet of the apes.

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