by cmsellers » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:16 pm
I have nothing against Koko, however she was just a gorilla; the media focus on her as a "talking ape" is one of my pet peeves.
Koko learned a few signs for things she wants, and that's the limit of what's been convincingly demonstrated. When it came to Francine Patterson's claim about things like her use of vocabulary to communicate feelings and her ability to compound words, it was always necessary to have Patterson as an interpreter, and her interpretations would vary depending on what was convenient. When Koko signed "nipple" at female staff, Patterson would tell them to take their tops off, however when she signed "nipple" at visitors she would tell them that "nipple" sounds like "people" and Koko was telling them she liked people.
Patterson's research methods were unscientific, her treatment of Koko was questionable, and her treatment of female staff was completely inappropriate. She was an excellent showman and convinced the general public of her claims, however at the same time she managed to convince much of the scientific community that all animal language research is pointless and any convincing results are fraudulent.
And this is unfortunate, because we've since seen better work with more convincing results in animals that are not gorillas. The most persuasive case in my mind is Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex, though even if you believe all of Pepperberg's claims Alex could not use recursion, without which you cannot have a true language. (Indeed, there is only one case in animal intelligence studies which suggests any animals can reason recursively: studies of tool use in New Caledonian crows.) If you still want to find evidence of proto-language in our closest relatives, work with bonobos like Kanzi has also been far more rigorous than Patterson's work with Koko, and the results more convincing, if less sweeping in scope. Though the results with bonobos have been less impressive than Alex, I'm still willing to buy most of the claims researchers have made for Kanzi.
Humans have a bias toward large charismatic apes, and Patterson was an excellent self-promoter. I think that that's incredibly unfortunate. It's interesting that today, the "see also" sections of the Wikipedia pages for Alex and Kanzi both link to Koko's page, while Koko's page doesn't link to the pages of any other individual animals used in animal language experiments, which indicates the relative place each of these animals has in our collective consciousness: Koko is still the talking animal, despite the dearth of actual evidence that she could do anything beyond memorize a few signs for things she wants.