Chimpanzee Signing: Darwinian Realities and Cartesian Delusions

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

Scholarship in Review 84(2)

Scholarship in Review was a magazine highlighting research and scholarly activities at Central Washington University, published by the Office of Graduate Studies and Research.https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/scholarship_in_review/1000/thumbnail.jp

Beatrix (Trixie) Gardner -- A Tribute

Central Washington Univeristy, US

Beatrix (Trixie) Gardner -- A Tribute

Central Washington Univeristy, US

On the Psychological Well-Being of Chimpanzees

No abstract available

Dirty bathwater, innateness neonates and the dating game

No abstract available

A Survey of Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in the Selectively Logged Ngotto Forest, Central African Republic

Currently, the timber company Industrie Forestiére du Batalimo is selectively logging the Ngotto Forest in the Central African Republic. The forest is home to a population of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and provides the Bofi-speaking people of Grima with food, medicine, housing material, and other commodities. Over a 7-month period, the research team conducted a line-transect survey of the great ape population in the forests to the south of Grima to document their distribution. For comparison purposes, the team also surveyed a section of adjacent forest that had already been logged. Ape nests were significantly rarer in the logged forest than in the unlogged forest, and ape nests were most common in the more pristine forests to the south. This report further discusses the effects of logging and other human activities

Unbalanced human apes and syntax

We propose that the fine discrete movements of the tongue as used in speech are what account for the extreme lateralization in humans, and that handedness is a mere byproduct of tongue use. With regard to syntax, we support the Armstrong et al. (1995) proposition that syntax derives directly from gestural motor movements as opposed to facial expressions