2007: A bad year for talking animals

Like many celebrities, Alex and Washoe needed no last names, but then again they had no last names.

Alex died in September, 2007 and was probably the world’s most famous parrot. I clipped his obituary from the newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers and taped it to my office door. Washoe died around a month later. She was a chimpanzee who learned elements of American Sign Language and even taught signs to other apes and at least one human.

I learned about Washoe nearly 25 years ago, when I was in a graduate linguistics program. We discussed her case in the first few weeks of class, when we talked about what is and what isn’t language.

“Washoe’s enduring legacy comes not from the number of signs she could be said to acquire, or whether those signs amounted to language,” her obituary in the January, 2008 issue of Anthropology News said. “Rather, it relates to how she caused people to think hard about the dividing line between apes and people, indeed, about the very nature of personhood.”

The author of Washoe’s obituary is William and Mary’s own Barbara King. She is the Chancellor Professor in our Department of Anthropology and is the author of Evolving God, a book tracing the genesis of religion in hominids. Washoe is, literally, a household name, in learned households, anyway and in classrooms and labs as well. The very fact that Barbara King was tapped to write the obituary for Washoe is not only a testimony to her eminence in the field of primate research, but also scores off the charts when it comes to coolness. Barbara told me that Evolving God is going into a second printing. She also showed me a Dutch edition. Good news.