Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
The Quack Detector
By Stephen Jay Gould
Science: Good, Bad and Bogus
by Martin Gardner
Prometheus Books, 408 pp., $18.95
In the heady days, only a decade ago, when psychologists thought they had unlocked the conceptual capacities of apes by teaching them American Sign Language, a leading researcher confessed to me that he would refrain from teaching one key item to his chimpanzee—the fact of her impending personal mortality. No other animal, he explained, understood this most terrible of all facts—and he had nightmarish visions of his enlightened ape spreading the bad news by sign throughout chimpdom.
Review, 2404 words
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