Department or Administrative Unit
Primate Behavior and Ecology
Document Type
Book Chapter
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Author Copyright
© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publication Date
2002
Abstract
Truly discontinuous, all-or-none phenomena must be rare in nature. Historically, the great discontinuities have turned out to be conceptual barriers rather than natural phenomena. They have been passed by and abandoned rather than broken through in the course of scientific progress. The sign language studies in chimpanzees have neither sought nor discovered a means of breathing humanity into the soul of a beast. They have assumed instead that there is no discontinuity between verbal behavior and the rest of human behavior or between human behavior and the rest of animal behavior—no barrier to be broken, no chasm to be bridged, only unknown territory to be explored.
Recommended Citation
Fouts, R.S., Jensvold, MLA, and Fouts, D.H. (2002). Chimpanzee Signing: Darwinian Realities and Cartesian Delusions. In Bekoff, M., Allen, C., and Burghardt, G.M. (Eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (pp. 285-291). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1885.003.0040
Included in
Animal Sciences Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Anthropology Commons, Psychology Commons
Comments
This book chapter was originally published in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. The full-text book from the publisher can be found here.