Free The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally Page B

commonalities.
    One legacy of the Terrace paper has been an ongoing difficulty getting funding for this kind of work. Researchers often have to go outside the typical funding bodies of academia to keep their studies going, turning to special interest groups and private individuals. The promotional literature for the Koko research mentions visits from Sting and Robin Williams, for example, a gambit that gives animal language research a weird profile. Such marketing gives the impression that it is not solid, straightforward science.
    Still, the basic tenor of the commentary has begun to shift over the years. Critics used to dismiss the research by saying, “All that the animals have is a few words, and they don’t have any syntax whatsoever.” Now the fact that apes can acquire words is treated as an interesting phenomenon.
    Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University and the author of The Ape and the Sushi Master, says:
 
    I think the trend is clearly towards poking holes in the wall that exists between us and animals, and increasingly people embrace the comparison, so to speak. In the 1970s, when I had to give a lecture on chimpanzees, some people would say, “How can you use the term ‘reconciliation’?” They would have strong objections. Or let’s say it was about sex differences, and they would say, “How can you compare chimpanzees and humans?” Because obviously, we are cultural beings and we can change our behavior.
    When I give lectures on these topics today, that never happens anymore. It’s because there’s a gene on the cover of Time or Newsweek almost every week, a gene for this or a gene for that, so people are getting very used to the idea that genes add something to behavior. So the climate is totally different, and there’s a much greater openness to seeing us as animals, as Darwin always wanted and as many other people wanted.
    I was recently invited to give a talk for business ethicists. Now, business ethicists are basically philosophers who teach at business schools. Even there, there is an enormous openness for these comparisons, whereas I’m sure twenty years ago they would not want to even touch a monkey. So I think the trend is clearly towards more comparisons. More comparisons doesn’t necessarily mean that we fully accept the similarities. Usually they’ll want to keep something like, “This is typically human” or “This is unique to humans”—they want to keep this to some degree.
     
    One of the most important contributions of ape language research is its challenge to the traditional idea that other animals have a fixed mental bag of tricks, and humans are different because we have language and that makes us mentally flexible. If that were the case, Kanzi would have been unable to learn the language skills he has. Clearly, these apes who have the rudiments of language can also be flexible and creative with their communication.
    Ape language research, and Kanzi in particular, opened one fascinating window into the problems of language evolution. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom opened another in 1990 when they published a paper in which they sidestepped the question of how much animal language training can teach us about language evolution and instead argued directly that not only could language evolution be studied but it should be studied. The two scholars—one a rising academic star, the other a graduate student with a brilliant idea—inflamed hearts and minds because their proposal was clever, innovative, and engaging. And even though they weren’t the first to propose that language evolution was a valid topic of inquiry, their paper ignited a small blaze that quickly grew and spread.

3. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom
     
    I n 1989 Paul Bloom, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in the psychology department at MIT, was doing research in child language development. He was interested in word learning in young children, which had nothing to do with