Saturday, July 30, 2005

She certainly gave science a wish or two...

November 4th, 1970. A middle-aged woman and her mother came into a welfare office in Temple City, California, carrying a small girl who looked to the officer to be just 6 or 7. She was in reality 13, and had lived a life of severe abuse. Genie (real name protected by law), a very unfortunate victim of abuse, was kept locked in a room alone for over 10 years. While awake, she was tied to a potty chair, and slept in a crib with her hands restricted. Her father, who was mentally unstable himself, regarded Genie as a retarded child, and considered his ritual abuse as a way of protecting her.

Genie's peculiar bunny-like walk shocked her rescuers, in which she held her arms like paws in front of her, and walked haltingly. She wasn't toilet-trained, could focus to only a few feet in front of her, could not eat solid foods and spat constantly, and the only words she said were 'stopit' and 'nomore'.

Genie is a feral child, one of several cases of children who have lived many of their formative years without the nurturing environment of a human society. Her case shocked and saddened millions of people, and she found a lot of well-wishers. However, Genie also provided a lot of evidence and food for thought for linguists. She provided a unique, albeit extremely unfortunate case study to investigate the Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that the period from about two years till puberty is critical to the learning of language in a child, and if that period is missed, the child doesn't learn language as proficiently as a normal child would. An easy-to-see support of this hypothesis is that most of us, who have been brought up in a place where the language spoken is not our own, pick up the foreign language with native-like proficiency, whereas our parents still grapple with words and constructions, in spite of being exposed for the same time.

Psychologists, linguists and neurobiologists tracked Genie's progress. During her rehabilition, she was very eager to learn new words, pointing at them until someone told her what the object was called. She rapidly progressed; her acqusition seemed to be just a delayed version (about 12 years) of that of a normal child, only faster! She went through the natural initial phases of language acquisition, until she was stuck at the multiword phrase. Genie just couldn't go beyond saying phrases like "Applesauce buy store" and "No have toy". At the same time, her caretakers were amazed at how quickly she picked up maths and how well she could express abstract thoughts through drawing. It is said that the scientists working with Genie fell in love with her innocence, and often would spend entire days with her.

In Genie's case, however, the Critical Period Hypothesis could not be verified conclusively. Evidence of brain damage was found, although no one was sure whether her brain was damaged from birth or because of the brutal treatment she recieved in her earlier years. It wasn't sure anymore whether her block in acquisition was due to her passing the critical age, or due to the brain damage. In any case, the experiment was scrapped, and today Genie lives in a foster home in southern California.

The case study of Genie was fascinating, but also very controversial. Her mother, and a whole lot of people, ended up thinking that the experimentation on Genie was detrimental to her being rehabilitated and science should have left the poor girl alone, but scientists maintain that they loved Genie like she was their own child. What struck me the most was simply that there was an actual word for children like Genie - 'feral children'... which means it happens often enough to require a name! Depressing...

The movie Mockingbird Don't Sing is based on Genie. Although not an excellent movie, it is worth a watch.
The mind is turned on!

I look down at a familiar white dog that comes out on the lawn and settles down amongst us as if it's one of us, and although I smile at how cute the act looked, I can't help but loathe its utter lack of intelligence. I'm definitely a superior being, I think. And I look so much more handsome, and have far less hair on the chest... and then the mutt looks up to me, and its eyes reflect purity, kindness and intelligence - it's one of God's creatures;
it seems to have a soul. I wonder, what really makes us so different?

Bah! But of course, man is far superior. We're thinkers, we're builders, we're warriors, we're philosophers, we're murderers. We appreciate beauty, we create beauty, we destroy it. I've never seen a bird stop and stare at the sunset, just like I've never seen a dumb monkey electing a dumber one for
President. As a society, we're cultured and complex, and we are rational beings. And of course, we possess the most powerful tool ever created: language! We are above nature. We aren't bound by it, we're beyond it.

My mind dwells on language and culture.
Certain species of monkeys have a set of sounds specifying signals, such as that of food or danger. Parrots and parakeets imitate voices, a songbird can actually piece together bits of songs heard from other birds to make its own composition. Apes (the most famous being Koko) have been taught how to use hand signals to communicate with man. Language, right? Wrong! Even Apes only seem to reach the Multiword Phrase Level, speaking sentences like 'Koko hug', a feat accomplished rather easily by humans before the age of 3, without years of research, training and pampering. The full recursive infiniteness of human language (add 'Google says that' before any declarative sentence to make a new one, for example), a lexical repertoire of over 30,000 words, and the vast array of abstract thoughts detached from time and space that can be expressed... now that's raw power. That's unparalleled, that's human.

On a high, and rather proud of myself, I move to culture and beauty. We appreciate the beauty of the world around us and we create
things purely for aesthetic pleasure. No other being does this, or indeed needs to! Doesn't that put us above nature? Why would nature give us tools we don't need for our survival? Appreciation of art and beauty, kindness, altruism, magnanimity... these are biologically without function or even illogical. Perhaps they aren't... many researchers, notably G.F Miller, say very interestingly that almost every trait we consider uniquely human has risen out of the process of sexual selection. With traits like pure physical strength no longer a parameter for fitness, humans have to rely on other measures of fitness. The appreciation and creation of beauty and art reflect a developed and superior mind, altruism and kindness are an obvious indicator of success, and it is but obvious that courtship in humans employs wit and humour, a definite measure of intelligence. One even dares to say that the entire world of art, of beauty and of charity is here just to help us find mates! Many elements of human sexuality also seem to be deeper than they are. Facial beauty is a direct consequence of symmetry, a measure of genetic health. The large breasts and buttocks of the human female exhibit fitness and energy resources to take care of the soon-to-come young, and hence are naturally attractive to men. Perhaps the expressive power of language, as it is now, is also a result of sexual selection!

Perhaps the character John Keating (
Robin Williams) was right when he said in 'Dead Poets Society' that language was made not to communicate, but to woo women! We seem to think we are above nature, that what we define as human is not needed for survival and hence not dictated by it. We use this to detach ourselves and to elevate ourselves. But we seem to be very much under the control of nature... we're just too intelligent to realize it!

And as science fails to give me some solace, I look back at the dog. It gives me a blank stare, but its soul gives me a smile. I won this battle, it says. The war is far from over, I reply. And I finish the remaning lime juice and move on.