FFAF: Exposing “Smart Animal” Frauds

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Trent sad. Trent need subscriber. Subscribe Trent podcast. Maybe I don’t sound as intelligent to you, but if I were a great ape who had a podcast, maybe that would just blow your mind at how smart I allegedly am. Allegedly. So welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On Monday and Wednesday, we talk apologetics and theology. All the great ways to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But on Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today, I just really want to talk about the animal intelligence frauds. Two famous cases that a lot of people think that animals, especially when you have domesticated animals, they can certainly do impressive tricks, following commands, things like that. But some people have claimed that there have been exceptional animals whose intelligence rivals that of human beings.

But it turns out when you actually dig deeper into the stories, that is not the case. I’m going to share two of those examples with you today. So the first one you’ve probably heard of, that’s the case of Hanabiko AKA Koko, Koko the gorilla. Koko sad. So Koko the gorilla was born July 4th, 1971, and passed away June 19th, 2018. Koko was a female western lowland gorilla. So Koko was born in the San Francisco Zoo, though lived most of her life at The Gorilla Foundation preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Koko’s instructor and caregiver Francine Patterson said that Koko had an active vocabulary of more than 1000 signs of what Patterson called “Gorilla Sign Language.” GSL as opposed to ASL, American Sign Language. That would put Koko’s vocabulary at the same level as a three-year-old. Other people said it was as much as 2000 words of spoken English, though there is debate about this according to this article.

As with other great-ape language experiments, the extent to which Koko mastered and demonstrated language through the use of these signs is debated. I think there was actually a video where Koko was supposedly signing out like a climate change message. Not that he understood climate change but was making a message related to that. It was just some kind of nonsense and I lean towards the nonsense view of this. Those who lean towards the ProView, they say Koko understood nouns, verbs, and adjectives, including abstract concepts like good and fake. Good luck trying to find a college student that can tell you what the good is or goodness and was able to ask simple questions. However, it’s generally accepted, Koko did not use syntax or grammar. That her use of language should not exceed that of a young human child.

Others are more skeptical. The linguist, Geoffrey K. Pullum, among others called Koko’s claimed abilities mythical. Writing that she never did more than flailing around, producing signs at random, and criticized much of the press coverage is calling it sentimental nonsense. There’s an article on Big Think called “Koko the Impostor,” that does a great job of breaking down this alleged language that Koko was speaking with the sign language. That the problem is that human beings we’re great at finding patterns that don’t really exist. So you have things like pareidolia, where if you look off, like the face on Mars. People think, “Oh, my gosh. There’s a mountain feature, it looks like a face staring back at us. Maybe the Martians built it.” No, it just happened to look like that based on the shadows and interplay. And that when you see two dots and a line under them, human beings interpret that as being a face when oftentimes, that kind of feature can just show up in nature randomly.

And that same thing happens. Audio pareidolia, thinking you hear messages and random sound. I did an episode of Free for All a long time ago, a creepy one on electronic voice phenomena. People who think they can capture ghosts talking on tape when really, it’s just random white noise that people interpret to be words that aren’t actually there. Or it catches things like cell phone, radio conversations, or baby wave monitors. But the article on Big Think does talk about Koko and it also talks about another chimp, I think it was called Nim Chimpsky. Nim Chimpsky named after the linguist Noam Chomsky. So Nim, this chimpanzee, it said here that most of the footage demonstrated apes producing word salads that contain signs for food or affection they desired. Usually, these sentences are very short and in no sense grammatical. So you’re not using language, if you just start throwing words out there.

Yeah, I mean it doesn’t take much. A dog can associate a word with a particular object or a particular action. But to combine words together into sentences to form new ideas and commands of those sentences, that’s something that’s unique to human intelligence. So it says here, “Nearly all of Nim’s sentences…” And Nim is another chimp compared to Koko, “were two or three words long. Extended sentences were very rare.” The general pattern was Nim or me followed by eat, play, tickle, banana, grape, or the like. Understandable. Human children begin with shortened sentences, but they rapidly develop the ability to form longer sentences. I love my three-year-old, he says to me, “Daddy, I have question.” I love that “Daddy, I have a question.” My wife the other day said to him, we had to turn off… We gave him a sabbatical from TV, he was just having a little bit too much of it. And “No, we’re not going to watch TV today. It hurts your brain.” “No. My brain does not hurt, Mommy. My brain does not hurt at all.”

It’s like watching an addict withdrawn. “Give it to me. Give it to me right now. Plug it into my veins.” It says here, “Nim once formed a 16-word sentence.” Oh, a 16-word sentence, that sounds pretty impressive like human intelligence. Here’s the sentence, “Give orange, me give, eat orange, me eat orange, give me eat orange, give me you.” If that sounds to you more like the nonsense babbling of a parrot or what your dog might say to you if he saw that you had an orange and much less like the thoughts of a child, you can see the problem. The situation was amusingly summed up by Noam Chomsky talking about Nim Chimpsky. And he said this, “The ape was no dope. If you wanted a banana, he’d produce a sequence of irrelevant signs and throw in the sign for banana randomly, figuring that he’d brainwash the experimenter sufficiently.” I don’t know why I think this is funny.

So figuring he’d brainwashed the experimenter sufficiently so they think he was saying, “Give me a banana.” He was able to pick out subtle motions by which the experimenters indicated what they’d hope he’d do. Final result, exactly what any sane biologist would’ve assumed, zero. Yeah, Chomsky adds in a final dig according to the article. Then comes the sad part, chimps can get pretty violent as they get older. So they were going to send him to chimp heaven, but the experimenters had fallen in love with him and tried hard to save him. He was finally sent off to some sort of chimp farm where he presumably died peacefully signing the Lord’s prayer in his last moment. So I’m terrible. I don’t know why I think this… But I laugh when people get overly attached to animals. It’s like, “Stop it. They’re not people. Okay.”

Yeah, they might be better than really crummy, awful people, but they’re not people. And it’s disorder when you treat them like people and you blur the line about the value of human beings. When we treat animals like people, what ends up happening is we don’t overall treat animals better, we just treat people worse. Because we think of people as just another kind of animal, raw animals. And if animals do this awful sort, they’ll say like, what is it? Homosexuality is normal in species, 500 species engaged in homosexuality. Only one species engages in homophobia. Okay. 10,000 species poop outside, only one species poops inside. Guess what? I like being the species that goes to the bathroom, okay? That makes humans special and worthy of being considered the objects of human exceptionalism, of intrinsic human dignity and human rights and all of that.

So when someone tells you Koko was just like a little kid trapped in an ape’s body, you can point out the correction there. By the way, so Koko would just sign for things that she liked. Okay, like banana, grape. She’s just like, “I just want these things. Give me these things.” And you can see how Koko’s just throw out the words and other signs. And it’s like playing a slot machine, maybe I’ll get a winning combination, and something will come back. But not communicating. But along with things like bananas, grapes, playtime, it turns out that Koko also was interested in another thing, nipples. Koko was involved in sexual harassment lawsuits. This was not included in the obituaries that were given of Koko when she died at the age of 46. It says in this article, “There’s one creepy and uncomfortable story the obituaries aren’t telling, which is a shame. Because of all the stories about Koko and the research she was involved in, it’s the most revealing. The story was the sexual harassment lawsuit.”

The problem here is what it says here, that in 2005, Kendra Keller and Nancy Alperin, who had been employed by The Gorilla Foundation the previous year, took Patterson, the female trainer for Koko to court alleging that Patterson instructed Keller and Alperin to engage in the sexual act of removing their clothing to expose their breasts to Koko, in particular their nipples. The lawsuit alleged in response to signing from Koko, Patterson, pressured Keller and Alperin to flash the ape. “Oh, yes, Koko. Nancy has nipples. Nancy can show you her nipples.” I apologize, I have to read this one. This is terrible. I’m just going to skip ahead 30 seconds if you don’t want to hear this. The other time she was quoted as saying, “Koko, you see my nipples all the time, you’re probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I’ll turn my back so Kendra can show her your nipples.”

Okay, that’s when you would turn to Patterson and say, “Guess what? When I signed on to take care of a great ape here at the zoo, this is not something that I signed on for. So I’m taking you to court for pressuring me to expose myself to a gorilla.” But apparently, I mean, Koko was just probably interested in all kinds of things. I doubt it was a sexual fetish. But I don’t know, I don’t have the mind of a gorilla. Who knows? But it certainly, once again, falls into banana, grape other that Koko was just randomly signing for. And what Koko would do would just sign for these things and would pick up on certain patterns based on the emotional responses of the caretakers, which is how another allegedly smart animal fooled a lot of people into thinking that he was smart. This is the story of der Kluge Hans. I’m sorry if I… der Kluge Hans, maybe that’s it, not Kluge. Der Kluge Hans. Hans Gruber, Mr. McClane. Thinking of Die Hard there.

Clever Hans, born 1895, went to horse heaven in 1916 or the glue factory, depending on how you frame it, was a horse claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. However, after a formal investigation in 1907, the psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks but was watching the reactions of his trainer. So what would happen is that you would have Hans and his trainer. Let’s see, the horse with his trainer, Wilhelm von Osten, that was the owner of the horse. I think he was the trainer, but you would have Hans and you would ask him all different kinds of questions like, “Okay, what is two, the sum of two and three? Or what is two plus three?” And then Hans, to answer the question, would tap his foot, would step his foot. Wearing horseshoes, you can hear him putting his foot down. One, one, two, three, and he would stamp and then get to five. And then he would stop, and people would applause like, “Oh, how did he do that?”

And so people were watching, like, “Is the trainer signaling Hans?” No, ’cause it would work if Hans looked at somebody else. There was no element of signaling that was involved. But in studying Hans, if Hans heard the question but was unable to see the person asking the question, he only got the correct answer 6% of the time. But if Hans could see the person asking the question like two plus three or something like if December 8th is a Tuesday and then the following day is a Thursday, what will the date be? Or something like that, which would be the 10th, 10, whatever it might be. But if Hans could see the person, even if they’re not doing signs or anything like that, he could get the correct answer 89% of the time. How was Hans able to do this? Kluge Hans, Clever Hans? The answer was that Hans would watch people. He would be asked the question and he knew, “Okay, I’m asked the question. Stamp your feet.” And he would start stamping his feet and Hans could see social cues, micro expressions in the person asking the question.

And so let’s say, two plus three is five. One, two, three, four. And there’s this nervousness and anxiety subconsciously in your face like, “Is Hans going to get the right answer?” Then he slowly does five and then the tension releases in the face. Like, “Ha. He got the right answer.” You think, and he stopped. He’s going to get it. And then so what Hans would do is he would stop stamping his feet when he saw that subtle micro expression in the face of those who were asking the questions. That when they would release the tension in their face, that was the cue he knew, “Oh, that makes them happy. They clap. They give me treats. I’m going…” So he didn’t solve any problems, he wasn’t intelligent. He just knew when I see this expression stop stamping, then you get applause and treats. And so that is how Clever Hans was able to cleverly fool many people. And it seems that Koko the gorilla and other so-called signing gorillas were probably also responding to similar sorts of micro expressions, other elements like that.

So great. Well, thank you guys so much. I hope this was helpful for you all. A fun little bit of trivia. I’m actually going to be hosting trivia soon for a fundraising event for a Catholic school and it’s going to be all just either Catholic trivia or stuff that I often bring up on Free for All Friday. So I do wonder if some people attending, if they’re going to listen to the backlog of episodes, they will certainly have an advantage, that’s for sure. All right, well, thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.

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