![]() ![]() A behind-the-scenes look at what remains of this research today reveals a surprisingly dramatic world of lawsuits, mass resignations, and dysfunctional relationships between humans and apes. No new studies have been launched in years, and the old ones are fizzling out. The researchers made these apes the center of their lives.īut the research didn’t deliver on its promise. Dedicated researchers brought apes like Koko into their homes or turned their labs into home-like environments where people and apes could play together and try, often awkwardly, to understand each other. In dozens of studies, scientists raised apes with humans and attempted to teach them language. "Scientists have often complained about possible over-interpretation of Koko's sign language utterances and the lack of proper documentation of what she has said when and how," deWaal, the Emory University primate researcher, said in an email, adding that "coaching and interpretation by the people around her" may have altered her messages at times.īut the science, deWaal said, was "irrelevant to Koko's pop-image.… Koko's passing is the end of an era, and a genuine loss.Koko is perhaps the most famous product of an ambitious field of research, one that sought from the outset to examine whether apes and humans could communicate. Other scientists, such as Herbert Terrace at Columbia University, who raised and taught sign language to a primate named Nim Chimpksy (a play on the name of the linguist Noam Chomsky), argued in scientific and popular literature that most of Koko's conversations and those of other primates were "not spontaneous but solicited by questions from her teachers and companions." "That's the time that gorillas and humans separated in evolution." "Koko represents what language may have been five million years ago for people," Cohn said in 1996. In 2004, Koko used American Sign Language to communicate that her mouth hurt and used a pain scale of one to 10 to show how badly it hurt. Patterson - a developmental psychologist - and biologist Ronald Cohn moved Koko to their newly established preserve in 1974 and kept teaching and studying her, adding a male gorilla in 1979. She was born July 4, 1971, at the San Francisco Zoo.įrancine (Penny) Patterson, co-founder of the Gorilla Foundation, was working on her doctoral dissertation on the linguistic capabilities of gorillas and in 1972 started to teach Koko sign language. Koko's real name was Hanabi-Ko, Japanese for fireworks child. Other cats followed after All Ball's death, but researchers reported that the gorilla kept "mourning" the original cat years later. The first was named All Ball, a grey and white tail-less kitten, given to Koko for her birthday in 1984. Instead, she had a series of kittens as pets. Koko watched movies and television, with her handlers saying her favourite book was The Three Little Kittens. Her favourite movies, they said, included the Eddie Murphy version of Doctor Doolittle and Free Willy and her favourite TV show was Wild Kingdom.ĭespite attempts by her keepers to introduce male partners, Koko never became a mother. To view apes as nice and caring was new to the public and a big improvement." "It changed the image of apes, and gorillas in particular, for the better, such as through the children's book Koko's Kitten that many young people have grown up with. DlHANqVYlE- the individual was super smart, like all the apes, and also sensitive, something not everyone expected from a 'King Kong' type animal that movies depict as dangerous and formidable," Emory University primate researcher Frans de Waal said in an email Thursday. Koko the gorilla, pictured here on the October 1978 cover of National Geographic, has died at 46.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |