[Leica] Re: Chimps and gorillas

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On Dec 11, 2006, at 7:26 PM, lug-request@leica-users.org wrote:

> Koko the gorilla (the one who knows American Sign Language) had an
> Olympus OM.
> http://www.koko.org/news/Events/event_051018_ASME_Award.html
>
> --Peter
>
> Larry Z. wrote:
>>  The chimps don't stand a chance. We've got tanks, guns, bombs,
> communication systems, aircraft, etc. What do the chimps have?  
> Nothing!
> We split from the chimps a long time ago on the evolutionary tree,  
> there
> is no point in rejoining them. All of this explains why we have  
> Leicas,
> and the chimps don't have any cameras!
>


I didn't write it. Larry K did. We better start numbering the Larrys  
and the Jims on the LUG.

But I have more than a little familiarity with chimps that can  
communicate. My graduate school classmate, Al Gardiner, with his wife  
Trixie, were the first people to teach a chimp sign language. Al  
trained as an Experimental Psychologist. He took job at the Univ. of  
Nevada and married Trixie. She was a sign language teacher for the  
deaf. Gardiner reached the conclusion that the reason chimps could  
not talk was that their throats and larynx could not make speech  
sounds but they had more than enough hand dexterity to communicate in  
sign language. He and Trixie adopted a newborn chimp, Washoe, and  
raised it in the same home as their baby child. They treated both  
alike using speech and signing to talk to the kids. Washoe learned to  
sign at about the same rate as the child learned speech and excelled  
the child in physical skills. When I visited them both "children"  
played together just like normal kids except that the chimp seemed to  
be the alpha male. Indeed, that was why the Gardiners terminated the  
experiment. Their own child was getting an inferiority complex. The  
Gardiners determined that it was not until the human child began to  
use language at the age of two, that its development surged ahead.  
Trixie died about a dozen years ago but Al is still around.

I don't know if Washoe ever used a camera but Al had a Leica.

Larry Z