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0e74c84
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I believe that we humans, in teaching chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is just my opinion and I wouldn't dare put it in a paper.
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Douglas Preston |
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73dbf11
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Toward the end Jennie and I had quite a bit of trouble. The inconsistent and chaotic atmosphere in the Archibald home was starting to take its toll. Jennie became very disobedient. She picked up a lot of Mrs. Archibald's ways. Very aggressive.
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Douglas Preston |
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6b3fbe7
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Jennie never did reject me, however. Oh no. She loved me to the very end. Her love for me was more powerful than anything the Archibalds could undermine.
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Douglas Preston |
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4226d41
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The real blow to the project came in 1973. I expected a renewal of my NSF grant for 1973. This was automatic. The NSF rarely cuts off funding in the middle of a research project, especially when the results are as spectacular as ours were. But there were other forces afoot.
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Douglas Preston |
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178d715
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sometimes she didn't know her own strength, and she didn't understand that people were a lot more fragile than she was. Sometimes she was rougher than she intended, you see. Did you know that a full-grown female chimpanzee is three to five times stronger than a man?
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Douglas Preston |
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a5786a1
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Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, an..
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Douglas Preston |
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ab11d65
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A humane research environment for chimpanzees is very, very expensive. I'm sure Miller would have been much happier if we'd locked all the chimps in four-by-five cages. When we lost our funding, we had to shut down the project immediately. This was a terrible loss to science. I can't even begin to tell you. But it also affected Jennie. It was the beginning of the end.
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Douglas Preston |
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1c5736d
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Sen. Proxmire, the watchdog of the scientific community, has tracked down and reported taxpayer-financed scientific research that is redundant, unnecessary, or just plain silly. Those projects that represent an egregious waste of taxpayer money are given his highest award, known as the Golden Fleece. Many of the projects that win the award seem amusing, until one examines the cost.
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Douglas Preston |
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e89b1f8
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I looked around at all the people talking and eating. And it suddenly seemed to me that all these people were apes: chattering, masticating, perambulating, gesticulating apes. Big grotesque hairless apes, with comical tufts of hair sticking out on top. Wearing these bizarre, ritualistically colored strips of cloth. We were a big gathering of apes, like apes in the forest gathering at a tree that had dropped its fruit. The sound, I tell you,..
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Douglas Preston |
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1ec436d
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R.'s chemotherapy is going better than expected. Total loss of hair, though. We are praying together for the first time since the early part of our marriage, and I am more filled with love for her than ever. She seems so broken and helpless; but God's love will give her and both of us strength.
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Douglas Preston |
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e6b473e
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This idea that animals in nature are uncorrupt and peaceful, while man is corrupt, violent, and unnatural, is sheer, unadulterated, unmitigated, onehundred-percent crap.
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Douglas Preston |
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c7f7eec
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If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!"
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Douglas Preston |
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b678909
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Every year he would select a few projects that he felt had no merit and would award them a golden fleece. As in "fleecing" the taxpayers." --
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Douglas Preston |
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67d8024
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the American taxpayers had wasted $550,000 teaching five chimpanzees to talk sign language. What could a chimpanzee have to say that might be of interest? Proxmire asked. Well, he said, here it is in black and white, here are the earth-shattering comments from these chimps, after a half million dollars of English lessons: "Gimme banana!" and "I gotta go potty!" He was reading from one of my papers on the Senate floor! The big fat pompous as..
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Douglas Preston |
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cbf8e34
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Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn't even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?
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Douglas Preston |
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f15b3db
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The question is, do we really need talking chimpanzees? The supporters of the project tell us they are unlocking the secrets of human language. But Sen. Proxmire--backed up by an eminent-scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Craig Miller--has called that idea into question. The project has yielded nothing more than elaborate imitative behavior on the part of the apes. Nothing approaching real communication--that is, language--h..
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Douglas Preston |
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96a552f
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Dear Editor, So you think the world doesn't need talking chimpanzees. Well, have any of your smart-aleck editorial writers bothered to come here to Kibbencook and see our "talking" chimpanzee? Her name is Jennie and she's a member of our family and communicates with those around her a lot better than most human children her age. I open your paper in the morning and I can hardly wade through all the gobbledygook that you try to pass off as "..
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Douglas Preston |
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2e5cb7a
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The man was angry and acting like a bully, as policemen do. His name was Russo. Bill Russo. Well, I'd known Bill Russo for years, and he was a bit, shall we say, limited. He knew Sandy, or should have known him, but I guess he didn't recognize him with the long hair. Thought he was some kind of crazed hippie. So he ordered Sandy up against the car with his arms out, and started searching him. Well, you know how protective Jennie was. She tu..
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Douglas Preston |
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978a602
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Sandy told him Jennie was part of a secret government scientific project and that if they did anything to her the FBI would put him in jail.
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Douglas Preston |
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48868b4
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In the meantime, he said, he would have to take Jennie down to the pound. Hugo was magnificent. Very cool and patient. He. explained to the man who Jennie was, what she was, and why it was impossible to even think of putting her in the pound. He dropped hints about Jennie's strength and how she could escape from any cage made for an animal. He frightened the poor man half to death. He said, well, under the circumstances it would be acceptab..
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Douglas Preston |
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b962401
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Alterman had hired a professional ASL interpreter from the Somerville School for the Deaf. Her credentials were impeccable. She was terrific and we had very carefully coached Jennie and rehearsed her testimony. For days on end we rehearsed what Jennie was to say. If she were human I am sure it would have been illegal, coaching the witness the way we did.
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Douglas Preston |
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6f74abc
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The minute the judge saw Jennie in her little blue suit with the big red bow, and saw her signing back and forth with the interpreter, he would never, ever, in a thousand years, find her a menace to society and order her destroyed. How could he? She was just like a little person!
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Douglas Preston |
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37899c0
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Jennie's testimony was meaningless to determine the facts of the case, but that he was allowing it anyway. The judge wanted to see the signing chimpanzee in action.
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Douglas Preston |
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8a1e98e
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I could see the reporter scribbling away as if his life depended on it. I suppose for him it was the scoop of a lifetime. Here he'd probably been sitting around for months doing the Kibbencook courthouse "beat," and seeing nothing more interesting than a drunk driver. And now, isn't it funny, but I wonder if Mr. Alterman didn't have something to do with getting that reporter into the courtroom? I hadn't thought about that before, but this c..
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Douglas Preston |
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ce4f3e8
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I suppose the whole thing was highly irregular from a legal point of view, but it was great fun. And nobody was having more fun than the judge. It wasn't a real trial, you see, so he didn't have to worry about all the legal niceties.
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Douglas Preston |
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6ab4506
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Sarah was nine years old that summer. Her passions were reading and music. Sarah devoured books, sometimes two a day. Lea had to check her every night to make sure she turned out her light, or she would read to all hours and drag herself down to breakfast with dark circles under her eyes.
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Douglas Preston |
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78a80f1
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She became particularly irritable toward me and Sandy. She would not allow us to approach her, let alone touch her, and she often broke into loud screams if we approached. She also became curiously incommunicative and ignored many of our efforts to sign to her. Lea and I knew well that chimpanzees become difficult when they reach puberty. And yet, we had managed to persuade ourselves that Jennie would be different. We felt we knew Jennie ev..
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Douglas Preston |
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f04744d
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While in estrus she found being confined intolerable, even though she had always slept in a locked room. We had to listen to her screaming and pounding much of the night, and one night during that first estrus she managed to break the lock and get out.
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Douglas Preston |
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dde4602
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We live in a nation of ignoramuses. The average American knows nothing about science. A man asked me once if the stars went away when the sun rose, or if they were still there but you just couldn't see them. He was a stockbroker I had the misfortune of employing, a man who made over one hundred thousand dollars a year! Well, I took my investments away from him, damn quick! And then the market climbed five hundred points.
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Douglas Preston |
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634e35c
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I do not begrudge the average American his ignorance. It's a free country. But when you have elected officials, people who wield enormous power, who flaunt their ignorance, that is a different matter.
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Douglas Preston |
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3c4c9e5
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Here we were, spending all this taxpayer money teaching chimps a few hundred signs. They had no clue as to how this would illuminate our understanding of human linguistic development. Or the evolution of language. Proxmire had no idea that this research might enhance the way we teach language to retarded or handicapped children. There was no understanding of the revolutionary results of our work, and how it revealed for the first time the m..
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Douglas Preston |
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5fa92c8
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Here we are, two of the world's experts on chimpanzee behavior, and we have no idea how to control this one animal." And he laughed bitterly. For the first time in my life I felt at a total loss. I had no idea what to do, no answer for him. I felt only dread for what the future might hold." --
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Douglas Preston |
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53ec1ea
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the guilt and suffering of Judas Escariot. I do not believe, however, that the congregation took to it. I asked the question: Was Judas chosen for the deed? It was prophesied, was it not? Where, then, is the guilt?
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Douglas Preston |
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47c50c8
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The good people of Kibbencook, indeed all human beings, want answers, not questions, from their religious leaders. No matter.
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Douglas Preston |
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688e483
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I have not felt her presence, as I had always believed I should if she should predecease me. Where is she? I am afraid for her, and for myself.
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Douglas Preston |
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34b8c08
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The monkey, as I understood it, is to stay indefinitely. I returned hatless. R. was much put out. I pray God bring her peace.
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Douglas Preston |
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2b679d0
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animals surely would be in Heaven, otherwise Heaven would not be Heaven.
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Douglas Preston |
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8ba8aee
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at least the higher animals have souls, and they are inevitably saved. Only man, who has the capacity for good and evil, can be damned.
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Douglas Preston |
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7aca985
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Jennie had a set of values, but she didn't realize they were different values from the rest of us. She never could understand why she was always in trouble. In the end, I mean. She didn't know what it was that made her angry all the time. I'll tell you what it was. It was very simple: it was our society trying to break her, trying to make her a nice middle-class person.
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Douglas Preston |
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6180916
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their relationship had a spiritual dimension. Think about that for a moment. Language is power. Prentiss was like a spiritual guide. She gave Jennie power--and Jennie used it.
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Douglas Preston |
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ed619f8
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She created a new world for herself. It blew my mind to see this animal acquire language. And then literally reshape her world with it.
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Douglas Preston |
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3a93286
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At what point in evolution did man acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and thus the capacity to be damned? In this light, the story of Adam and Eve takes on deeper significance. It is a parable of evolution.
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Douglas Preston |
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ad37fac
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it was never too late for the truth.
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Douglas Preston |
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4fb7ed5
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He said he had been converted to atheism at the age of six, when his Sunday school teacher had described with relish the eternal fires of Hell.
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Douglas Preston |