The gorilla didn't talk. That's the truth of it. All those years we were sold a bill of goods about Koko and her thousand-word vocabulary. The newspapers ate it up. So did the TV guys. Even the scientists bought in. But it was all a load of bananas.
I've seen my share of con jobs in boxing. Guys taking dives. Mismatched bouts set up to pad a prospect's record. Tomato cans fighting in other states under the boxing licenses of dead men to get around medical suspensions. Crooked managers steering their half-decent fighters into the tank, turning them into nothing but opponents. But this ape language racket takes the cake. At least in boxing, you know to keep your guard up. With Koko, they snuck it right past us.
The story—repeated across dozens of Weekly Reader features and PBS specials—went that this smart-aleck gorilla, raised from a baby by some researchers in California, had learned to use sign language. Not just a few gestures, mind you. They claimed she knew over 1000 signs. Could express complex thoughts. Even crack jokes and lie. A regular furry Woody Allen, if you bought the hype.
And boy, did we buy it. Koko was on magazine covers. In children's books. They made documentaries about her. Had her hobnobbing with celebrities. Robin Williams came to visit. So did Mr. Rogers, in his cardigan sweater. Koko picked out kittens as pets and named them. When one died, they said she grieved. The works.
It was like something out of a Disney movie. The gentle giant who just wanted to communicate. To bridge the gap between apes and humans. To show us how alike we really are. Touching stuff, if it was on the level. Problem is, it wasn't.
There were always skeptics. Scientists who said the whole thing didn't add up. That the researchers were seeing what they wanted to see. Interpreting random gestures as meaningful signs. But those voices got drowned out. We wanted the fairy tale to be true.
Then along came a guy named Herbert Terrace. He'd done his own ape language study with a chimp called Nim Chimpsky. Cute name. A play on Noam Chomsky, the big-shot language expert. Terrace started out a believer. Thought he was going to prove apes could learn language just like humans.
But Terrace was an honest man. And a careful scientist. He looked hard at the video footage of Nim signing. Really broke it down. And you know what he found? The chimp wasn't using language at all. He was just imitating his handlers. Stringing together signs at random, hoping to get a treat.
It was like when a boxer's got nothing left but keeps flailing away. Running through their memorized combinations, hoping to land a lucky punch. That's what these apes were doing with their signs. Just throwing stuff out there to see what stuck.
Terrace went public with his findings. Said the whole field of ape language research was bunk. You'd think that would've been the end of it. But Koko's handlers doubled down. Kept right on claiming their gorilla could talk. And plenty of folks were happy to keep believing.
Why? Same reason people believe in faith healers, social media influencers, and fortune tellers (a friend in marketing tells me he’s amazed at the digital advertising budget one popular online psychic has). We want it to be true. An animal that can think like us, talk like us? It's a comfort. Makes the world seem less lonely. And if gorillas can learn our language, maybe we're not so different after all. Maybe we ought to treat them better.
Noble sentiment—the whales who probably can talk would get behind that. But you can't base your animal-rights campaign on a lie. That's like fixing fights to make people feel good about a boxer past his prime. It might help old Tex Cobb sell tickets for a while, but watching guys like Sonny Barch take a knee in their fights with him isn’t doing anyone any favors in the long run.
The real scandal is how long it went on. Decades. With hardly anyone calling foul. The Koko show ran from the 1970s clear into the 2010s. That's a hell of a long con. Makes the Black Sox look like pikers.
And it wasn't just Koko. There were other signing apes too. Washoe the chimp. Chantek the orangutan. Even a bonobo named Kanzi who they said could understand spoken English. All of it hyped to the moon, as the crypto bros say. All of it dubious as a boxer's medical clearance after he's taken too many shots to the head or popped some ludicrous blood pressure reading before a big match.
The researchers behind these projects weren't fighters or managers on the take. They were respected scientists. Or at least they started out that way. But somewhere along the line, they got too invested in their star pupils. Couldn't admit they might be wrong.
The facts here are clear, if you look at them straight. These apes never really learned language. Not the way humans use it. They picked up some signs, sure. Could associate them with objects or actions. But stringing them together into real sentences? Expressing abstract thoughts? No. That was all in the researchers' heads.
What the apes did learn was how to work the system. How to please their handlers and get rewards. It's not so different from a fighter learning how to work the ref. Or charm the judges. Or play to the crowd. It's a kind of intelligence, sure. But it isn't language.
It was a Rorschach test. People saw what they wanted to see. If you believed apes could learn language, every random gesture looked meaningful. Every grunt sounded like poetry. The apes? Well, they were playing Family Feud—guess what their handlers guess they want to see.
It's not so different from how some people watch fights. They see their guy winning even when he's getting pasted. Every wild swing looks like it almost connected. Every stumble is just him setting up a trap. The truth is right there in front of their eyes, but they can't see it.
The ape language researchers were the same way. They'd invested years, whole careers, in this idea. Built up a whole mythology around these talking apes. How could they admit it was all smoke and mirrors?
So they kept at it. Kept putting out press releases. Kept claiming breakthroughs. Even as the scientific community turned its back. Even as the evidence mounted that it was all bunk.
Makes you wonder what other so-called facts we're all taking for granted. What other stories we're swallowing. Just because they come from people with fancy degrees. Or because they tell us something we want to hear. To the moon, huh? Only in the pictures, kid.
In boxing, you learn to be skeptical. To watch out for the fix. To know that not every punch that looks like it landed really did. That sometimes the fight game is more about selling tickets and building stars than finding out who's the better man. Often that’s the last thing we want to find out, especially when both dudes are the absolute worst.
Maybe we ought to bring some of that skepticism to the rest of life. To the stories we hear on the news. To the latest scientific breakthrough. To anything that seems too good to be true.
Because usually, if it seems too good to be true, it is. Just ask Koko. If she could really talk, that is. But she can't. Never could. And that's the real story here. The story of how we all got took.
It's not a happy ending. But then, life rarely deals in happy endings. Not in the ring, and not in the lab. The best we can do is try to see things clear. To call them like we see them. Even when the truth isn't what we'd like it to be.
So next time you hear about some amazing discovery, some courageous baby-saving animal or miraculous pandemic-ending vaccine, remember Koko. Remember how easy it is to be fooled. How badly we all want to believe in magic.
In boxing, they talk about the "naked-eye universe"—what you can see with your own eyes, not what the judges or the commentators or anyone else tells you. That's what we need more of in this world. Less hype, less spin, more naked-eye truth. Because if we can't trust our own eyes—and sometimes we can’t—who or what can we trust?
That old skeptic Sextus Empiricus knew the score: “If Socrates died, then either he died when he was living, or when he was dead. But he couldn't have died when he was living, for he was not dead when he was living. But he couldn't have died when he was dead, for when he was dead he had already died. Therefore, Socrates never died.” How true that is.