Great Ape Trust scientists invited to lecture at prestigious Berlin Behavioral Biology Symposium

Des Moines, Iowa – January 29, 2009 – The inclusion of two Great Ape Trust of Iowa scientists in a prestigious symposium on behavioral biology in Berlin next spring is a signal that scientists may be reversing a long-held position that biology alone determines behavior, said ape research pioneer Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a scientist with special standing at the Des Moines, Iowa, scientific research institute studying the intelligence and behavior of great apes.

Savage-Rumbaugh, whose groundbreaking work with the bonobo Kanzi and other great apes challenged beliefs that only humans were capable of language, has been invited to present as a distinguished senior lecturer when esteemed scientists from around the world gather at the Berlin Behavioral Biology Symposium April 30-May 4. William M. Fields, Great Ape Trust’s director of bonobo research, also will present as an invited co-lecturer at the symposium, where the past, present and future of behavioral biology will be discussed from myriad perspectives.

Behavioral biology was founded as animal psychology around the turn of the 20^th century, but has evolved into a complex discipline encompassing ethology, sociobiology, neurophysiology, human ethology, behavioral ethology, biosemiotics, evolutionary psychology and related fields.

“The other sub-disciplines which have grown out of this debate tend to emphasize one perspective or another in this larger debate,” Savage-Rumbaugh said. “The fact that Great Ape Trust has been invited to participate in this pivotal meeting is a clear recognition from the academic community at large of the centrality of The Trust’s science to long-term resolution of the brain-mind debate. The role of ape language and ape culture is one of sitting at the intersection of all the sub-disciplines that arose across time since inquiry into the biology of behavior began.

“Our inclusion signals the increasing awareness of the significance and role of epigenetics in cross-generational behavioral events and ‘natural selection’ – which may itself need to be redefined as ‘behavioral selection,’” Savage-Rumbaugh said. “What we are witnessing is a reversal of the concept that biology determines behavior. We are on the cusp of understanding that behavior determines biology, both on the ontogenetic time scale and phylogenetic time scale.”

Savage-Rumbaugh and the other distinguished senior lecturers were selected not only for their groundbreaking research, but also for major conceptual and interdisciplinary contributions that have considerably influenced and shaped the entire field of behavioral sciences. Savage-Rumbaugh, who joined Great Ape Trust in 2005 after a 30-year association with Georgia State University’s Language Research Center, was the first and only scientist to conduct language research with bonobos.

Her work with Kanzi, the first ape to learn language in the same manner as children, was detailed in Language Comprehension in Ape and Child published in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (1993), which was selected by the "Millennium Project" as one of the top 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century by the University of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences in 1991. The corpus of Savage-Rumbaugh and Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, a scientist emeritus at Great Ape Trust who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on ape language, forms the basis for Great Ape Trust’s research trajectory.

Because each of the distinguished senior lecturers was asked to invite an outstanding colleague to present – Fields, in Savage-Rumbaugh’s case – those attending will get cross-generational perspectives from scientists who cofounded the behavioral biology discipline and conducted the bulk of the research, and the field’s most promising younger scientists. One aim of the symposium is to develop a unified perspective of the field incorporating all insights that already have been gained with newly identified avenues for research.