Extraordinary tale of scientist parents who adopted a chimpanzee to raise as their baby's SISTER - but bitterly regretted bizarre 'nature versus nurture' experiment on their son after it yielded chilling results

UK Daily Mail ^ | January 20, 2024 | Bethan Sexton

[Twotone]

Extraordinary video footage shows how two scientist parents attempted to raise their infant son alongside a chimpanzee as part of a bizarre nature versus nurture experiment in 1931.

Psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg conducted the study on their ten-month-old son Donald and a seven-month-old chimp called Gua at their Florida home.

The couple were attempting to establish if it was possible to educate an ape and teach them to communicate as a human.

snip

Donald took to walking around on all fours, dragging his knuckles like an ape.

He would often start biting people when he became aggressive and he and Gua shared a secret language of bark-like noises that they would use to communicate.

Donald began to lag behind his peers in terms of development, and often chose to shun other children in favor of playing with Gua.

All the while, Gua was growing in strength and becoming more and more unpredictable.

Eventually, the couple became so concerned by Donald's behavior and the potential for Gua to lash out that they opted to end the experiment early.

[daniel1212]

Then there was Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist and the grand architect of the project, planned to raise a chimpanzee in a human home, with no other contact with other chimpanzees, and begin instructing him in sign language from infancy. Days after his birth, Terrace scooped up the infant Nim, flew him to New York, and had him placed, like a foster child, in the home of the LaFarges, asking the family to instruct the chimp in American Sign Language. Not a single member of the household was fluent, or even competent, in sign language. The LaFarges were wealthy, eccentric hippies—W.E.R., a pony-tailed and put-upon poet, and Stephanie, a former student and lover of Terrace’s—with a Brady-Bunch-sized family who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. And wait—it gets weirder.

FR post here. It's Romans 1.

[Getready]

Sounds like mental disease runs in families. Poor chimp. Poor kid. Poor parents.

[daniel1212]

UK Daily Mail’s real problem is its soft porn tempting sidebar. I usually avoid the site, yet it is often has informative stories that US media does not.

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[NorthMountain]

One wonders at the personality traits that make a good scientist.

Perhaps you might try actually meeting real scientists in the real world.

We're not sickos like these two, and we're not dorks like what hollywood shows you on the TV.

I gotta say, though, the field of psychology seems to attract (or produce, not sure which) some truly odd ducks. Jordan Peterson is a breath of fresh air coming from that community.

[NorthMountain]

“Evil clown” is a redundancy ...

[TauntedTiger]

Yep, this is what scientists are capable of. We act as if the Nazi scientists were out of the ordinary when in reality they were the very definition of scientists.

[2nd Amendment]

Was the chimp registered to vote democrat?

[Candor7]

This is the legacy of the poor child Donald.Furries.

Beastiality, pedophilia, political homosexuality, transitioniing, all driven by imbalence ever since the days of Sodom.Oh how evil likes to fill whatever depression it can in the human heart.

INteresting is ot not that back in 1930, these psychologists cpuld not connect the dots between their experimanet and neasiality. Today ots cutified as “furries.”

My Irish Setter would be appalled if he knew.

[Clutch Martin]

“Considering what chimps have been known to do to people they turn on, they are fortunate that their son was not attacked and either disfigured or killed by the animal.”

I was pretty good friends with a biology major a couple decades back and he had some interesting information regarding pythons and other fauna and flora and he told us the thing about chimps is that in the wild they fight each other and they know instinctively where all the soft parts are because they have the same soft parts so when they bite your face off or they rip your nuts off it’s because they know what works.

You don’t really have to train a dog how to fight, they take to it naturally. Same with primates and almost every other animal out there.

[metmom]

The only person I knew who was a furry was also transitioning from girl to guy.

Her mother was a piece of work and had about them most addictive personality I ever met.

[Twotone]

Aha! So YOU are a scientist. We’ll be keeping an eye on you. ;-)

Certain personality traits are “beneficial” for certain lines of work, like bravery in military men. But they can lead to weird stuff, as in this case. The other story this reminds me of is Cheaper By the Dozen, where the father was a progressive & into studying efficiency & ran his huge household that way. Much less negative than the chimpanzee case, though.

[Palmetto State Conservative]

I’m not suicidal, but how depressing for both the kid and the chimp. It is scary to think what people are capable of doing in the name of “science,” isn’t it.

[PIF]

Did the kid recover from this experiment?

—
Yes they are both now at the local zoo.

[Jonty30]

It’s very unfortunate that his life was destroyed because of a father who just had to see what would happen.

[NorthMountain]

Cheaper By the Dozen

I read that as a teenager ... saw it as a bit of a cautionary tale.

For most of us (and this applies to both science and engineering), the subject of our study is "things". In psychology (and similar), the subject of their study is "people" ... which they can tend to reduce to "things", with such appalling results as this chimpanzee experiment.

[CaptainK]

As scary as the scientists infatuated with gain of function experimentation.