The weed smoking chimp raised by a human family.

Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee raised like a human child by a surrogate family as part of a controversial project on animal language acquisition. During his lifetime Nim learned over 125 signs including “stone smoke time now”, which Nim used when he wanted to smoke marijuana.

Nim Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University. The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace with the linguistic analysis headed up by psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on linguist Noam Chomsky, who holds that humans are “wired” to develop language. Though usually called Nim Chimpsky, his full name was Neam Chimpsky, or Nim for short

Since 98.7% of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists (but not Noam Chomsky) believed that a chimp raised in a human family, and using ASL (American Sign Language), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans. Project Nim, headed by behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace at Columbia University, was conceived in the early 1970s as a challenge to Chomsky’s thesis that only humans have language.

While Nim did learn 125 signs, Terrace concluded that he had not acquired anything the researchers were prepared to designate worthy of the name “language” (as defined by Noam Chomsky) although he had learned to repeat his trainers’ signs in appropriate contexts. Language is defined as a “doubly articulated” system, in which signs are formed for objects and states and then combined syntactically, in ways that determine how their meanings will be understood. For example, “man bites dog” and “dog bites man” use the same set of words but because of their ordering will be understood by speakers of English as denoting very different meanings.

One of Terrace’s colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard criteria, Nim’s true vocabulary count was closer to 25 than 125. However, other students who cared for Nim longer than Petitto disagreed with her and with the way that Terrace conducted his experiment. Critics assert that Terrace used his analysis to destroy the movement of ape-language research. Terrace argued that none of the chimps were using language, because they could learn signs but could not form them syntactically as language.

Terrace and his colleagues concluded that the chimpanzee did not show any meaningful sequential behavior that rivaled human grammar. Nim’s use of language was strictly pragmatic, as a means of obtaining an outcome, unlike a human child’s, which can serve to generate or express meanings, thoughts or ideas. There was nothing Nim could be taught that could not equally well be taught to a pigeon using the principles of operant conditioning.

After the project was concluded, Nim struggled to integrate into a lifestyle with other chimpanzees because he had been raised as a human by a human surrogate family. He was later sold to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, where he was subjected to experimental injections and spent most of his time heavily sedated. After efforts to free him succeeded, Nim was purchased by The Fund for Animals and lived out the remainder of his life at Black Beauty Ranch in Texas.