if you think about it, every time we tranquilize animals to transport them safely to another place, we are the sleep paralysis demon

thechekhov

You know, I love this comic dearly, but ever since I’ve put it out into the world, I realized that

I made a grave error in my script.

A lot of people in the comments have, understandably, tried to correct me on my choice of words, most specifically on this panel:

“And yet a chimp can not learn language the way a human can.”

And I’m here to admit my mistake………….

I forgot to put a disclaimer reminding people that I do, in fact, know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Alright, I know that there’s a fun little factoid that gets passed around a lot - that gorillas/apes/chimps can learn sign language, and therefore CAN do language as well!

And the thing is - no, that’s not actually true. Not in the way you may have come to believe it.

If you want the TL;DR of it:

most, if not all, projects involving great apes and sign language were started and largely led by people with no actual native OR near-native understanding of sign language. Even if the apes DID learn signs, they did not learn ASL in any meaningful way.
the tapes used to prove that the apes were effectively communicating in ‘sign’ were heavily doctored and cut in order to make them seem more cohesive and convincing than they actually were
through a thorough review of the tapes, the apes (gorillas, chimps) involved were found to be effectively signing random things until the handler saw one that they thought was ‘correct’
the handlers were often incredibly close to the apes and were often giving their charge signals - sometimes signing things for them to repeat, and the apes were often determined to be only copying signs their handler threw up, which was counted as ‘correctly answering’
many, many apes often signed in an extremely limited manner - although they had the ability to sign many words, they rarely, if ever, asked questions - one of the main hallmarks of ‘true’ language use
human language is thoroughly agreed upon by linguists to be a specific ability, and it has been determined that current apes do not have anything similar, though - importantly!! - they are still able to communicate in a multitude of incredibly complex and effective ways!

For further reading, I would suggest the following:

Here’s some reading about Nim Chimpsky, one of the more famous chimps, whose life was pretty horrible and frankly tragic by all accounts, even human ones

Here’s a wiki article with an overview of various ape language experiments and their surrounding issues

And HERE is a very succinct podcast episode that neatly summarizes the entire issue within an hour and twenty minutes:

Koko The Gorilla - You're Wrong About

“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 te

Buzzsprout

lastoneout

I highly reccomend this Soup Emporium video on the subject, it covers most of the same stuff the You’re Wrong About podcast ep does but he also talks about those dogs and cats that press buttons to “talk” and specifically focuses on how this whole thing has a lot of fucked up ableist implications that should be acknowledged. Just be warned for mentions of animal cruelty, sexual harassment, and ableism. (I also reccomend his video about Helen Keller which expands on a lot of the ideas about ableism and language he brought up in the Koko one.)

Also stellar comic OP I love it!

#now to convince people that dolphins aren't extraordinarily intelligent #and the idea comes from a 'study' done by someone who already believed they were #long post #see also: shrimp vision #it's actually much more limited than human color vision #but it's faster