Two films on release in the UK later this week, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the documentary Project Nim, demonstrate that fact is stranger – and sadder – than fiction
Project Nim in pictures
Project Nim in pictures
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which goes on general release in the UK from Thursday, is a prequel to the original film. Or perhaps it's a prequel to the prequel? At the film's climax there was clearly still more "evolution is revolution" to come from 20th Century Fox's simian uprising franchise.
The fictional life story of the chimp Caesar, played by Andy Serkis, is similar to the real-life story of a chimp called Nim who was born at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in Tuxedo, New York, raised by a human family and learned to communicate through sign language.
The fictional Caesar undergoes genetic modification and develops spoken language, among other advancements, that facilitate the revenge of this "damn dirty ape" against his human tormentors.
Fact can be stranger and sadder than fiction. A day after Rise of the Planet of the Apes is released, Project Nim, a feature documentary from the team that made the excellent Man on Wire opens in the UK. It tells the true story of Nim, who "escapes" the laboratory as an infant when he is selected for a highly unusual experiment. He is breast-fed by a loving, surrogate human mother, Stephanie LaFarge, and raised at her home in New York as the youngest sibling in her large family.
During Nim's five years of freedom he learns to "talk" through sign language, use a toilet and smoke a joint with Bob Ingersoll – a psychology graduate anxious to improve the welfare of captive primates – before being returned to the laboratory.
Our species' interest in the minds of our ape cousins is an old obsession. In 1661, a chimpanzee arrived in London on a boat from Guinea, Africa. Apes rarely survived captivity, so the chimp's arrival caused excitement among London's intelligentsia. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that the ape, " ... is so much like a man in most things, I do believe it understands English and I am of the mind that it might be taught to speak and make signs."
Centuries rolled by and the chattering classes' desire to converse with our mute cousins never waned. In the US in the 1930s and 40s experiments were conducted in which human families, with an infant, adopted a chimp and raised the youngsters together like siblings. The hypothesis was that chimps would spontaneously learn to talk the way human children do. But as anatomists had already established, the chimpanzee larynx is positioned far too high for spoken words to be formed. No one should have attempted experiments that could only conclude with a confused chimp.
A surprising behaviour did manifest, however. The neuroplasticity of the human infants' brains seemed to allow an evolutionary regression and the parents were horrified when their toddlers began lip-smacking, hooting and moving anthropoidally, as feral children have been observed to do – perhaps demonstrating that it is easier for us to ape apes, than for apes to ape us.
Until the 1960s, symbolic representation of language was thought to be uniquely human. The views of behaviourists such as BF Skinner still held sway, insisting that minds, personalities, beliefs and desires were "mythical". Jane Goodall was in the early years of her field research at Gombe, shocking us with tales of chimps using tools, and being criticised by the scientific establishment for treating the animals as individuals, daring to name them instead of numbering them, and identifying differences between male and female behaviour (previously, only captive, male animals had been studied).
It was against this background that psychologists Beatrix and Allen Gardener decided that if chimps couldn't talk like humans, they would try to teach a chimp American Sign Language (ASL). The Gardeners raised the chimpanzee Washoe at their home (no human baby this time), teaching her more than 300 signs that allowed her to request food items and play activities. When she first laid eyes on a swan she spontaneously signed "water bird", showing an ability to innovate language.
Project Washoe proved that chimps possessed abilities for symbolic language and the experiment was heralded as a breakthrough in our understanding of chimpanzee cognition. But linguists such as Noam Chomsky were highly critical of the research. Putting aside the evidence of symbolic behaviour in chimps, Chomsky proposed that syntax (rules of grammar) were universal among humans and unique to our species. If chimps couldn't demonstrate the spontaneous acquisition of syntax then they were merely mimicking rather than comprehending the symbols they used.
This was a red rag to the ambitious psychologist Herb Terrace at Columbia University, and it's where Project Nim begins, with Terrace naming the ape Nim Chimpsky to poke fun at Chomsky.
For the film, producer Simon Chinn and director James Marsh were able to gather an extensive archive of original footage. At a revelatory moment, the maturing Nim meets another chimpanzee for the first time and spontaneously, frantically, begins signing. I would have loved subtitles here – my only criticism of the film. (Can an ASL-speaking reader who has seen Project Nim translate this scene?)
Although the film presents an authentic chronology of Nim's troubled life, some re-enactment was necessary. In October last year I interviewed Peter Elliott and Pauline Fowler of Animated Extras, who are credited on the movie as the primate choreographer and sculptor of the "re-enactment unit" (animated sculptures and chimp suits), respectively. I like to think I know a little bit about chimps and I am familiar with Fowler and Elliott's work, but I left the screening of Project Nim unsure what was genuine archive footage and what was re-enactment, which is a remarkable tribute to their skills.
Today, Terrace's Project Nim experiment is rarely cited: it's a skeleton in the comparative psychology cupboard. When scientists talk about ape intelligence, they usually cite experiments that ran concurrently or have been conducted since Project Nim.
There were clear failings in Terrace's methodology. For example, within the space of four years more than 60 sign language teachers worked with Nim. He would form attachments and build trust with a particular teacher, only to have them leave and another student arrive.
And Terrace's starting assumption was that chimps are like mute children, with the same linguistic potential. Nim was taught to imitate his teachers, face to face, in the way ASL is taught to deaf children (who also learn by imitation, but eventually, spontaneously, acquire syntax). So the experiment didn't prove one way or another whether Nim had developed syntax.
By contrast, primate language researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh eliminates the potential for imitation by putting the instructor out of sight and having the ape wear a headset and listen to audio instructions to perform novel, odd activities, such as, "put the toy car in the fridge". The apes comply – Savage-Rumbaugh's methods have thus demonstrated that apes "comprehend" sentences.
Its methodological failings meant that Project Nim was considered a lamentable and regressive step by fellow primatologists. More seriously, the whole field was set back after Terrace claimed Nim had "fooled" him into thinking apes could acquire syntax, in much the same way the horse Clever Hans in the 1890s music hall act fooled people into thinking he could count (when in fact he was picking up unconscious cues from the humans).
Today, primatologists including David Premack, Roger Fouts, Tetsuru Matsusawa, Sue Savage Rumbaugh, Daniel Povinelli, Dick Byrne, Andy Whiten and Frans de Waal have raised our awareness of ape theory of mind, symbolic behaviour, mathematical ability, spontaneous use of language, language comprehension and self-awareness, among other abilities once thought to be uniquely human.
But back in the late 1970s the ill-conceived Project Nim was a high-profile, glamorous experiment that psychology students begged to work on and TV crews queued up to film. Nim became a celebrity, appearing on the cover of Time Magazine.
Chimps are long-lived animals, they bond with their carers in the way humans do, but when Nim was five years old Terrace decided he had enough data and Nim was abruptly dispatched back to the laboratory and the project was abandoned. The newly incarcerated Nim persisted in signing to the lab staff through the bars of his cage, but no one there was familiar with ASL.
When the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates finally closed, Nim and a couple of other chimps were rescued by Ingersoll and taken to a welfare centre. Freed once more from the lab, LaFarge visited him and with guilt-fuelled bravery gave the now adult Nim the opportunity to rise and take revenge against her for all the humans who had let him down. In a dramatic act, more at home in a Planet of the Apes film script than real life, LaFarge entered his enclosure knowing he would attack.
The documentary Project Nim has no agenda and no judgement is made on the ethics of the experiment. All the key figures are interviewed, including Terrace, whose opinion of the project's merits is clearly at odds with those of the other interviewees.
I was struck by the fact that, four decades on, all those who helped to facilitate Terrace's Project Nim retain highly charged, fond memories of their time spent with the chimp – but not of their time spent with Terrace.
This article was amended on 9 August 2011. The original stated that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is released in the UK on Friday. This has been corrected.
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