You're Wrong About - Koko The Gorilla

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

“It’s interesting that we became enthusiastic about ASL in the process of teaching it to a population that couldn’t benefit from it.”Mike tells Sarah about a very special ape and the very problematic humans around her. Digressions include video dating, "Biography" and the terrible terrible inventor of the telephone. We start with a SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT about the future of the show. Both co-hosts understand the difference between chimps, monkeys and apes but occasionally misspeak.For a transcript of this episode (Thanks Andrea!), click here or copy-paste:https://rottenindenmark.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/YWA-Koko-the-Gorilla-Transcript.pdf Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks!Marcus Perlman, the researcher Mike interviewed!"Human and Animal Cognition: Continuity and Discontinuity""In Memorium: Koko, A Remarkable Gorilla""What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us?" “Monkey Business”“Talk to the Animals,” the 1980 Omni article“Animal Bodies, Human Minds: Ape, Dolphin, and Parrot Language Skills”1979 New York Magazine article on Herb Terrace“The Last Distinction?”“The Sad Twilight of Koko The Gorilla and Her 'Mother'”“Why Koko Can’t Talk”“The Other Side of Silence: Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America”“The Education of Koko”Support the show

Isn't it terrible that the name Donald is like Adolf now? Like you hear it and you're just like, ugh. Are you ready? You want to get going? Yeah, welcome to your wrong about the show where, oh no. Although, oh no is actually a pretty good tagline. That's actually pretty apt for a lot of our episodes. Yeah, let's just go with that.

Welcome to your wrong about the show where, oh no. Yep, I stand by it. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And if you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about. And speaking of which, we have a little announcement to make.

We are undertaking the radical step of offering Patreon rewards for the first time ever. We're actually going to give people stuff. It's finally the answer when you sign up for a Patreon is something other than you get nothing. Very excited. We've had Patreon for 15 months and we're finally organized enough to be able to offer something to the people who are so kindly helping us to make this show. So one of the things we have learned from meeting a lot of you folks through social media is that we get a lot of questions and people want to know how we research the show

and people want to know if things were cut out of the episodes. And they want to ask follow up questions of like, what do you think about this new piece of information? Or what do you think of the historic episode of the Red Shoe Diaries with Paula Barbieri in it? Something people ask me literally every day. Just kidding. Not even once, but someday somebody will. And we thought it would be fun to like once a month go through those questions and maybe do some extra research on stuff or like do a little follow up episode.

Yeah, this is a place for us to kind of convene in a fun after party bonus episode and talk about such exciting topics as Tanya Harding's episodes of America's Worst Cooks or whatever other weird tangential stuff comes up and that you want to ask us about. Yeah. And yeah, we're just excited to try some stuff out. So if you don't want to support us, that's still super chill. But if you would like to hear us chat about random stuff and ask us random questions, please do. If you're not one of those iTunes reviewers who thinks the girl host says like too much.

Those were about me for the record. Those were about me because my likes have gotten out of control. It's both of us. The problem is both of us. If you would like to ask us something about that, please don't. Yeah. So yes, stay tuned for more news on that. If you're a Patreon subscriber, you'll get a message.

We don't actually know how this is going to work yet, but we're going to figure it out. It's going to work somewhere or another. Yes. We'll have fun. And today we are talking about Coco the Gorilla. I'm so excited. I do not think we have ever announced an episode topic that has inspired more anxiety in my listeners. I feel like some hearts are going to be breaking across the world tonight and I don't even know why.

People had this reaction like we're going to cancel Coco. Like we're going to be like, fuck this gorilla. She didn't do shit. Like just to spoil it, that is not going to be the purpose of this episode. Coco is guilty of white collar crime and elite deviants. We might ruin a couple of the humans around Coco, but we're not necessarily going to ruin Coco. Coco can stay.

Well, this show is all about ruining humans. Yes. I think that's fine. Yeah. All right. Tell me the story, Mike. I mean, this is a fun episode because we've been doing so many of these true crimey episodes and deep historical episodes.

And this one is maybe the first one that is really about what makes us human. I mean, this is the first one that talks about biology and cognition and nature. It's just a fun little detour. You're taking us on the little Mike railroad. On a little choo-choo. And so, yeah, do you want to tell me what do you know about Coco the Gorilla? What do you remember? Oh my goodness.

Okay. So when I was a child, there was a book which I believe many of our listeners will remember and I bet you're going to be able to say it with me. Coco's Kitten. Yes. Do you have Coco's Kitten as a child? Did you read that? I weirdly didn't. Coco's Kitten was a book about Coco. I don't know if it was pre or post Kitten that she became famous for her ability to

communicate in American sign language, or at least that was what we were told. It was both, actually. She was kind of famous and then Coco's Kitten came out and then she was mega famous. It's like being a pop star and you release, you know, a couple singles before you hit it really big. Yes. And it's like communicating with humans. Number 17 on the charts.

Kitten, number one. Okay. So I remember that Coco, I forget where she lived, but it was somewhere in California. And she had this, the like main researcher working with her was named Penny Patterson. Penny Patterson. And she had beautiful blonde hair and I as a child, and I would imagine many other children, felt very intrigued by the idea that like women didn't seem to be very represented in science, but there were these famous women of primatology. Yeah, that's true.

And so there was Penny Patterson and there was Diane Fosse working with the gorillas. And of course there was Cain Goodall, who I also loved when I was a kid. Yeah, women in STEM, leaning in. There's also a lot of very interesting sort of literary analysis type literature of the emotions that it evokes in us when we see this giant gorilla who even though Coco is a female, we sort of think of gorillas as male, like we think of King Kong. And then we have Penny Patterson, who's this extremely petite white blonde. Faye Ray, lady.

Yes, there's just a lot of like cultural stuff wrapped up in those photos. And I do think that is one of the reasons why this story went so far. And so why? Because there is this kind of like beauty and the beast type images. Yeah. So it's interesting that there's like certain jobs that people like the optics of a woman doing and primatology is one of them. Right. Yeah. And so what I remember about Coco's kitten is that Coco expressed via sign language that she wanted a kitten or maybe that she wanted a baby. I can't remember.

She wanted a baby really bad, but they got her a kitten. They kept trying to get her stuffed animals, but she knew they were stuffed animals like she knew that it wasn't a substitute. And so they got her a real kitten. Right. Do you remember the name of the kitten? Allball. Yes. But Allball was a manx. The theory was that Coco picked Allball because like her, Allball had no tail.

And she liked rhymes. And so that's why she chose Allball as the name. Yes. And so the story of Coco's kitten was that Coco wanted a kitten and got a kitten named Allball. And I think, you know, as a child to me, some of the appeal of it was like, here was this gigantic, sad gorilla mom who just like wanted a baby and like in a way got to have one and also was kind of bittersweet because she was all alone far away from the other gorillas. Coco's just a complicated figure. And I think as a child, you like some of the first complicated characters that you experience are our animals. Do you remember what happened at the end of the book? Did your parents not tell you?

I don't know if it was in the book, but I know that Allball got hit by a car. Yeah. And Coco mourned. And so one of the really famous pieces of footage that went around was when Coco finds out that Allball was hit by a car, she signs bad, sad, bad. And then she sort of hunches over and kind of like, you can see the sadness hitting her. And then she signs frown, cry, frown. It was this revelation, I think, that animals have much more complicated emotional lives and potentially inner lives. That's so funny to me because it's not complicated. She's just like, I'm sad. This is sad. And it's like, oh my God, yes. Like if we didn't trust a gorilla to experience that emotion,

then like, what do we think of animals as humans? Like, geez. Well, this is actually, I mean, one of the sort of main through lines in this is the gradual realization by humans that animals are much more complex than we thought they were. And that they have emotions and that they know things. Well, this is a good intro to the episode because I wanted to start with a shower thought. I forget where I read this, but basically throughout the course of human history, humans have always defined humanity in opposition to something else. So before the Industrial Revolution, what made us human was our ability to make complicated things, right? Like we can sew

a shirt, we can make a sword, right? It was always kind of us in opposition to the animals. And then after the Industrial Revolution, we were like, well, machines can make all these things, right? And so it's like, well, then what makes us human is like this higher order stuff, like, well, we can play chess. And then 100 years after that, the computer comes along and computers can play chess. And then we had to redefine humanity, sort of almost going back to this more animal concept where humans have feelings, humans have creativity. And so we keep redefining humanity according to what humanity isn't. And so the history of talking animals goes back a really long time. And we've talked about clever Hans on this show.

Oh, I'm so excited to talk about this. One of the famous cases was a talking dolphin. I think this was in the 1950s. There was a guy named John Lilly. Oh, I remember that. Oh, this is Peter, Peter the talking dolphin. Yes. And he taught himself to make the P sound by like putting his blow hole in the water and he could make a puff through like suction. And he figured out how to make a P sound. Right. And there's the sort of the great tell of where this comes from and the ideology that's driving it is there's a weird link between this kind of research and eugenics, which we will come across a number of times in the show. So one of the things this guy John Lilly, who quote unquote taught dolphins to speak, one thing he once said was like the black races of

Africa, porpoises are on the brink of becoming westernized. Oh, my God. I mean, you can't talk about this like line between humans and animals without talking about the assumed gradations within humans. And we have a history of like measuring skulls and having books about like phrenology, you know, the face of the lying Jew. And of course, that's all come back. So that's great. And so I don't think everybody who was doing these studies was like an out and out eugenicist, but all of these studies are kind of done on this rubric of like, where do we place animals on this creatures worthy of moral attention versus creatures not worthy of moral attention spectrum. Good Lord. It's also really interesting that the metric is assumed to be like,

how intelligent is this being and therefore how decently are we forced to treat it because of that. Exactly. So I interviewed a ape researcher who actually worked with Coco for two years, a guy named Marcus Perlman. Oh, wow. And he splits this type of research into three generations. So the first generation was in the 1930s, these early studies of can a chimp be taught to speak like a human being. So there were these researchers in the 30s and the 40s who basically adopted a chimp and like, we're going to raise it as our son. Oh, yeah, I've heard of this too. Do you remember this? This was a chimp named Gua. And they and they had a human baby and they like raised them alongside each other. Yeah, they tried raising them together. Basically, that

didn't work because their son Donald starts taking up all these habits from the chimp. Right. And so they canceled the project. There's another experiment in 1947 where another couple adopts a chimp named Vicky and they spend seven years doing all of this like vocal training and like teaching it to talk. And essentially, after all of this time, she could say four words, mama, papa, cup, and up. I think it's fascinating that we spent so many people spent years of their lives being like this chimp must vocalize and there is literally no other way for being to communicate. Right. But so this one was also basically a failure. I mean, this is like so obvious to us now, but it was not obvious at the time that humans and chimps have completely different

vocal cords. Like the anatomy is totally different. Another big thing, apparently, I didn't know this was that apes can't control their breath the way that humans can. So that's why they don't write operas. Right. And also why they just sort of do like, I did not know this. This is actually really cool that as humans, without realizing that you're doing it, you're calculating how long your next sentence is going to be and then deciding how much air to take in. Wow, we're so talented. And so basically, everyone is like, well, we can't teach the chimps to speak because it's literally physically impossible for them to speak. So if only there was some way that creatures could speak without using their mouth and lips. Something that was invented

like a hundred years ago. So yeah. So now, I mean, we have to talk a little bit about the context and the history of sign language. What do you know about this? Because you've mentioned this on the show before. I know an unusual amount about it because I wrote like I took ASL for a year when I was in grad school and I wrote the paper that I like applied to PhD programs with was about Helen Keller, because initially the language was like that she was this perfect blank space because of her lack of language acquisition when she was a young child. And the rhetoric was that like, you know, the best of Western civilization had been poured into her and she was reading all this great literature and she was morally very pure. And it was just this weird paternalistic

rhetoric. And then she became an anarchist and no one said a thing. And she was like, I support the IWW and people are like, not going to talk about her Christ like you now. That's always something with like the social construction of disability that we never want disabled people to have like sexuality or political beliefs or radical ideas. Yeah. And so she went from someone whose intelligence was ranked very highly by these kind of paternalistic figures in American society, including Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, because he so for people that do not know Alexander Graham Bell, of course, the inventor of the telephone was like a pretty out and out eugenicist. He took it upon himself to like end sign language education in America. This was like

project. And to like breed out deaf people. Yes, he was convinced that deafness was passed down genetically, which there is a genetic component. But of course, it's not like a one to one thing. But he was convinced that deaf people were genetically inferior and that all of them needed to be forced to join the sort of hearing and speaking world and that all sign language should be completely eradicated. Right. And this is kind of the story of American sign language, that it was invented in the early 1800s, but it was never widely adopted basically because it was stigmatized. Deaf children were basically encouraged to learn to lip read, to speak. Some schools tied their hands to their desks or tied their hands behind their backs so they couldn't

sign to each other. Or put mittens on them. Yes. It's like a decades long project. This casting of ASL as like somehow lesser than or like it's a less rich version of English or it's this sort of derivative of English rather than a language on its own that has different features in English, but like features that are built around the fact that it's a visual language rather than oral language. So it has like different structural components. The word order is different. So I spoke to one of our listeners Andrea Boyle who's an ASL interpreter and she mentioned that ASL has different plurals. So the way that you would say I have sisters is you would say sister, sister, I have. Or for something like where do you keep the cups? You'd say cup, cup, where?

So you don't always put the number in front of the word to make it plural. And so these are the kinds of things that people often miss when they're talking about sign language as just this like basic extension of English, which it is not. This reminds me of some of the themes of our Ibonics controversy episode. Extremely. Because this I think is an example of standardized American spoken English being either indifferent to the ways that other dialects or languages can improve upon the things it can do or can do things that it can't do or if not being indifferent to it, like noticing that and maybe like not liking it. Right. I mean, I think you see this a lot with conversations about like foreign civilizations too, in that there's this drive to see different

cultures as like a degraded version of yours. I mean, if you read old history books like written in the early 1900s, this just suffuses every single insight that they're like, well, you know, Indian society is like two thirds as advanced as English society right now. Everything has to be put on the same ladder. Right. Like the reasons for comparing languages to each other in a way that tries to find the superiority of some and the inferiority of others has to be politically based rather than linguistic. Yes. It's a language, right? So it has all of the features of the language. So like deaf children will kind of babble in sign language the same way that kids will babble in spoken speech. And when ASL speakers have a stroke, it affects their ability

to speak ASL in the same way it affects hearing people when they have a stroke and it affects their speech. I mean, this debate is continuing because it's important for people to have a language very young because it affects cognitive development because it gives them a language to use to speak to themselves. And so this was something that was very like deliberately denied to deaf children. So I'm going to read to you, this is reasonably long, but I think it's just an amazing story. This is a letter to the editor that gets published in the New York Review of Books in 1986 in response to an Oliver Saks essay about basically everything we just said, just like the history of sign language and sort of what the situation is now for deaf

children. Reading Saks's essay was like reading a biography of my daughter. She was born profoundly deaf, a rubella victim in 1964. It would be fair to say that at the time, at least in New Jersey, nobody knew how to diagnose deafness. We toted Susanna from doctor to doctor and audiologist to audiologist for two years before someone finally had the knowledge. Thus correctly diagnosed at age three, Susanna had already missed some of the prime time for language acquisition. Once diagnosed, however, she could at least start attending a school for the deaf, right? No. The New Jersey School for the Deaf would not accept my daughter because her hearing loss was too severe. It sounds incredible. A paradox of oralism is that oralists only wanted to teach the

deaf who were not too deaf. I wish I could say that Susanna's story has a happy ending, however belated. It does not. She has acquired language at the second grade level, a little below the usual level for the profoundly deaf. She has great difficulty dealing with the working world even at its most menial. For the working world, even now, does not sign. The greatest affliction is not deafness itself. It is having to be sequestered because only in sheltered environments can they meet with others who share their language. The condition of the deaf today is better than it was 250 years ago, I suppose, but not much. And so this is one of the reasons why it takes these researchers so long to be like, hey, wait a minute, there's a form of expression

that is much more suited to gorillas and chimps than spoken speech. Wow. Wow. So that's a really interesting example of eugenicism and counterfactual superstition around a real language that anyone can tell is complex if they experience it for some amount of time. The problems in one area of science holding back another area of science, like that science shooting itself in the foot. Right. This is intersectional science being bad. And so finally, in 1966, this couple out of the University of Nevada in Reno start raising a chimp named Washoe with sign language. So they start very deliberately teaching Washoe sign language and immediately it's just like a million times better. Like it's very obvious that she's finding using her hands much easier than using

her voice. And so by four years into the experiment, she has a vocabulary of 132 signs. So this is pre-Coco, but she's like the first chimp, like speaking chimp media darling. The fist starts getting out of magazines. This starts being on documentaries. It's like the chimp that can talk. And the biggest thing that starts happening is she starts combining words. The famous story is that her trainer is out in a robot with her on like a little pond lake outside of the university campus. And Washoe looks at a swan and she signs water bird. And this is exactly how like human children do this. And so the existence of Washoe and like the fame of Washoe and this water bird thing gives rise to the debate that is really central

to Coco and the debate around sign language and ape communication for the next 30 years is there's two schools of thought about how people learn language. The behaviorist explanation is this BF Skinner stuff that basically there's nothing special about humans. It's just when children babble, like their parents ignore it, ignore it, ignore it. And then they say mama. And then their parents are like, hey. And they reward and they're like, I'll say mama again. And so over the course of the childhood, children are being reinforced for saying words, not reinforced for babbling. And so eventually they start to build up a vocabulary. They start to build up sentence structures. They start to build up word orders. This is how all of us learn

language is with these like thousands of little tiny reinforcements. We individually are like a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters like coming up with random combinations and we hit the right thing occasionally and our parents are like, yeah. Okay, so that's that theory. So that's the that's the behaviorist theory. The biological theory or the sort of the Noam Chomsky theory, this is how Noam Chomsky becomes famous, is this idea that humans are biologically hardwired for language. There are certain structural elements that are common to every human language. The Chomsky argument is basically there's too many words for us to do like one by one, getting reinforced, because then we'd all

be like 27 by the time we had a full vocabulary, that like there's something about the human brain that makes us vacuum up word orders and syntax and grammar much more quickly than other behaviors. And so we have these like slots in our brain where language goes, and we fill those up very quickly like without that much prodding. So this is like one of the central debates of human development. And if you're a behaviorist, if you follow this reward and punishment logic, you're like, well, we can teach apes to speak to because all we're doing with human babies is just teaching them one by one words, words, words. And so we can do the same thing with a chimp and a chimp is never going to have the vocabulary of like a 65 year old or whatever, they're never

going to be like reciting Shakespeare. But like you can get them to the same place as like a three year old or a five year old potentially, right? You can get them to do simple sentences. You can get them to start doing simple reflections simply based on rewarding or punishing them for delivering certain signs. It's interesting because like I do take a behaviorist approach to a lot. And I think that that plays a significant role in language acquisition because we can see that like language acquisition is socially enforced. But I also basically what I've read about Chomsky's theories is that there are all of these things that human children somehow magically know how to do at certain intervals. And a lot of it relates to grammar and sentence structure. And my understanding is that

if you ask like a two or a three year old, like what do you call a monster that eats sand? They'll say sand eater. And if you ask that same toddler, like what do you call a monster that eats grapes? They'll say grape eater. They don't say grapes eater. Like they understand somehow and explicably that like you make the thing that it eats singular. And there's like a million other things like that where they just kind of know. Yeah. And I mean, huge spoiler, whenever we see a binary like this, we should get very suspicious when it's like, is it nature or nurture? It's like it's very obviously both. And also nature affects nurture. And I mean, you can't it's separating those two things is very strange. Yeah. But so what happens as this debate becomes this like paradigmatic

debate within psychology is every psychologist gets an ape. You just like you get a psychology degree and they're like, here's your idea. People start like designing their own versions of sign language. People start making like computer keyboards. Somebody writes a book called why chimps can read. This becomes like the new hotness in psychological research is to try to sort of prove Chomsky wrong to prove this thesis that apes can communicate simply based on reward and punishment. And this is how we meet Coco. At the time, this is actually interesting to think about gorillas were seen as like oafish, the sort of the troll balrogs of the ape world. That's why they're depicted that way in the planet of the apes. They're like the cops.

Yes. Chimps are the smart ones. And gorillas are just like these big dumb oafs. So like nobody's doing anything with gorillas. And orangutans are Dr. Zaeus. And Coco is born on July 4th of 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo. Her name is actually not Coco. It's Hanabiko, which is Japanese for fireworks child. And like right after she's born, she's ill. So she's basically taken away from her family because I think she has pneumonia, these other conditions, they don't know what's going to happen with her. And they're really worried that she's not going to make it very long. So she's kind of already isolated from day one. And along comes this 24 year old grad student named Penny Patterson, who essentially shows up one day, and is like, I would like to teach this gorilla to

speak sign language. I want to do this for my grad school research. And the zoo basically is like, we don't think this gorilla is going to live. So like, yeah, have a blast, do whatever you want. We don't think she's going to be with us for very long. And so she starts coming all the time, spending hours and hours there with baby Coco. She eventually moves Coco out to like a special facility. Oh, so she and Coco bond because she's with her when she's really young. Yes. How old is Coco when she's when she and Penny meet? Coco's one year old. So she's like, she's like a primary figure in her life. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is like a mother daughter relationship. And so very quickly, Penny starts teaching Coco all of these signs. So by the time she's just a couple

years old, Penny says she can say 600 words. She has this huge vocabulary. Wow. She's developing much faster than the chimpanzees as well. So all of a sudden, a lot of the emphasis shifts to gorillas. Oh, so is there this argument that like gorillas will become the super communicators of the ape world? Yes, because we must be competitive. The ace must compete for us in the arena of intellect. And so I'm going to show you a clip of Coco and Penny like relatively early in this process. This is very, very cute. Research psychologist Penny Patterson is teaching Lowland Gorilla Coco, the American Sign Language of the Deaf. Can you find something soft? There's something soft here. Yes, that's soft. With reading readiness tests used with human children, Patterson tests Coco's

grasp of concepts. Yes, that's good. And then you say the tree. Well, you showed me the trees and that was wrong, right? Anything else? Wrong? Yes, they have that, the lady and the tiger. That is a bit weird. Okay, what do you think? I really like it. I like watching videos of Coco. Yeah. My sense is that like Coco is communicating and also that she's like getting bored very easily. It feels like, you know, like this beautiful, huge two year old. I know. This is the kind of thing that you see as a little kid and you're like, I want to work with primates also. Yeah. What's remarkable to outsiders is not just how many signs Coco can do, but the ways in which communication is revealing like this personality. So she's very like funny and sardonic. So

apparently there's one time when a trainer is trying to get her to make the sign for drink, which is sort of placing your thumb to your lips and they're trying to get her to do it. They're trying to get her to do it. She doesn't want to do it. And then eventually she does the sign that she does it in her ear. She also very quickly starts making up new words. I remember this. I remember some of these. Can I tell you the ones I remember? Yeah, go, go, go. I remember that she made finger bracelet. Oh my gosh. She wanted to communicate ring and drink fruit or melon. Yes. She also does, she calls ice cream, my cold cup. Oh, my cold cup. That sounds like a ban. Yeah.

And then nectarine yogurt. She calls orange flower sauce. Orange flower sauce. Wow. It's pretty good. Yeah. She also a really big deal. She starts lying. This was not something that people sort of knew in any regular sense that animals could do. People who didn't own cats didn't know that. So apparently she breaks the kitchen sink and somebody walks in and is like, who broke the sink? And then Coco like theatrically points to another staff member. Penny starts to notice that she's like sort of eavesdropping on her that apparently Penny's like talking to one of the other researchers and she's like, oh, driving to Los Angeles once a month, it's going to kill me. And immediately Coco runs up to her and starts signing frown, frown, frown, frown, frown.

And so they start spelling out words the way you do around children. Yeah. It's going to KILL me. She apparently starts roasting her other researcher. There's another guy named Ron Cohn, who's like one of the other researchers with Penny. And he's kind of like the disciplinarian, like him and Penny have kind of like a good cop, bad cop vibe. So people at one point ask Coco, like, who's Ron? What's Ron like? And she signs stupid devil. And then this is harsh. They ask at one point, they're like, do you tell jokes, Coco? Like, what's a funny joke? And then she signs I love Ron. She's like, damn, Coco roasted. Oh, Ron. Oh, no. She starts doing like poems. So she'll say like flower pink fruit stink. And these other sort of like fridge magnet type rhymes. This is like a

thing she becomes obsessed with nipples. Yeah, I've read about that. Yes. When does this start happening? This is very young. One of the theories on this is that she wasn't breastfed by her mother. And so she's always had this weird fixation with nipples. And so like Robin Williams eventually goes and visits her and he talks about how she like puts her head under his shirt and like reaches under his shirt for his nipples and is like, show me your nipples. This is just like a thing that she's really obsessed with. I mean, Howard Stern does that. So somehow not newsworthy on his show. And apparently Penny asks her once, like, what's your deal, Coco? Like, why are you so obsessed? And Coco signs nipples are nipples. She's like, you know, she's not wrong.

Coco is just like generating endless EDM titles, right? Nipples are nipples by my cold cup. Coco eventually gets to 2000 signs. I thought you were going to say 2000 nipples. I mean, she's probably at more than that, honestly. They try a big thing as they want her to have a baby because they want to figure out if she'll teach her baby to sign. So they bring in this other chimp named Michael to try to have her mate with. But apparently he's like much younger than her and they don't really get off on the right foot. And so she kind of friend zones him like they just sort of have a brother sister vibe and there's apparently an incest taboo among gorillas. Coco's like, I have a personality. Yeah, this guy is not ticking my boxes.

So that doesn't really work. And then they bring in another gorilla called Endume from the Cincinnati Zoo. Coco chooses Endume from like videos. It's like old video dating websites. They show her all these clips of different gorillas. Oh my God. And so Endume like does his video and he's like, I'm kind of a homebody gorilla. I enjoy a woman who wants to see my nipples and Coco's like, yes. Yeah. So they bring it into me, but like that doesn't really work either. I think he's also younger than her. It just never quite works. Because he shows up and she's like, I liked you better on the video. Something I can extremely relate to. I love how Coco has the same problem as Janet and the movie singles video dating joke during niche Cameron Crow content for you.

But so despite these troubles, this is when the sort of Coco fame goes into overdrive. I love that we're doing this like behind the music of Coco. It's like, despite her problems with finding a mate, Coco took over American culture as her success skyrocketed. Don't roast my transitions. How else was I going to get out of that? That was my only move. No, I just like that it feels like an episode of biography. That's all I got. It's in my, these two things are adjacent in my notes. That was the only way I could go from one to the other. It's like reading coal miners daughter by Loretta Lynn. You're like, wow, like at the same moment that there are personal struggles, she's like topping the charts. There's irony here.

So what happens is in 1978, she's on the cover of National Geographic. I think, I think I have that issue of National Geographic actually. Do you remember what it, what it shows? I believe it was her in all ball. That's the second cover. Oh, that's her second cover. I don't know what her first cover is. It's very interesting. It's a photo of her taking a photo of herself. It's like what we would now understand is like a mirror bathroom selfie. She's holding a camera up to her face and like taking a photo. And so it evokes this image that is very important to a lot of the rhetoric that you see at the time that like she is regarding herself. She's looking at herself. She's looking at us. Right. She has self-awareness. Yes. There's a movie called Cocoa Talking Gorilla,

this documentary that comes out. Cocoa's kitten comes out. It's on Reading Rainbow. Oh, wow. So Cocoa is having like a Partridge family experience. Oh, yeah. She's huge. I mean, she shows up on Mr. Rogers. There's this whole thing with Robin Williams that he comes and hangs out with her. And then he like does a story about her in his stand-up set. And then apparently like when he dies in 2014, they tell Cocoa and she sort of like slumps her shoulders that like they had a real connection. Yeah. She was in the first ever interspecies chat on AOL. What? Which is a huge time capsule. Huge time capsule. I know it wasn't as a human, but in my head, she's talking to like a bird. Yeah. And then, I mean, so much of the rhetoric at

the time, because I read a bunch of essays that came out in like the late 1970s and the early 1980s about this, was a lot of the rhetoric was this like in hindsight, like pretty lofty rhetoric about Cocoa's ability to sort of reason and reflect. That the idea is not just that Cocoa is like delivering like me want food type of utterances. She's thinking about death. She's thinking about her relationship to people. She's remembering people she met years ago and grieving them. So this is from a 1980 essay in a magazine called Omni, which is now defunct. One thing is clear about Cocoa, Patterson has not humanized a gorilla. The gorilla has seized on a useful human system to express its own nature. Oh, are they saying that like Cocoa is just communicating

her true Cocoaness? Yeah, that like finally apes have a system of language with which they can tell us about themselves, right? And that there's now been this bridge built between the two species. There's a story that shows up in a lot of the old articles that like Penny is like cleaning up after Cocoa like toys on the ground. And she sort of mutters like, why can't you just be like any other kid? And then Cocoa sort of shrugs and signs gorilla. This reminds me of the way people will like post alleged interactions they had with their two year old, you know, where you're like, today my eight month old looked up at me and said, abolish the police daddy or like whatever. I think we do that. And I think that we really as humans have a tendency to like interact with an

articulate being and to become enamored maybe of a being who is like just articulate enough for us to map our own thoughts and ideas on to and I wonder if that's relevant here. So in 1980, it all falls apart. Mmm, man, just like a Scorsese movie. So to do the debunking, we're going to have to meet somebody named Herb Terrace, who is a Columbia University psychologist. Hello, Herb. He trained with B.F. Skinner. He's like a died in the wool behaviorist, right, that language only comes from training in the wave of every psychologist getting a ape. He

gets this chimpanzee and as a troll to Noam Chomsky, he names it Nim Chimsky. Wow. So the entire purpose of his project is basically to like prove Chomsky wrong. I love academia awards. We've talked about this before, but like Herb is the best. He spends four years doing everything with Nim that Penny is doing with Coco. They do the signs, they do these tests. He becomes completely enamored with Nim the same way that Penny is enamored with Coco and he's a true believer, right, that like they are signing, it is meaningful communication, but then he sits down and watches the tapes. So part of what they need to do as this process is log all of the utterances that Nim is making, right, like what sentences,

what is he asking for, what word order is he using. They're trying to do like a mathematical analysis. They're trying to figure out like does he have a grammar, I would imagine. Yes, exactly. And so to do that, you have to be systematic. And so he sits down and starts doing this systematically. And in 1979, he publishes an article in Science called Can an Ape Create a Sentence to which he answers no. And he also writes an article the following year, specifically about Coco called Why Coco Can't Talk. So this is basically the grenade that he throws into the middle of this entire field of psychology and primatology. So is he arguing that they don't even have meaning that they're not even referring to like

something that the ape is looking at? What he says, this is for a 1979 New York Times article, new evidence by a researcher shows the apes may be doing nothing more remarkable than a dog does in learning to sit or heal. Wow. So one of the things that he does is he makes a log of all of Nim's utterances. This appears in the 1979 science paper. And it doesn't follow any form or structure. So here's a couple of them. Play me, Nim. Eat me, Nim. Eat, Nim, eat. Tickle me, Nim. Grape, eat, Nim. Banana, Nim, eat. Nim, me, eat. The longest utterance that Nim ever makes is 16 words. And so I'm going to read it to you. Get ready. Give, orange, me, give. Eat, orange, me, eat, orange, give me. Eat, orange, give me you. Right. So he's like repeating the same

idea many times. And so what he says is that even in the youngest child, if you had a child who's capable of making a 16 word utterance, you would never see something that repetitive and that devoid of meaning. No. And oftentimes what you see with children is that they'll start out by saying these like very simple phrases, but then they'll add things that add information. So the example that he uses in his article is that you would see a kid say like sit chair and then that would progress to like sit daddy chair or like sit me chair. But it wouldn't be like sit chair chair. That's not a pattern that you see in children. Also the speed at which toddlers are acquiring words is like. Super remarkable. Yeah. Like toddler language ability is defined by the fact that

you're constantly acquiring stuff. Yeah. And just like you'll say a word to a toddler one time and then they'll use it again a few hours later. Right. And you're like how did you notice, remember that and use that correctly? Like they're going through this like Spiderman mutation experience with regards to language. Another thing that he finds that's really interesting that you don't see in children is that the vast vast vast majority of the utterances of these apes are goal oriented. That all of this stuff about like reflection and like jokes and stuff, it's like 96 plus percent of what they're saying are just like feed me, tickle me. Right. You don't need language to express those things. Right. And so what he says, this is what he says about cocoa.

He says, Penny Patterson is all too ready to project human meanings onto the imitative utterances of an ape who is simply trying to manipulate its teachers to feed it or engage in some kind of social activity. So it's basically an exercise in just like basic desires. Right. I want to eat. I want to sleep. Anything deeper than that is essentially projection by the researchers. And so then is it a thing where like cocoa is producing so many utterances in the course of a day that some of them inevitably are going to kind of match the situation. Yeah. I'm going to show you another clip. This is a clip that demonstrates this, I think really well. Okay. This is Coco and Mr. Rogers. How do you say love for sign language? How do you say love?

Can you show him how to say love? I say love. What's that flower? She's asking you about your coupling. Is that a flower? That's a sun. My grandfather gave me the sun. It looks like a flower though. Does look like a flower. Can we talk a little bit about love? What? Throne? Oh honey. What? What? Love you. Love you, visit love. Oh, that was very nice. Thank you, Coco. There's a lot happening. Yeah. 46 seconds long and there's a lot happening. So Coco, so they're like, Coco, how do you say love? And she's like, tell me about this coupling. I'm interested in that right now and so they do that for a while and then Penny's like, what about love, Coco? Yeah. You can also see that she's just imitating Penny because Penny's like,

let's talk about love and then she makes it sign for love and then Coco does it and she's like, oh, see, Coco loves you. But it's like she's just reproducing what Penny just did two seconds ago. She's responding to the physical cue. Yeah. Do you think she asked to see Mr. Rogers nipples? All right, let's just move forward. We can't dwell on this. But this is something that you see a lot in the footage of Penny and Coco. One of the things that's really interesting is that Penny has never released any like raw data or raw footage of her and Coco. So research methods wise, I mean, this is a big part of Herb Terrace's critique, is that a lot of these researchers that are producing like, you know, this ape can say 150

things. They're not actually giving any of the background data of like, okay, we recorded her for eight hours. Here's the tape. It's all these like very carefully snipped together clips like the one we saw earlier that has a lot of cuts in it. And you don't know how much they're cutting out in between. And so what oftentimes happens in the sort of the few like long one take clips of Coco and Penny that do get revealed is she basically, she says something like, Coco, what color is this ball? And then Coco will sign drink or something. And she's like, haha, quit playing around Coco. And then Coco will say like elephant. And then she's like, oh, she's kidding. And she'll basically keep prodding Coco until Coco gives the right answer. And then

she's like, see, she can talk. So is it that like, you can read it as her being just distractible and not focusing very well. But really, it's like she gets tested, she's just producing signs until she gets it. Basically, it's just, it's always very interesting to realize how we ourselves are being queued to view footage. Yes. This is from this transcript of like the AOL chat session. This is very 90s. The user is named sick boy re. And he says, Coco, have you taught other gorilla sign language on your own? And then Penny says, that's a good question. Have you taught other gorillas, Coco? And then Coco signs myself lip. And then Penny says, yes, she taught herself. That's true. That's very good. And I think part of what that answer might be is she's taught us. In other words,

myself lip was her answer and lip is her word for woman. So herself has taught lips perhaps. Sick boy didn't get an answer, did he? Exactly. It's and when you go back through the footage, there's just a lot of that kind of stuff where it's like very selective interpretation. So there's a lot of great inflation happening here. A lot of great inflation. This also explains the water bird thing. One thing that Terrace notices is that when they ask Washoe, like what is this bird that you see on the lake and he signs water bird, she could have just been signing water and then bird, right? There's no indication that she's using a compound word there. She she's kind of giving out signs all the time. She's like, boat, water, sky, red, fruit, drink. And then she happens

to sign water and bird in that order. And they're like, she's creating compound words. So you think that this is at the level of just like the humans are tricking themselves the entire time. I mean, the human intervention affecting this, like this is another thing that Terrace finds in his research is that almost all of the signing that Nim is doing is directly in response to researchers. So he almost never starts conversations. He interrupts at these sort of random intervals, like he doesn't listen and then deliver signs and then listen and then deliver signs. He just kind of signs willy-nilly like whether or not someone else is signing at the time, which is another thing that very young children begin to understand that conversations are give and take. Like this is not a pattern that

you see in children very young. The main sort of metaphor that Terrace uses, he notes that you can teach a pigeon to peck A, B, C, D, and then a pellet will come out. Instead of A, B, C, D, you could write on the buttons like, I want some food. And then when the pigeon does it, you could be like, the pigeon can read. It's asking us for food. But it's not like the pigeon is not understanding those symbols. So okay, so the argument is that for the apes, these signs are basically empty signifiers. And they have figured out kind of that like some of them will get a response they want at various times. But even with that knowledge, they're kind of throwing them out a little randomly. Yes. This is like when I was in eighth grade and trying to teach myself how to

sing the Chinese language version of anything goes from Indiana Jones, the Temple of Doom. And like I did know parts of it at times, but like nope, didn't speak the language. But that's a thing. I mean, if somebody told you like make this gesture and then I'll give you a banana, you'll make the gesture and whether or not like you understand that that gesture means banana and can use it in other contexts, there's really no indication of that. It's more just like Coco does something and then she gets a banana. And she's like, well, when I move my fingers like this, I get a banana. And she's like, these people are clearly very invested in me making these gestures that they are teaching me. And so I'll just kind of cycle through a bunch

of them all in a row. Yeah. And this is what Marcus, the researcher who spent two years working with Coco, I asked him sort of where he falls in this like ongoing 30 year long debate. And he said, basically, he's like, Coco is really good at getting what she wants. You know? It also sounds like it's from a VH1 behind the music episode. Like Coco is really good at getting what she wants. And that is my answer to your question. I mean, one of the interesting examples of projection here that I think is worth like dwelling on is this whole thing of Robin Williams, that like the story goes around that Coco like reacts to Robin Williams death, right? And that sort of she slumps her shoulder, she signs cry. But this was 2014. And Robin Williams spent one

afternoon with her in 2001. And it's like Robin Williams is special to us because he was in movies that we watched. Yeah. But there's no indication that he's special. Like Coco spent an afternoon with thousands of people by that point. Has Coco seen hook? It's unclear. We have this parasocial connection with celebrities in a way that maybe God bless them other animals don't have. Right. Like you don't hear a lot about celebrity fish, do you? But so what's amazing is, you know, after this article comes out, Herbert Terrace's book comes out, the field implodes. So there's now essentially just one place where they're still doing this type of research in the whole world. So the the AP language boom has ended.

Yeah. Herb Terrace basically killed it. This is a quote from Sue Savage Rumba, who's one of the few researchers still doing this. She says, AP language research went from being a field of perceived intellectual excitement and public claim to one that at best should be viewed as scans. Suddenly, it became extremely difficult to have research papers reviewed, let alone published, and funding for the major projects dried up overnight. And this quote hints at the next section of our debunking. Oh gosh. It says, AP language research has yet to recover from Herb Terrace's public surrender to Chomsky, a turnaround that felt especially treacherous considering the inexactitude of Terrace's own science.

Surrender to Chomsky sounds very sexual, I have to say. Like if that were a romance novel, I would read it. So we're now going to get a quote from Arden Neiser, who wrote a book called The Other Side of Silence, Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America, which comes out in 1991. And she has a really fascinating chapter of this book about the language, the AP language debates, sort of told from the perspective of deaf people and people who speak ASL. So she starts her chapter by saying, during the spring of 1979, I realized that I had been meeting a number of people hearing people who were very excited about ASL, not because 500,000 deaf Americans use it every day, but because they believed it might be taught to apes. This gets to Herb Terrace and Nym and Nym

Chomsky and the entire field. This is like a sort of double debunking of this, that nobody who was working with the apes spoke fucking sign language. Oh lordy, Miss Clority. So what they're basically doing, it's a lot of hearing people who don't speak sign language, who don't know the structures of sign language, they're signing ASL words in just like English grammar. It's this like weird pigeon ASL. This is from a Harper's essay that I believe was published in 2012. Nym was snatched from his protective mother in an Oklahoma chimp colony just after his birth and put into a household in New York City where nobody was a fluent signer. The household, a prosperous hippie family, modeled neither a sign language environment nor what was normal for chimps, nor what was normal for human

children. They allowed Nym alcohol and marijuana. What? He had no discipline, no intensive exposure to use of sign in context, and Herb Terrace rarely visited. Nym was just a pampered wild animal, kept as a household pet. Why do people do this with chimps? I know. It's so weird. It's also, I mean, the field was just like moving too fast that apparently this guy Herb Terrace just like got a chimp without really thinking it through and then just like sent it to like a friend of his who was a Freudian psychologist in like an upper west side Manhattan brownstone. And this Freudian psychologist lady apparently was like much more interested in Nym's like Oedipal complex and the fact that he kept like touching her breasts, even though she was like a mother figure to him, like

that's what she was interested in. Humans are gross is like the lesson, the big reveal of this episode. And, you know, unsurprising, like we're not finding out anything bad about cocoa. No, we're canceling all the humans. Yes. Cancel humans. Humans canceled. I mean, one of the like sort of sub threads of this that nobody has like dove in diving into is just the like the way that psychologists kind of like economists do now thought that they were qualified to do fucking anything in the 1970s. Yeah, I'm a Freudian psychologist. I'll just raise a chimpanzee from birth. I'm a white guy. I know how to do it. I read four books last year. I know. I don't speak sign language. I don't know anything about it. So I assume it's not very complex. Exactly. And so

he just puts this chimp into this brownstone. Eventually, he pushes out the Freudian psychology lady in favor of someone named Laura and Petito, who is an 18 year old graduate student. And he's just like, you, you take over. I bestow my monkey upon you, Laura. Apparently, they sort of start taking nim to this like empty, bare classroom somewhere on the Columbia University campus, where there's like, there's no toys. There's like nothing to do. There's nothing to climb or play on. That's weird. It's just like a bunch of language drills and instruction all day, which is like, this is a wild animal. It wants to like jump and play and use this energy. It doesn't want to like sit at a desk. One of the things that they say is like, it's really remarkable that nim can like

lie and like use manipulation. Like this is one of the things that comes out of this study. But it's like, it's because he keeps saying that he has to go to the bathroom so he can get out of this room. And so Teras like on some level admits this, I found a couple of old interviews with him after his book comes out. And so in one of them, he says, I couldn't afford to pay permanent staff and so relied on volunteers. In all, nim was taught by 60 different people, very few of whom formed close bonds with him. And so what he doesn't say in his science paper is that they had to abandon the project because nim started attacking his handlers. That's what I'd do if I were nim. Yes. It's like, this is a wild animal, you guys. Do we know about the circumstances of these attacks?

We do not know. And I did not look them up because I think they're going to really bum me out. But the phrase grievously injured comes up a lot. Okay. And then what happens to nim? It's really bad. This happens actually to a lot of the apes in these studies after the field implodes. They're like, we have no more ape money. Exactly. And it's really expensive to take care of these animals. So a lot of them end up in like terrible sanctuaries or like sketchy like Tiger King, like side of the road, random places. This is terrible. So nim gets sent to this facility in Oklahoma where he was born, which apparently is known among chimp people for being really bad. What kind of, is it a zoo? What is it? It's called a sanctuary, but it's like a bunch of

animals in fucking cages. And it's like, I mean, it's just like, this is the sad ending to a lot of these things that like Washoe died of a heart attack really young. Herb Terrace, actually, he's still alive. He gives interviews on this. He says he tried to rescue nim a number of times, but like he didn't have the funding to do it. And so whether we believe him or not, it's also true that like it's very expensive. And so you would need some sort of infrastructure to take care of these animals afterwards. And that infrastructure was never there. Has Penny responded to the Coco can't really talk stuff? Yeah, I mean, she's there was a very long conversation between her and Herb Terrace in the letters to the editor section to the New York Review of Books

after this article comes out in 1980. And she basically says that Terrace is like bitter because his own project failed. And he never developed a relationship with Nim, the way that she developed one with Coco. And the fact is, you can't get a ape to sign, like to communicate with you meaningfully if you don't have a relationship if it doesn't feel comfortable. And so her argument has always been that he set himself up for failure and then he failed. I mean, this is actually something that Marcus Perlman mentioned to me was that at the center of this research is this fundamental paradox that to get an ape to communicate freely, you have to have a close relationship with them. But then if you have a close relationship with them, you're not an objective

researcher. And so anything that that produces is not going to be credible to the outside world. Unless you have like reams of unedited tape that's being like screened and some kind of double blind something. Right. And you can't even really do double blinding like future researchers actually try doing this with masks. But then there's also like body language like apes are probably attuned to our body language in a way that we're not like aware that we're sending messages. Oh yeah, inevitably. And so it's not, I don't know, it's not, it just doesn't seem like it's very well suited to the scientific method. Right. And so the sort of the kind of like double debunking of this is that Nim and Coco and Washoe might have actually been doing even less

communication than we think. I think the biggest tell is this idea that drives me nuts, that Coco can tell when words rhyme. Like she names the kitten all ball and she's doing like fruit, sweet, meat, Greek, whatever. When like people point out that these are words that rhyme in spoken English. But Coco doesn't know spoken English. She speaks sign language. This is from Terrace's article. Only slightly less amazing than Coco's ability to create rhymes and to understand Pig Latin is her professed ability to substitute a sign for an English homonym of a word she does not know. For example, Patterson says that when Coco had difficulty articulating a need, she would occasionally use need, a sign that sounds like need, but is made in sign language in

an entirely different manner. She has also on occasion interchanged signs for I and I, no and no, 11 and lemon and others. The last example is particularly revealing. As far as I can tell, Patterson never mentioned Coco's ability to count or to use numbers. Why then would Coco sign 11? So they are contending that she under that she's learned two languages actually. Yes, it's just a sign that nobody really reckoned with the fact that sign language is a real form of communication, of course, has its own rhymes and has its own puns and like regional dialects and like everything you have in a language you have in sign language. But the researchers were still coming to it with this like very English centric view of what the apes were actually doing.

And a very oralist view. Yeah. And so this journalist, Arden Neiser, she's working on her book about deaf, the deaf community in America. And she at the New York Public Library bumps into a deaf guy who was one of the only deaf researchers to work with Washoe. So this was early, he didn't actually work with Washoe, but he worked at the same facility as Washoe. He was co-workers with Washoe. Yes. And he says, I wasn't there long. There was a very high turnover among the deaf. The gardeners wouldn't listen to anything the deaf people told them about ASL. They thought we didn't know anything about it and were just trying to make trouble. There were three shifts a day. I'd go in, wake up the chimp, change the diapers and put the

clothes on, sit him in a chair and warm up milk just like for children. I put a little bit of milk in the cup and waited for the sign, drink, thumb and mouth. I made the drink sign, waited. When he made it, I put a few drops in the cup and waited for the sign again. I wasn't supposed to give any food until he made the eat sign. I watched really carefully. The chimp's hands are moving constantly. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. I just wasn't seeing any signs. The hearing people were logging every movement the chimp made as a sign. Every time the chimp put his finger in his mouth, they'd say, oh, he's making the sign for drink and they'd give him some milk. For part of the day, I was just supposed to sign to the chimp about things he knew, things

are in the place that he knew the signs for. I signed my head off, but mostly the chimp didn't seem to notice. Even with these utterances of like me, drink, eat, nim, eat, whatever, some of that is projection too. Right. The rhetoric around this is like, isn't this amazing that we've taught these apes to communicate in language and this thing that they needed, we've given to them Prometheus with the fire. It's like, no, it's like we're forcing them to do this thing that they are just sort of rotally mechanically doing because they're hungry and bored. And so Arden Neisser also speaks to Laura Petito, this researcher who joined the NIMM project when she was only 18 or 19 years old. She's now a researcher of ASL and how deaf children

acquire language. And she was the only one who was actually taking classes in ASL. She asked Laura like how she feels about the experiment now. And she says, it haunts me. I think about it all the time. All sorts of questions remain, questions I never thought to ask while the project was going on. I think the truly fascinating things about the chimp's social and emotional behavior have not been studied. NIMM had, I'm sure, an intact communication system above the system we gave him, but we never tapped into it. NIMM didn't do anything with the signs. He only used them for requesting things. And even that is too anthropomorphic a description. He never used them in the deeper human sense of making a request. NIMM could never quite

understand he was communicating. He never used the signs as a cognitive tool. And I do not believe that he used them to think with. He had his own powerful, deeply wired communicative devices. What we added was insignificant. It didn't really add a thing. And it's like, yeah. I wrote in my notes, apes are apes, dude. And so in the same way we talked at the beginning of this problem with kind of placing species and placing languages and placing civilizations on this literally one dimensional spectrum from sort of backwards to civilized. That doesn't allow you to look at just the differences and kind of celebrate the differences without having to add a value judgment to them. So sometimes you have to remind people that like humans are not

descended from apes. Apes are not like a degraded version of man. We have a common ancestor, but the common ancestor was seven million years ago. So it's not like we were once apes and now we're people. It's that we diverged on this forking path and we've spent seven million years developing and so have they. So they are adapted to their environments. I mean, one of the things you find in the biology books is that a very good reason why apes can't really learn sign language is because they still walk on their hands a lot more than humans do. We hardly ever walk on our hands. I know, like they literally use their knuckles to like walk around on the ground. And so our hands are made for like dexterous, you know, tunnel building these like delicate gestures

and apes are like doing much more basic functions of things like holding onto trees and hanging from them. It's very interesting to me that also specifically at this moment, you know, in kind of the 60s when Americans are really experiencing this cultural wave of like, did we get the fuzzy end of the lollipops compared with the chimps? I mean, chimps do wage war on other chimps and stuff, but nothing on the scale of Vietnam. I gotta give them that. And I wonder if there was this weird, like, sick human impulse at this moment when anxiety about what civilization had done to us and what we had done to ourselves was at, you know, this spectacular high. And when people were being very public about these anxieties and like sitting on the bus reading the population

bomb, did we have this need to like take these blameless apes and like force them to try and do something that they could like kind of do? And it's so interesting that it's, I mean, it's so different from fieldwork where you would potentially be going out and attempting to sort of observe the chimps and understand the conditions that they live in by experiencing them as much as you can and just sort of quietly like watching the chimps speak chimps. And so this is, I mean, this sort of gets to like the third generation of ape research that it's much more now about just like descriptive studies. So like Marcus, the researcher that I interviewed that was with Coco, he found that gorillas actually do much more

vocal like oxygen control than we thought they did. Like they'll kind of deliberately cough and they'll blow a raspberry when they want a treat. And so you're not like teaching them vocal control. You're just like, what do they do? And so this sort of over humanizing of apes and like this need to see apes as some version of ourselves is really what brings us back to Coco and what explains the later years of Coco's life. Oh gosh, what are Coco's later years like? Is this like the Motley Crue story? Coco's sunset boulevard years. I mean, in some ways Coco is really lucky in that she wasn't taken away from Penny and they were getting donations from like, you know, newsletters and like various like people would give donations to the Gorilla Foundation to keep

Coco housed and fed. Coco was famous enough to be financially secure in her old age. Yes, and Penny never loved her, which in a lot of ways is like this really sweet, giving, caring thing. But then we also have reports from people who worked at the Gorilla Foundation that first of all, they ask everybody who leaves to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which is just like not a great sign. Unless you're Beyonce. And then in 2012, we had like an open letter from a lot of the staff members there saying that basically the Coco is like fed like a human diet and like she's not very healthy. Like Penny will mention sort of casually that like Coco loves pizza. And then like actual sort of like primatologists

and people who work on this stuff are like, she should not be eating pizza, dude. Like this is not what she eats in a while. It's not good for her. And like the sweets, like they're feeding her chocolates. Apparently the Gorilla Foundation is like, oh, they're good. They have like antioxidants in them. But like, do gorillas need fucking antioxidants? Like, I don't know. The lack of oversight for like working and living with wild animals is, you know, we've all learned a lot in the last few months about how lax that can be. Yes. There's weird money stuff. There's also two employees sue because they say that Patterson made them show their nipples to Coco. Apparently, according to the lawsuit, Patterson once said, Coco, you see my nipples all the time.

You're probably bored of my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples. Oh, so is this becoming like Coco wasn't actually asking for nipples? Coco was the excuse to ask people to show their nipples? I think it's just like, I think it's more emblematic of just like the refusal to place any boundaries. Right. So you think it's like Penny's devotion is like arguably manifesting in her treating Coco like another human. And it's like, it's really nice that you feel like you took these sacred vows to like give your whole life to Coco. But maybe Coco would do better if you gave less of your life to her. Yeah. One of the things that's actually really fascinating to me, and I think this is

like an archetype that we haven't run across in our show all that much in that Penny Patterson is like very obviously like a good person or thinks of herself as a good person or is trying to be a good person. Yes. And yeah. And you know, one of the aspects of her that doesn't get all that much attention is that she's a devout Christian. I've not yet. I've never heard that before. And I've been hearing about Coco and Penny since I was a little kid. I mean, she talks about in the first years of training Coco that she would like sort of fog her breath on a window pane and she would draw a little angel in it. And then she would try to get Coco to draw it and then she would try to get Coco to sign Angel. And part of her project has always been to prove that gorillas have a soul.

Wow. But it's also interesting that over time, that drive I think has pushed her to sort of do a like the ends justify the means kind of thing. So throughout the time that she's with Coco, there's these kind of very background rumors that first of all, apparently the San Francisco Zoo actually asked for Coco back. And Penny either flat out refused, or she raised enough money through fundraising to buy Coco from the zoo. But it seems like nobody really wanted to have like a big public legal battle about this. And so they thought that it was better to just leave Coco with her. I can't believe we're talking about gorilla legal battles. I guess this was inevitable that we would get here. Oh, and then Michael, this gorilla that she brings in to try to impregnate

Coco was actually captured from the wild. Oh, the story that Penny tells in her book is that sort of his parents were eaten by natives in Cameroon. And people in that part of the world do actually eat gorillas. So that's like somewhat plausible. But then other people that kind of know more about the dynamics of the international trade in gorillas have said that what that usually means is that his parents were poached and that he was kidnapped and then sold. And so, and I mean, she admits in her book that she bought Michael from some random guy like someone she met through Barbé Schroeder, the film director. Wow. For $28,000. She went to go see a man about a gorilla. Yes. There's this documentary that the BBC did in 2015 where Penny talks about Coco's inability

to have a child. And like she breaks down crying talking about this. And it's really moving. And it's clear that she sees this as her failure and that Coco's sadness is her sadness. You know what I mean? I keep thinking about these moments that she talks about as evidence that Coco knows sign language, right? If she says, oh, driving to LA is going to kill me and Coco runs over and signs frown, frown, frown. And in a way, it's like you don't really need Coco to sign frown, frown, frown for that to be like kind of a touching story. Right. And maybe it's that Coco is noticing your emotions and what you're putting out emotionally because animals are generally much better at that than we are. Yes. And she's communicating with you on a different level than the one you're trying

to teach her, but it's still real and it's still happening. Right. And you don't necessarily need to put it in this frame of like, look, she has like grammar and syntax and she's pluralizing words. It's like, maybe she's just intuiting something and she's expressing it to you, but we aren't necessarily tuned in to the way that she's doing that. And so, you know, she set out to prove that gorillas have a soul. And I think she did. Yeah. Right. Yes. But not in the way that she wanted to. I mean, she certainly made a generation of children love gorillas. I mean, that's a start. And I do think there's also something to the idea that like when she started working with Coco, there was this idea that gorillas wouldn't take to language, which I guess was true in the end,

but that they wouldn't like because they were like inferior to the other great apes or something like that. And I think that what all these children grew up with as a truth that is still a truth is that like, here's Coco. She's a lovely gorilla. She is best friends with this lady. She wanted a baby and she got a kitten and she loved her kitten and then she lost her kitten and she was sad. Like I think that all remains true if she's not communicating with signs that she is sad. Right. That she's still telling us that. Right. She's not necessarily telling it to us in the language that we've taught her or that we claimed to have taught her, but it's there if we want to listen. This actually reminds me of the famous

miracle worker moment of Helen Keller feeling the water on her hand and saying water or like wah. That didn't happen. Oh, she wasn't verbalizing at all. They weren't working on that at all yet because Anne Sullivan was like, okay, this child is deafblind. Like I'm going to fingerspell everything into her hand. And so the water pump moment is her realizing that the word being spelled into her hand means the thing that she's feeling. There's no verbal language involved at that point. She's not there yet, which is very interesting, right? We rewrote that to privilege the kind of communication that is meaningful to us. I'm like that moment of realization still happened, but it's just a little bit different than the version that was made palatable for

the public. Well, that's lovely. That's like a little bonus you're wrong about. Thanks. And so on June 19th of 2018, Coco is 46 and she passes away in her sleep. The average gorilla in the wild, I think lives to like 30 years, but they tend to live much longer in captivity. I mean, Marcus, this researcher that I interviewed, I mean, he said that like, there's no way to look at Coco or these kinds of studies with anything other than like sadness. The existence of her, like she was born in captivity. She spent her whole life in captivity. It's not clear that she like knew that she was a gorilla. Like her whole life, she was socializing with humans. There's no way to look at it as anything other than just like a tragedy. Like

her existence is a tragedy, right? Even if the abuse that she suffered wasn't as bad as Nim. But like captivity is a form of abuse and lack of other gorillas is a form of abuse. Because what's amazing to me is like the whole debate in the 70s and early 80s was sort of like can an ape learn sign language? And it's like, yes, they can. No, they can't. But like, was that ever the right question to ask? Like I think of like, you know, if I'm like kidnapped and taken to like an alien planet and like they teach me to speak, they're like clapping and like slapping different parts of my body language or like whatever weird, eight armed alien language they have. Yeah, I like picturing you clapping as fast as you can to try and get like a little

earthling biscuit. But it's like, it's an interesting parlor trick. But like that's not teaching them anything about humans. So is it like, yeah, like you're on this planet and you're like clapping to get crackers. And then they're like, look, this human can write clap poetry. And you just like, clap a bunch. And they're like, wow, so beautiful. Right. And you're like, I just want a cracker, you know. And also take me back to my planet. Right. It's not telling you anything about sort of like the ability of apes to engage in higher order cognition. Because our only way of tapping into that is to try to translate it into a language that we understand. It's like, it's the wrong medium to be figuring out the kinds of thought that they're capable of.

I know all of our episodes are depressing, but like this one is depressing in like a different way. Yes. It's kind of more painful because I have less of a callus on it. Yeah. Yeah. And what, I mean, how would you describe this like modality of painfulness, Mike? I mean, this is, I'm going to end with like a really dark Kafka quote that Kafka, Kafka wrote a short story called A Report to the Academy, which is about like an ape that learns to speak, but like really speak. This is an excerpt from the Harper's article. In recounting why he had learned to talk, the ape explains to his fellow members of the Academy. There was no attraction for me in imitating human beings. I imitated them because I needed a way out and for no other reason. And so I learned things,

gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one needs a way out. One learns at all costs. In conclusion, education is a tool of the oppressors. There you go. Yeah. I mean, guess the ways that like the ways that we teach are informed by what kinds of intelligence we find valuable. Right. Yeah. And also, I mean, it's also a parallel to deaf people, right? Where it's like for a hundred years, we were like, no, no, you need to learn to communicate in this other way. You need to communicate in this way that isn't suited to you, but we're going to make you do it anyway. It's interesting that we became enthusiastic as Americans about ASL in the process of teaching it to a population that couldn't apparently benefit from it. Like when there were people who were

like, we would like to communicate in a way that is, you know, useful to us. We were like, absolutely not. We're going to force someone else to do it rather than doing the thing that's useful to them. So it's only worth teaching to someone if it's painful for them. Right. And so we wouldn't want to recognize it for people that want to be speaking it. We only want to impose it upon this other, you know, what we believe to be this other spectrum of humanity. Why value a means of communication if you can't force it on people? Yeah. So yeah, that's it. Well, Mike, that was really a bummer. It's a bummer. Thanks. But we didn't cancel Coco. You can keep Coco. And throw out everyone else.

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