It began with Noam Chomsky’s assertion that language and the understanding of signs is, within the context as we know it, purely a realm of human endeavor. That would seem fairly axiomatic and difficult to challenge. We like to humanize the animal world and to somehow attribute them human capacities as both an endearing tribute and to reinforce our own insecure foundations as a superior element. The confusion has always been a mixing of the spirit with actual discernable knowledge. Still, there have been cases of disproving what appears to be the immutable assertions of Chomsky. This is sen in a new documentary called Project Nim at look at a mid-1970′s project that has been put to film by James Marsh. Its hard to understand why someone would invest such time and expense into such a futile venture and that may be the real subject of the film. the desire to play god with the laws of the universe, an act of arrogance which by definition is doomed to destruction. It does throw a spanner in the work of Darwin however.The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution.
Read More: http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2011/04/06/tonight-in-music ---1939 Ensemble, or Monkey Typing Shakespeare (whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of shit and arrows of outrageous fortune.)---
From an article by Benjamin Hale:
Nim Chimpsky. The name is of course a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist and most-cited academic author alive, who in the middle of the twentieth century was allowed to set the arbitrary goalposts determining what language “is” and “is not.” Herb Terrace’s experiment was one of several sign language experiments with apes throughout the sixties and seventies that sought to test Chomsky’s assertion that language is a uniquely human capacity. Chomsky is never directly mentioned in Academy Award-winning director James Marsh’s documentary film Project Nim, since it focuses on, well, the human interests of Nim’s story more than on the science of it. But the punny frivolousness of the name Herb Terrace gave Nim Chimpsky is perhaps an indication of how seriously he took into account the emotional life of his subject: that is, not at all. …
Based on Elizabeth Hess’s very excellent 2008 book on the subject, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, Project Nim chronicles the titular chimpanzee’s relatively short and chaotic life, beginning with his birth in Norman, Oklahoma in 1973. The project was at the time the most ambitious experiment in ape language to date. There had been several previous failed language experiments with apes that attempted to teach them spoken language, and, correctly reasoning that nonhuman apes physiologically cannot produce the same range of vocal sounds as humans, University of Nevada psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner had the idea to attempt imparting sign language to a chimpanzee, which they began to do with the female chimp Washoe in 1967. But Washoe was already several years old when the Gardners’ research began. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist and the grand architect of the project, planned to raise a chimpanzee in a human home, with no other contact with other chimpanzees, and begin instructing him in sign language from infancy. Days after his birth, Terrace scooped up the infant Nim, flew him to New York, and had him placed, like a foster child, in the home of the LaFarges, asking the family to instruct the chimp in American Sign Language. Not a single member of the household was fluent, or even competent, in sign language. The LaFarges were wealthy, eccentric hippies—W.E.R., a pony-tailed and put-upon poet, and Stephanie, a former student and lover of Terrace’s—with a Brady-Bunch-sized family who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. …Read More: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=520
Read More:http://www.alltheworldsanape.blogspot.com/
…Herb Terrace quickly emerges as the arch villain of Marsh’s narrative. The film left me wondering whether Terrace gave thought to how negatively he would come out looking when he consented to filmed interviews; if so, then his gameness is, I suppose, commendable. The film certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. Pretty much unanimously disliked by every other voice in the documentary, it doesn’t take much to paint his character as irresponsible, opportunistic, incompetent, cruel, cowardly, disloyal, pitifully vain, and given to using his authority to have sex with his students—at one point to the detriment, almost certainly, of the project. Laura-Ann Petitto, the most important and involved of Nim’s teachers and caregivers, left the project after Terrace abruptly broke off an affair with her (Petitto was eighteen when she began working on the project). “It wasn’t the chimp I had problems with,” she says, “it was the humans.”
Terrace became one of the most powerful enemies of ape language research when he declared in a 1979 paper in Science, and a book that followed, that Project Nim, and by extension all animal language experiments, were bunkum—the wishful thinking of sloppy scientists deceived by their subjects’ clever and complex ways of begging for treats. Terrace’s public surrender to Chomsky rendered ape language research difficult to fund for everyone else in the small field for a generation, an about-face that felt especially treacherous considering Terrace’s own sloppy science, relatively minimal hands-on participation in the experiment, and preening penchant for camera-hogging. Billy Tynan, one of Nim’s early caregivers, describes Terrace as “an absentee landlord” who only occasionally showed up at the rambling Georgian estate in the Bronx where Nim was kept after he outgrew his first human family in the LaFarge’s Upper West brownstone—often with cameramen, or the press. Whenever cameras were rolling, Terrace made sure he was in the picture….Read More:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=520
Read More: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2008/0311/p13s01-bogn.html ---It was the early 1970s, an era of experimentation. Minds were open and grants were plentiful at the moment that scientists latched onto the idea of raising baby chimpanzees as humans and teaching them sign language. After all, if they succeeded they might penetrate the mysteries of the animal mind. And if not, what was the harm?---
… After only five years, Terrace abruptly abandoned the experiment, in part because of liability issues surrounding Nim’s increasingly uncontrollable violence (“I was probably afraid she would sue me,” he bluntly says of an incident in which Nim severely injured Renee Falitz, a sign language interpreter who worked on the project), and Nim was unceremoniously tranquilized and flown back to his birthplace on the farm in Oklahoma—a place now infamous among captive ape researchers for its primitiveness and brutality. Cramped metal cages, guns, barbed wire, cattle prods—this was a place where chimps were treated like animals, or prisoners, not as human children. Terrace, of course, brings the cameras, resulting in some beautiful, genuinely touching footage of Nim meeting another chimpanzee for the first time in his life. The saddest moment of the film comes when Terrace—who spent years spoiling Nim with attention and luxury only to suddenly abandon him to the life of a captive animal—returns to Oklahoma a year later for a visit; we see Nim recognize Terrace, and explode with obvious joy, rushing to hug him. Bob Ingersoll, a raspy-voiced hippie who comes across as a saintly presence in the second half of Nim’s life, says of Nim seeing Terrace again that he was thinking, “Holy shit! I’m goin’ back to New York!” But it’s only a show for the cameras. Terrace left the next day, never to be seen again by Nim, and Nim fell into a deep depression….
nch-painter-paintings-teasing-the-monkey/poster">
Read More: http://www.encore-editions.com/paul-charles-chocarne-moreau-french-painter-paintings-teasing-the-monkey/poster ---Paul Charles Chocarne - Moreau French - France Painter & Paintings Teasing the Monkey---
COMMENTS
