A group of scientists from US and UK universities said that in comparative studies of humans and monkeys, scientists systematically underestimate the intelligence of the latter, conduct experiments biasedly and interpret the results in a biased way. The authors list common mistakes and give specific recommendations to his colleagues in an article published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Comparative psychology deals with the evolution of the psyche, and to do this, studies often compare organisms of different species. But the results of research in this area should be interpreted with caution, since when conducting experiments it is sometimes difficult to maintain objectivity and ensure fair and equal conditions participants. Even within the same species, there are difficulties: in order to compare the intelligence of different groups of people, it is necessary to take into account everything that affects this intelligence. It was once believed that this is an innate characteristic, that it is inherited, and it seemed easy to compare. But back in 1981 it became known that in addition to genes, important role plays the environment in which the individual grows and develops, his education, life experience, health.

But if it is difficult to compare people with each other, then what about interspecies differences? Ideally, comparing the intelligence of children and monkeys is possible only if the monkeys are exposed to the same environment. In tests of social intelligence (language and gesture comprehension), lack of experience with human habits can be particularly important and significantly affect test success. Studies with monkeys that grew up with people have already been carried out, in one of them the scientist Winthrop Kellogg "adopted" a young chimpanzee named Gua, who lived and grew up with his young son. However, at present, such a study is unlikely to be repeated and published due to ethical restrictions.

This is just one of the errors that the authors found. They studied several comparative experimental studies of the last decades that concerned the social intelligence of children and monkeys and, in particular, their ability to interpret and correctly use a gesture that points to something ( forefinger pointing towards the object). In all studies, humans have outperformed monkeys on the test, and this was due to its evolutionary uniqueness. The works were checked for compliance with the criteria that the authors called necessary to ensure the objectivity of the experiment: this is the equality of the environment, preparation, sampling protocols, testing procedures and the age of the subjects during testing.

The authors found non-compliance with almost all criteria. The environment in which the subjects lived was not the same, the discrepancy was rather rough, without any attempts on the part of the experimenters to equalize these conditions. In the experiments, the monkeys were in cages, but the children, of course, were not, but the presence of physical barriers could negatively affect the result (as was the case with dogs). Also, experimental animals often grew up in sterile laboratory conditions, while children grew up in good conditions that promote cognitive development. This fact also affected the sample, since intellectual level people was higher due to environmental conditions. Also, the sample was skewed by additional selection criteria among people: in some studies, in order to participate in the test, the child had to do something similar before. For monkeys, no such criterion was put forward. In terms of preparation, in studies related to language and gestures, children had much more experience with the subject than monkeys. Testing procedures also differed: in one study, children who failed to point a finger at an object were given a “second chance” and allowed to answer by placing their palm on it, but still concluded that the person was superior.

In addition, the authors drew attention to how the experimenters interpreted the results: the result of the test was always a specific, visible and measurable response, but, in their opinion, it testified to the deep mental abilities inherent in people. For example, in one study, children and hominid monkeys searched for an object hidden in one of the containers, and the experimenters gave hints, among which was pointing to the desired container with a finger. Children understood this gesture better than monkeys, more often they did right choice, and the researchers suggested that this is because children understand the communicative intentions of humans, while animals do not. That is, the interpretation in these studies did not take into account the differences in the conditions of the experiment and often downgraded the intelligence of the monkeys.

inadequate conditions comparative studies lead to conflicting results. The results of all studies analyzed by the authors were later refuted. In a study with a hidden object, the results indicated that the monkeys did not understand the pointing gesture, but some individuals did manage to do so. In another study, scientists only partially refuted these results when they found that the distance of hominids in relation to the container affects the success of the same task.

So do monkeys have social intelligence? While monkeys do not always reach the level of a one-year-old baby in comparative tests, according to other results, they correspond to the age of two or three. summer child and able to understand misconceptions other individuals. Many studies show that monkeys can be taught to speak, for example, in sign language, but their speech remains poor and is not transmitted further. The pygmy chimpanzee Kanzi, who could understand about three thousand words by ear, is considered the champion in mastering the human language among monkeys. Winthrop Kellogg's chimpanzee achieved some success, but stopped in social development quite early, as she turned out to be indifferent to communicating with her new parents.

Summarizing the work on the errors, the authors give several recommendations for conducting comparative studies. They mention the cross-parenting technique, as in the Gua chimpanzee experiment, but although it solves many of the problems associated with unequal conditions, it is not ethically perfect. Therefore, it can be replaced by adequate training to pass the test: for example, if a child at the age of nine months can navigate by the gestures of adults (if the gesture indicates an object nearby), then the monkey should be trained for at least nine months. In addition, you should be stricter with the explanation behavioral outcomes and rely only on those variables that can be observed and measured. And the sample needs to be made more equal and balanced, more attention paying attention to the influence of the environment.

It is known that monkeys and other animals search for fruits in wet tropical forests use their spatial memory. However, it was not clear to scientists how they generally search for fruits. Ethologists have observed chimpanzees ( national park Tay, Ivory Coast, West Africa) by examining what strategies primates use to find fruits. In doing so, they discovered that animals have a knowledge of botany, which they successfully use in their search for food.

As researchers from the research team of Karline Janmaat and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology write in Animal Cognition, “chimpanzee monkeys know that some tree species bear fruit simultaneously and use these botanical information in their daily search for food. If the fruits of a certain tree are ripe, they especially carefully check other trees to see if there are any already ripe fruits."

During their observations, scientists who studied the behavior of chimpanzees followed the animals in their habitats and drew attention to how chimpanzees gaze into the crowns of trees. For analysis, they used only those records in which chimpanzees searched for food in trees where there was no fruit at all - acting “wrong”, so to speak. In this way, primatologists were able to rule out from these "mistakes" that the sight and smell of the fruit caused the inspection of the trees.

Chimpanzees look at fruits in the trees Photo: Ammie Kalan

Instead, they discovered an interesting behavior of chimpanzees: they control these trees, expecting to find a ripe crop there in the near future. After the monkeys ate the first ripe fruits, they realized that the probability of finding food increased significantly. “Chimpanzees didn’t just have a preference for a certain type of fruit they had eaten in the past,” Karlin Janmaat elaborates, “instead, we can predict which trees animals will inspect based on botanical signs (certain types of trees bear fruit at the same time).”

The researchers conclude that those with high intelligence chimpanzees know that certain types trees fruits ripen at the same time, and apply this knowledge in daily searches food, considering two factors:

1. botanical knowledge based on successful search fruits;
2. ability to classify fruits.

"Our results show the variety of strategies our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, use to find food. In addition, they shed light on evolutionary origin human ability towards classification and abstract thinking,” says Christoph Bosch, head of the department of primatology (Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology).

". Let me tell you how it really happened.

The honor of "first contact" - a conversation between representatives of different species - belongs to the chimpanzee Washoe and her caregivers, spouses Allen and Beatrice Gardner. By that time, it was already known that animals are capable of thinking: they can solve problems "in the mind", that is, not only by trial and error, but also by inventing new behaviors.

It's proven German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who conducted his famous research on the intelligence of chimpanzees at the beginning of the 20th century. In one of his experiments, the monkey, after a series of failed attempts knock down a high-hanging banana with a stick or get it by climbing on a box, sit down, “think”, and then get up, put the boxes one on top of the other, climb on them with a stick and shoot down the target.

These experiments inspired scientists for the first attempts to "humanize" monkeys. In the 1930s, the Kellogg psychologists adopted a baby chimpanzee named Gua, who grew up with their one-year-old son Donald. Parents tried not to distinguish between "children" and communicate with them in the same way.

True, they failed to achieve much success in raising the Gua, but Donald began to act ape: the development of his speech slowed down, but he learned to perfectly imitate the cries and habits of the Gua and even began to gnaw the bark from the trees after him. Frightened parents had to stop the experiment, Gua was sent to the zoo. Another pair of psychologists, the Hayes spouses, who raised the chimpanzee Vicki, with great difficulty still managed to teach her to pronounce a few words: “mother”, “dad”, “cup”.

Only in 1966, ethologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner, watching films about Vicki, drew attention to the fact that she wanted and could communicate using signs: for example, she loved to ride a car and, in order to communicate her desire to people, she came up with the idea of ​​bringing them images cars that she pulled out of magazines. It was not a lack of intelligence that made her incapable of speech, but the structure of her larynx. And then the Gardners came up with the idea to teach chimpanzees the sign language used by the deaf and dumb.

Thus began the Washoe project.

Washoe and her family

The future first lady of the chimpanzee world was a 10-month-old cub caught in Africa: she was originally supposed to be used in space research - apparently, she was simply born for fame.

The Gardners raised Washoe as their own child. She not only memorized the gestures with which her adoptive parents addressed her, but also asked questions, commented own actions and the actions of her teachers and she herself spoke to them.

Her first “word” was the “more!” sign: to tickle, hug, treat or introduce new words. During her first year with the Gardners, Washoe mastered 30 signs-words of Amslen - American language deaf and dumb, for the first three years - 130 characters. Mastering the language in the same sequence as the child, she learned to combine signs into simple sentences. For example, Washoe pestering one of the researchers to give her a cigarette that he was smoking: the signs “give me a smoke”, “smoke Washoe”, “quickly give a smoke” follow. Eventually the researcher said, "Ask politely," to which Washoe replied, "Please give me that hot smoke." However, she was not given a cigarette.

Chimpanzees were easily given such seemingly purely human skills as joking, deceiving and even swearing. She called one of the ministers, who did not let her drink for a long time, "dirty Jack." But swearing is not at all such a primitive thing, since it speaks of Washoe's ability to use words in figuratively, summarize their meanings. It is on this ability to generalize with the help of words that human intelligence is built.

It turned out that Washoe was as good at making generalizations as little children were when they were learning a language. For example, one of the first signs she learned was “open!” - she first used it when she wanted to be opened the door of the room, then she began to use it to open all the doors, then for boxes, containers, bottles, and finally even to open the water tap.

The monkey correctly used personal pronouns, ideas about the past and the future (in the future, she was mainly interested in holidays, such as Christmas, which she loved very much), word order in sentences (for example, she perfectly understood the difference between “You tickle me” and “I tickle you "). Sometimes Washoe tried to "talk" not only to people, but also to other creatures. One day, when a dog was chasing the car she was in, Washoe, who was scared to death of dogs, instead of hiding as usual, leaned out of the window and began to gesture frantically: “Dog, go away!”

Meanwhile, several other newly born chimpanzees were brought into the Gardner lab. They learned quickly and soon began to communicate with each other in sign language. And when a cub was born to Washoe, he began to learn gestures, watching no longer people, but other monkeys. At the same time, researchers have noticed more than once how Washoe “puts his hand on him” - corrects the gesture-symbol.

In April 1967, Washoe used word compounds for the first time. She asked "give me a sweet" and "go open it." At this time, the chimpanzee was at an age when human children are first beginning to use two-word combinations. Comparison of the abilities of humans and monkeys was the next line of research. But this aspect brought the Gardners some trouble. The fact is that at first some of the scientists did not recognize the ability of Washoe to speak. Roger Brown, professor Harvard University, known for his research on the development of speech in children in early age, believed that Washoe did not always strictly observe correct order words and therefore does not understand the connections between various categories words that give a sentence certain meaning. Jakob Bronowski and linguist Ursula Bellugi published a poignant article claiming that Washoe could not speak because she never asked questions or used negative sentences. Finally, the linguist Nom Chomsky categorically stated that the chimpanzee's brain is not adapted to the fact that the animal could talk.

Research, meanwhile, produced more and more new results, which the Gardners analyzed and carefully compared with the available data on the development of speech in children. And soon the critics were forced to withdraw some of their objections.

Roger Brown acknowledged that word order is not critical. In some languages, such as Finnish, it is not as important as in English. The arrangement of words in a sentence does not play a big role in ASL, either. Yes, and children themselves often violate the order of words, but ... perfectly understand each other.

The Gardners concluded that children and monkeys were very close in terms of answering questions, forming binary sentences, using nouns, verbs and adjectives, and word order in a sentence. Unfamiliar with grammatical norms, children, like chimpanzees, tend to replace entire sentences with one or two words.

Testing showed that Washoe freely asks questions and uses negative sentences. The monkey is able to use the signs “no”, “I can’t”, “enough”. Washoe willingly leafed through illustrated magazines, asking people, "What is this?" Chomsky's statements about the limited capabilities of the chimpanzee brain are simply not verifiable: there are still no methods that would allow us to find out this question. Only recently, the American scientist Norman Geschwind began experiments to establish whether there is a region in the chimpanzee brain similar to that which regulates speech activity in humans.

When the Gardners finished their work with the Washoe in 1970, she was in danger of going to one of the biomedical centers "for experiments" and, if not dying, then at least spending the rest of her days in a small solitary cell. She, and then other chimpanzees who were trained in the laboratory, was saved by Gardner's assistant Roger Fouts, who created the "Monkey Farm", on which the "Washoe family" now lives - a colony of "talking" monkeys.

Gorilla Professor

The results of the studies of the "Washoe family" seemed completely unbelievable, but in the 70s, several groups of independent researchers working with different types great apes, confirmed and supplemented these data. Perhaps the most capable of all 25 “talking” monkeys was the gorilla Koko, who lives near San Francisco. Koko is a real professor: she uses, according to various estimates, from 500 to a thousand signs of Amslen, she is able to understand about 2000 more signs and words in English and, by solving tests, shows an IQ that corresponds to the norm for an adult American.

However, like other "talking" monkeys, the main development of its speech and intelligence occurred in the first years of life (as a rule, talented monkeys reach the level of a two-year-old child in speech development, and in some respects a three-year-old). Growing up, they in many ways remain similar to children, react in a childish way to life situations and prefer games to all other pastimes. Koko still plays with dolls and toy animals and talks to them, embarrassed, however, when someone catches her doing this.

Here, for example, Koko plays an imaginary situation between two toy gorillas. Having placed the toys in front of him, the monkey gestures: "bad, bad" - in relation to the pink gorilla, and then "kiss!", referring to the blue one. And when her partner, Michael the gorilla, ripped off her leg rag doll, Koko burst into the most terrifying curse ever heard from a monkey: "You dirty bad toilet!"

Koko loves cats very much (she had her own cat, which recently died), loves to draw. Koko's drawings can be viewed on her website http://www.koko.org/index.php, where you can also find out latest news from the life of a gorilla who is already under forty (chimpanzees and gorillas can live up to 45-50 years).

Now scientists want to bring the "humanization" of Coco to new level They are going to teach her to read.

Trained animals or brothers in mind?

Nevertheless, the conclusions from these studies turned out to be too scandalous and completely unacceptable for most scientific community. On the one hand, the "talking" monkeys turned out to be a fly in the ointment in a barrel of honey in the reasoning of philosophers and psychologists about the abyss between a man with consciousness and animals like automata, controlled by reflexes and instincts.

On the other hand, linguists attacked: according to Noam Chomsky’s concept, which dominates American linguistic knowledge, language is a manifestation of a genetic ability that is unique to humans (by the way, in mockery one of the “talking” monkeys was called Nim Chimsky).

According to critics, monkey gestures are not meaningful signs, but simple imitation of researchers, at best "conditioned reflexes" acquired as a result of training. Experimenters, when talking with monkeys, allegedly give them hints all the time, without realizing it themselves - by facial expressions, gaze, intonation, and the monkeys are guided not by their words, but by non-verbal information.

“Talking” monkeys were compared with Clever Hans, an Oryol trotter whose owner “taught” the horse to count and answer questions. Then it turned out that Hans was simply reacting to the subtle movements of his coach.

Among the skeptics was the researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaud. She decided to refute the idea of ​​"talking" monkeys. A series of studies began in which pygmy shimpanzebonobos communicated with scientists via a computer on a specially designed artificial language- Yerkishe. Instead of gestures, he was taught to use a special computer keyboard with conditional icon keys that denoted words. When a key was pressed, the word was displayed on the monitor as a picture. Thus, it is convenient to conduct a dialogue, correct or supplement remarks. But Kanzi other than that without special education recognized about 150 words. His guardian, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaud, just talked to him like that.

One of Rambaud's goals was to reward the monkeys as little as possible for correct answers. The adult monkeys that Savage-Rumbeau worked with showed little talent and only added to her skepticism. But at one fine moment, baby Kanzi - the son of one of these monkeys, all the time spinning around his mother - suddenly began to take responsibility for her on his own initiative. Until that moment, no one taught him anything, the researchers did not pay attention to him at all special attention, but he answered brilliantly.

It soon turned out that just as spontaneously he learned to understand English, and in addition showed a considerable talent for computer games. Gradually, thanks to the success of Kanzi and his sister Bonbonishi, Savage-Rumbaud's skepticism faded, and she began to present evidence to the scientific world that her "speaking" chimpanzees knew three languages ​​(Yerkish, Amslen, and around 2000 English words), understand the meaning of words and sentence syntax, are capable of generalization and metaphor, talk to each other and learn from each other.

According to the scientist, monkeys often guess the intentions of the speaker, without even understanding the meaning of the words. It's like watching a soap opera with the TV turned off. After all, the meaning will still be clear. Rambeau confirmed this observation by conducting an experiment comparing sentence comprehension between 8-year-old Kanzi and Ali, 2-year-old girl. Testing continued from May 1988 to February 1989. Out of 600 oral assignments and Kanzi did 80% and Ali did 60%. For example, “put the plate in the microwave”, “take the bucket outside”, “pour the lemonade into the Coca-Cola”, “put the pine needles in the bag”, etc. Such amazing linguistic behavior of the monkeys raises an obvious, albeit ambiguous question: Is it possible to consider that the language of Washoe, Kanzi and Koko is close to the language of a two-year-old child, or is it a completely different “language”, only slightly similar to human?

It was very difficult to argue with the results of Savage-Rumbaud's research. For those who cherish human exclusivity, it remains only to assert that, after all, the language used by monkeys is still very far from human. As in a joke: “A pig entered the circus arena and played a virtuoso piece on the violin. Everyone applauds enthusiastically, and only one spectator does not clap, looking indifferently at the stage. "You didn't like it?" his neighbor asks. “No, not bad, but not Oistrakh.”

In the animal world: culture, education, emotions

"Animals are devoid of consciousness." This thesis is the last hope to affirm the exclusive position of man among other living beings, giving us the moral right to keep them in cages, use them for experiments and build factories for the production of "live meat".

But back in the middle of the twentieth century, ethology appeared - the science of animal behavior. And the observations of ethologists made it possible to take a completely different look at the mental abilities of animals.

It turned out that great apes(like elephants and dolphins) are self-aware, at least on the bodily level: they recognize themselves in the mirror. The spectrum of emotions shown by them is very rich. For example, according to the observations of ethologist Penny Patterson, gorillas love and hate, cry and laugh, they are familiar with pride and shame, sympathy and jealousy ... One of latest research, performed by British biologists from the University of St. Andrews, even showed that dolphins have a semblance of permanent names for each other.

Many great apes use tools, which until recently was considered the exclusive privilege of man. “Since Jane van Lawik-Goo-Dall first saw chimpanzees using a thin twig to fish out of a hole in a termite mound about half a century ago, zoologists have discovered about forty more methods of purposeful use of all kinds of objects in the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys.” says Evgeny Panov from the Institute of Problems of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This is no longer an instinct, but a cultural skill that is passed down from generation to generation. AT last years there is more and more research cultural traditions monkeys, and the word "culture" is used there without quotes.

However, according to Evgeny Panov, “ high level The development of tool activity in great apes indicates their ability to rationally plan long sequences of actions. However, this does not lead to the emergence of a developing material culture.

But maybe monkeys just don't need it? Recall the aphorism of Douglas Adams: “Man has always believed that he is more intelligent than dolphins, because he has achieved a lot: he invented the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, while dolphins did nothing but entertain themselves by tumbling in the water. Dolphins, for their part, have always believed that they are much smarter than people- exactly because of this reason".

Yes, the brain of a great ape weighs three times less than ours, but this does not make us an exception among other living creatures: dolphins, whales, elephants have a much larger brain than ours. The researchers came up with the idea to compare not the volume of the brain, but the ratio of brain weight to body weight. But here's the problem - laboratory mice were ahead of us in this coefficient.

Then the Gardners worked with three chimpanzees. Moya (her name means “one” in Swahili) is six years old, Tatu (“three”) is in her fourth year, Nne (“four”) is a male, he is two and a half years old. Washoe was withdrawn from the experiment shortly before the beginning of this phase. All chimpanzees entered the farm no later than the fourth day after birth. From the very beginning, they lived under a strict, scientifically based regime. Each animal has its own living space - a bedroom, a play area, a bathroom and a dining room. Three employees work with each pet, and in strictly planned classes they quickly teach the chimpanzees the language of ASL. Teachers are accustomed to using it - one of the employees is deaf herself, the rest are children of deaf parents. In the presence of animals, all employees on the farm communicate only using ASL, so that chimpanzees never hear human speech.

The working day on the farm starts at seven in the morning, when the servants wake up the chimpanzees. The "sign of the day" is determined daily - new sign, which educators try to introduce in a suitable situation into the everyday life of their pets, creating the most natural conditions possible for replenishing their vocabulary. After the obligatory morning toilet, breakfast includes, among other things, a glass of warm milk. And while eating, chimpanzees learn to be independent: they must tie their own bib and eat without outside help. The meal is followed by brushing the teeth and brushing the coat.

When it's not hot, chimpanzees walk around in clothes that they have to put on themselves. They make beds and clean up. As a rule, monkeys are able to wipe up spilled liquids, wash dishes, and perform other tasks. All this has a beneficial effect on the knowledge of the language and avoids being spoiled.

There are classes before and after lunch. Half an hour - training in the use of signs, and another half hour - viewing illustrated magazines, books. With the so-called "pedagogical" games, they are encouraged to draw, to select objects from a certain number, fun with cubes, they are taught to thread a needle and even sew. Chimpanzees have been found to have an attention span of thirty minutes. And to avoid overexertion, they are sent to bed twice a day. Around seven o'clock in the evening they bathe and frolic in long, light clothes until sleep, so that the wool dries well.

With this lifestyle, Moya acquired a vocabulary of 150 characters, and Tatu more than 60. Once a week, all researchers get together to discuss the results of the work, including the evolution of the signs from chimpanzee to chimpanzee program. In some weeks, up to 19 acts of communication between animals using ASL were recorded. Most of them boil down to "go play" or "come tickle" signs (chimpanzees are very fond of being tickled). It happened that Moya, willingly riding Tatu on herself, gave a signal "here", pointing to her back, where Tatu was supposed to climb. Moya marked Nne with the sign "child", cooed over him and gave him to drink from her bottle, while Nne himself, for a reason known only to himself, calls Moya a cookie.

This generation of chimpanzees, as shown by comparisons, overtook Washoe in development, since they had earlier acquaintance with the ASL language and were in a more favorable "stimulating" environment from the first days.

The conversational abilities of great apes are being successfully studied in the USA and under the programs of four other experiments.

But an experiment conducted with chimpanzees at Columbia University in New York was recently interrupted. The reasons that prompted psychology professor Herb Terrace to capitulate caused considerable controversy among colleagues.

Four years ago, Terrace began an experiment in which the chimpanzee Nima (his full name Nim Chimpsky - an allusion to the American linguist Nom Chomsky) was also taught ASL. Nim mastered the sign language as diligently as other "wunderkinds", and even held out his hands to the teachers to show him new signs. He successfully passed the "baby" phase language development, inventing new signs, and learned ... to deceive and scold. Despite all this, Terrace came to the conclusion that chimpanzees are not able to correctly build sentences. In his experiments, Terrace paid attention not to how Nim's vocabulary was replenished, but to the grammar of his statements. Nim, making a combination of two words, connected the words quite meaningfully. Some words, for example, "more", were always in the first place for him, others, for example, "me", "me", - in the second. Nim saw that the phrases "give me" and "give me" are constructed differently. But further, according to Terrace, he did not go. And this is where the differences in the use of conversational skills between young children and chimpanzees begin.

First, if chimpanzees build combinations of three or more word-signs, then the third and subsequent elements are only in rare cases contain Additional information they either repeat an already used gesture, or add a name to the personal pronoun - "play (with) me by Him (om)" Of the 21 four-term sentences that Nim formed, only one did not contain repetitions. In the children's language, such repetitions, according to linguistics, are almost never observed.

The second difference is what linguists call the average length of an expression. Children use, getting older, longer and longer and more complex phrases. At two years, their average sentence length is about the same as Nim's - 1.5 words (or signs), but in the next two years, the length of Nim's phrases grew very slowly, while in children (both deaf and healthy ) increases sharply.

And Nim's semantics was different from the child's. He was unable to communicate with semantic meaning sign and how it is used. The positional relationship between, for example, something edible and the corresponding verb for Nim did not exist - he did not see any difference between "there is a nut" and "there is a nut". It follows, Terrace argues, that chimpanzees do not understand what they are saying.

Finally, Terrace conducted a careful analysis of films that showed Nim's "conversations" with a person, and compared these results with a study of conversations between children and parents. Children begin to understand early on that a conversation is a kind of game in which the participants constantly change roles: first one will say, then the other. The child rarely interrupts the interlocutor or speaks simultaneously with him. With Nim, in about 50 percent of the cases, statements were wedged into the speech of the interlocutor.

There are three ways to keep the conversation going after your partner has finished speaking: you can repeat the other person’s phrase completely, you can partially repeat what was said and add something of your own, and finally you can say something completely new Children under two years of age repeat up to 20 percent of their parents’ statements . The following year, the percentage of repetitions drops to two percent. Nim, however, imitated 40 percent of his teachers' phrases throughout his third year of life. Children under two years old supplement what was said by the interlocutor in 20 percent of cases, and by three years old they support half of the conversations in this way. Nim's additions did not exceed 10 percent

Between monkey and man

One of the main problems is that we are looking everywhere for "similarity" to our mind and our language, unable to imagine anything else. "Talking" monkeys are very different creatures than their natural counterparts, "stupid monkeys," as Washoe puts it. But they never become human beings, at least in the eyes of the people themselves.

Washoe was named after the area in Nevada where the Gardners lived. Later it turned out that the language Indian tribe, originally living in this area, "washo" means a person. Washoe herself considered herself human. “She is the same person as you and I,” her tutor Penny Patterson says about her Coco. In an experiment to divide photographs into two categories - "people" and "animals" - Vicky, who knows only three words, confidently put her photo in the "people" group (like all other "talking" monkeys with whom this experiment was carried out ). She placed photos of her own "non-speaking" father just as confidently and with visible disgust in the "animals" group, along with photographs of horses and elephants.

Apparently, linguists and biologists simply do not have a reasoned answer to this question. And the main reason for the disagreement is that there are still no well-established definitions and concepts. What a child and a monkey perceive human language different, that's for sure. But "talking" monkeys classify reality in a way similar to humans. They divide the phenomena of the surrounding reality into the same categories as people. Let's say, with the sign "baby" all trained monkeys denoted children, puppies, and dolls. Washoe made the “dog” gesture when she met dogs, when she heard dogs barking, and when she saw their images - regardless of breed. Children do the same. Gorilla Koko, seeing a ring on Penny's finger, "said": "a finger necklace." And the chimpanzee Washoe called the swan "water bird." What is this if not the language of a child? After all, when he sees the plane, he also says “butterfly.” Moreover, the fiance of Coco the gorilla Michael, who learned sign language at a very late age, showed miracles of ingenuity! He appealed to abstract concepts such as past, present and future.

Once he told that when he was little and lived in the jungle, hunters killed his mother. Unlike people, “talking” monkeys have long solved the problem of “identifying” their language: in their opinion, it is definitely human. And since language is a unique sign of a person, it means that they themselves "became people." This conclusion of theirs was confirmed repeatedly. Washoe, for example, did not hesitate to classify herself as a human being, and called other chimpanzees "black creatures." Koko also considered herself a human being. When asked to separate photos of animals from photos of people, she confidently placed her image next to the images of people. And here is a photograph of her hairy and naked father she attached to a pile of elephants, horses and dogs.

How should we treat these creatures? In the glorious Soviet film "The Adventures of Electronics" there was exactly the same problem: for adults, Electronics - talking robot, and it can and should be “turned on and off”, while children clearly see: this is a person, even more people than his twin Syroezhkin.

Today, animal rights activists are looked upon as sentimental lunatics. But perhaps tomorrow everything will change, because once upon a time, slaves or representatives of others human races were not considered human.

Ecology

Some great apes, it turns out, can be much smarter than their relatives. At least scientists know of one such female chimpanzee that has been described as "exceptional" when compared to other members of the species.

This amazing female chimpanzee named Natasha is over 20 years old. It is unique in that it shows incredible results in various tests and experiments. Research published in a journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, show that geniuses are also found among monkeys, although they, of course, cannot think as intelligently as a person.

Some abilities still distinguish the monkey from the rest. The staff at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda were aware of these unusual features Natasha even before the researchers became interested in her and conducted tests. Natasha turned out to be one of the smartest monkeys known to scientists on the planet.

For example, Natasha constantly escaped from her former enclosure, surrounded by an electric fence. She threw branches at him until the sparks stopped flowing, thus realizing that the electricity was turned off. She also learned how to tease people by "persuading" them to throw her something to eat.

Scientists from the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology decided to study this monkey, and many other primates also took part in their research. The researchers wanted to understand how geniuses differ from ordinary monkeys. For their experiments, scientists prepared 8 different tests.

For example, in the first experiment, chimpanzees had to find hidden objects, so the scientists wanted to test their ability to navigate in space. In the second experiment, the monkeys had to use "tools" in order to get food as a reward. In other experiments, the scientists tested the monkeys' ability to understand things like color, size, and shape.

Scientists noticed that some monkeys did better or worse on tasks, while Natasha brilliantly passed almost all tests. Scientists did not call these abilities of the monkey "manifestation of intelligent thought." The mental abilities of a primate are a set of skills associated with memorization, the use of tools, and understanding the quality of objects.

As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention", so with regard to monkeys, the same principle most likely works here, which can explain the abilities of primates. For example, some monkeys can make special tools to get termites out of termite mounds or break nuts.

However, why are not all monkeys able to develop such complex skills? Scientists believe that everything depends on environmental constraints and needs.

Special abilities are demonstrated not only by monkeys, but also by other animals. For example, the dogs Rico and Caesar know the meanings of about a thousand words! Interestingly, most genius dogs belong to the Border Collie breed. Their owners claim that they did not train their pets.