Model Humans: Interpreting Apes, Creating Data, 1960-1979
Creators: name: Sveiven, Noah
Publisher: name: Stanford Digital Repository
Year: 2024
Subjects: Primatology
Jane Goodall
David Hamburg
Emil Menzel
Francine Patterson
Stanford Outdoor Primate Facility
Koko the Gorilla

description: Jane Goodall (1934–), David Hamburg (1925–2019), Emil Menzel (1929–2012), Francine Patterson (1947–): These behavioral scientists treated and talked about the apes they studied as though the creatures were model humans.  Two competing methodological traditions flooded their studies with epistemic pretensions and influenced how each of them interacted with their animals: (1) the art of primatological narrative and (2) the art of measurement.  The art of primatological narrative held that anecdotes are data and that narrative itself is a form of knowledge.  Field notes, with paragraphs of prose comprising complete sentences about the observed behavior, are the recordkeeping technology associated with the narrative-knowers.  Jane Goodall is the exemplar of this tradition.  In opposition to primatological narrative, the art of measurement held that numbers are the most reliable representations of the world.  David Hamburg championed this approach, insisting that his students think about behavior as the sum of discreet units of actions that can be counted and entered into a data set.  Checksheets (a special kind of spreadsheet with preidentified behaviors or individual animals constituting one axis, units of time the other axis) are the recordkeeping technology associated with the number-knowers.  While Emil Menzel conducted several rationalized experiments about how chimpanzees understand location (using charts with grid lines to plot the chimps as dots on paper), Menzel was first and foremost a narrative experimentalist.  For her part, Francine Patterson insisted that she should be counted among the quantifiers, but in practice, her sentimental approach contradicted her scientistic rhetoric.  While Goodall has certainly published papers using quantitative data, her worldview and persona are built on a profound narrative sense of how best to know other living beings.  As each of these scientists created and interpreted their data, these two competing methodological traditions influenced them and their relations with their apes.

This thesis charts the history of narration and measurement in the studies these researchers conducted on apes.  Chapter 1 focuses on Jane Goodall as the exemplar of knowing apes by narrating them.  Chapter 2 focuses on David Hamburg as the exemplar of prizing measurement, especially the technology of the check sheet, as the gold standard for knowing about other animals.  Chapter 3 demonstrates how Emil Menzel attempted to balance the arts of primatological narrative and measurement, and how his desire to achieve this methodological combination alternatingly slackened and tightened the restrictive living conditions of his captive chimpanzees.  Chapter 4 answers the question of why the Stanford Outdoor Primate Facility closed a mere five years after it opened: the model humans turned out to be too humanlike.  Chapter 5 shows how Francine “Penny” Patterson harmfully humanized Koko the gorilla by insisting on measuring her with human-based rubrics with the ultimate effect of conceding the idea that commensurability with human beings confers moral worth on other-than-human life.  Throughout these chapters, I argue that the historical processes of peopling the animals and harming them went hand in hand.  For the apes, it was their proximity to humanity that harmed them.