Adam’s Task: CALLING ANIMALS BY NAMEby Vicki Hearne; (Knopf: $17.95; 266 pp.)
For openers, here is a little quiz. Which of the following three propositions is true, which false:
1) Some animals can communicate.
2) Some animals have language, and they can speak it.
3) Some animals, although they cannot speak it, do have language.
If you guessed that Proposition 1 is true, you were right, and by a wide margin, for not just some, but all animals can communicate; that is, all can process incoming and outgoing messages. So can all living creatures, not excluding fungi and plants and such living entities as the component parts of animals’ bodies, notably their cells.
In sum, communication (or, to use a more technical expression, semiosis) may be a part and parcel of the definition of life itself. Even some man-made objects, notably robots and, of course, computers, can be programmed to communicate.
Proposition 2 likewise is true but in a far more restricted sense: All available evidence shows that solely the creature taxonomists call Homo sapiens --you and I, in short--is language-endowed, and, moreover, capable of manifesting its language in linear speech. The truth of this proposition has not always convinced all explorers. In 1916, for instance, William H. Furness III of Philadelphia valiantly tried, but dismally failed, to teach an orangutan to talk, and, even as recently as the 1950s, Keither and Cathy Hayes of Florida lavished six fruitless years trying to coax a chimp to speak English. Today, no responsible scientist believes that animals can be taught (like the monkeys and apes in the late Bernard Malamud’s final novel, “God’s Grace”) to speak even one of mankind’s thousands of languages.
It is Proposition 3 that seems most troublesome. To be sure, there are many members of our own species who are language-endowed yet are for one reason or another unfit to speak. Such speechless, or mute, men and women are customarily, and for that very reason, labeled “handicapped.”
But what about the nonhuman animals? Most assuredly none of them--neither dolphins nor seals nor chimps nor gorillas nor orangutans, celebrated captives all of them about whose allegedly uncanny powers the media have made so much noise over the last few decades--can utter so much as a single word. But are there any in whose nervous systems some arduous regime of laboratory training could instill a propensity for silent language?
The answer is: No. When this third proposition is restated as a testable scientific hypothesis, the answer must come unequivocally, if still provisionally, in the negative, for all the evidence gathered thus far has uncompromisingly confuted this proposition. Chimps cannot talk our language, and their own chimp-to-chimp communication is not properly called language either.
But Vicki Hearne is unimpressed by all this evidence.
Disingenuously she declares, musing about Washoe, the Ur -chimp in the succession of misfired attempts to train a speechless laboratory primate to communicate by linguistic means: “That doesn’t mean she isn’t talking.”
It is this sort of picturesque, even cavalier, use of English prose that makes her book--a collection of essays (several previously published) loosely organized around the core theme of two-way communication between animals (especially domestic) and humans--so irritating. Hearne is identified as a creative writer who trained wolves and several species of domestic animal before she joined the Yale English faculty.
As her cited exclamation indicates--or more rightly, as it conceals--she simply redefines “talking” to suit her immediate purposes. As Hearne must know better than at least her more unseasoned readers would, Washoe’s trainers never intended, even had this been feasible, that their chimp should learn to talk but hoped only that she might “sign,” roughly in the manner of deaf people. This reviewer recalls being cautioned on a first visit to young Washoe in Reno not to address her vocally.
Furthermore, Hearne is quite wrong to say that Washoe and other chimps were “taught Ameslan,” i.e., the American Sign Language of the deaf. The truth is that the so-called “signing apes” were drilled, at best, in but a minuscule number of Ameslan signs, simplified to the point of caricature, which had, moreover, a superimposed alien syntax (the syntax of English, which is not that of ASL, a complex, though unspoken, natural language of its own).
Hearne’s title was inspired by one of John Hollander’s poems bearing the same designation, and her book is meant, accordingly, to explain why the relationship between trainer and animal trainee is a “moral” one, a term that punctuates her discourse.
As the author puts it, with typical incoherence and prolixity, Adam’s task and ours is to realize “that animals matter to us, and that the way they matter to us is probably all we can know of how and why we matter and of how they matter to one another and to the planet.” True, several recent major conferences--notably, the Smithsonian Institution’s April symposium on the general topic of “Man and Beast”--have been devoted to the domain and modalities of human/animal liaison and bonding, today recognized by all scientists and many laymen as a cardinal problem implicating the survival of us all.
Unfortunately, Hearne is nescient in the vast scientific literature on the very subjects of her discourse.
Hearne’s scientific artlessness can be illustrated by her repeated belittling references to the “Clever Hans” fallacy. Briefly, Hans was the name of a stallion in Berlin at the turn of the century supposed to have been endowed with (among other things) the power of language. Oskar Pfungst, a master psychologist, proved, after years of research (recently reviewed by Dodge Fernald in his beautiful book “The Hans Legacy”), that the horse had no special gift but was merely responding to simple binary (“go”/”no go”) cues. His groom eventually confessed, in writing, that “Clever Hans, he is really myself. When I lower my eyes, then the horse stomps until I raise my eyes again.”
Hearne objects de haut en bas or, so to speak, from her high horse that “this notion is used to discredit virtually anyone who disagrees . . . as either a fraud or a charlatan or else plain credulous and stupid.” But that the bogus character of this episode (and countless others variously involving horses and virtually every other kind of domestic mammal, bird, jungle beast or sea mammal) has now become established beyond reasonable doubt means only that “Clever Hans,” far from being a hobby horse for combative scientists, is really shorthand for a deep precept of common and scientific procedure. The principle underlying this precept was memorably enunciated by Francis Bacon, who wrote in his Novum Organum (1621): “The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down . . . forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: And although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe, or despises them, or rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions.”
Hearne’s book, while mildly entertaining, is infuriatingly arrogant, self-righteous in manner, and unredeemed by any consequential addition to organized knowledge.
