In 1974, scientists took a tiny monkey from the zoo.
The chimpanzee was brought into the family and raised as a child. It wasn’t until years later that it became clear that as part of the Nim project, scientists were trying to turn a chimpanzee into a human.
A chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky fell into the hands of biologist Stephanie LaFarge.
The name of the monkey was not given by chance. It is an allusion to the outstanding linguist Noam Chomsky, who considered language to be an exclusively human characteristic.
The experiment was curated by Columbia University professor Herbert Torres.
He believed that, of course, the monkey would not be able to speak. But he saw it as real to teach her words in the form of sign language for free communication.
Stephanie Lafarge taught Nim to eat with a spoon from a plate and use the restroom at first.
A year later, the chimpanzee began to wash dishes, he also maintained order in his room.
For 4 years of work, Nim learned 125 gestures.
However, when the continuous learning process was interrupted, his vocabulary quickly dropped to 25 gestures.
And after the final examination in 1977, they decided to curtail the project – they could not turn the monkey into a man.
Modern scientists criticize the Torres experiment. In their opinion, trying to make a representative of a different species out of a monkey was initially a failed idea.
