Reviewed By:  James M. Jasper
New York University

Douglas Keith Candland
Feral Children and Clever Animals:
Reflections on Human Nature
New York: Oxford, 1993, 411 pp. $30.00

If we could ever accurately describe human nature, it might include the use of signs and language. It might also include efforts to communicate with beings on the borders of humanity, especially nonhuman species but also human beings lacking full socialization. In a marvelous idea for a book, Douglas Keith Candland has examined some of the most famous of these efforts over the last several hundred years, in an effort not only to probe human nature but also to uncover many of the roots of modern psychology.

Feral Children and Clever Animals is best when presenting these stories. We learn about Kasper Hauser, a young man who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, repeating something that sounded like "I want to be a horseman as my father is." When he was murdered five years later, theories abounded about his being a possible successor to the ruler of Baden, raised in secrecy and isolation to keep him out of the way. Then there is Clever Hans, the German horse (two horses, actually) who could tap his hooves in answer to mathematical and other questions. He turned out to be responding to subtle and unintentional bodily cues from his trainer and other human observers. We also encounter the many chimpanzees and gorillas who have learned sign language and computer symbols as means of communication, such as Washoe and Koko. Most of the stories are familiar, but Candland provides interesting details and commentary.

The failure of this long book lies in the analysis accompanying the anecdotes. Candland repeatedly states that the ways in which the children and animals are studied tells us more about the investigators than their subjects, yet he does not hesitate to label certain research questions as wrong (implying that others are right, regardless of intellectual context). He tells us that these experiments and observations raise important questions, but he rarely answers them, or even tells us what the implications are. The reader is intrigued - yes, these are important issues - but disappointed.

Even Candland's conclusions are merely suggestive. He says that the reader should have learned something about the differences between physical and behavioral science, the relationship of experimenter to subject, the strengths and weaknesses of laboratories versus natural settings for research, experiential versus innate knowledge, and the limits of constructing a great chain of being. But he leaves it to the reader to figure out exactly what conclusions to draw. The author, in the end, has little to say about human nature.

Occasional excursi also address the roots of several schools of psychology: behaviorism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the measurement of mental abilities. Here too, the stories are revealing: about the origins of the idea of a learning curve, for example, or the progressive aspects of a behaviorism that was opposed to arguments for the hereditary sources of knowledge. But there is no tight argument about these traditions or their relationship to feral children and clever animals.

This book is similar to many of the cases it describes: a great opportunity squandered

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