The “Forbidden Experiment” may have the potential to illuminate fundamental truths about human nature, but it’s so grossly immoral it would send any modern university’s ethics committee into meltdown. Nevertheless, in historical periods that were less concerned with human dignity, some have dabbled with their own renditions of this deeply problematic endeavor.
There are a few versions of the Forbidden Experiment, but most involve raising a child while depriving them of key social interactions. In theory, this could help to unpick what parts of our humanity are influenced by genetics (nature) versus our environment (nurture).
In one of the most commonly discussed versions of the experiment, a child would be raised from birth in the total absence of speech, words, and written text. Deprived of language, the investigators could gain insights into biolinguistics and the development of language in the human mind. For instance, does the human brain have a hardwired understanding of the way language works through a set of rules, structures, and archetypal forms? Alternatively, do we freely learn languages without any innate grammar module?
At least that’s the premise. Most of the time, these kinds of ideas are kept as merely thought experiments, designed to probe complex concepts without any real intention of being demonstrated in the real world.
However, somewhat unbelievably, there are historical accounts of people attempting to conduct this wildly unethical experiment (although the veracity of these stories is shaky).
According to Herodotus, an ancient Greek scholar known as “The Father of History,” the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I gave two newborns to a lone shepherd under the strict instruction to not utter a word to them. Two years later, the first word they spoke was supposedly “becos,” the word for “bread” in ancient Phrygian, an extinct language once used in Anatolia. This led Psamtik to believe that Phrygian was the mother tongue of all humanity.
An equally dubious account tells the story of the linguistic experiments carried out by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century CE. He supposedly gave several babies to be cared for by mute and deaf wet nurses with the hypothesis that they might innately know the Hebrew language, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or “the tongue of their parents.” Unfortunately, his experiment was fruitless because “children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.”
Others have described the Forbidden Experiment as an instance of a child being raised by other animals, thereby depriving them of human social interaction. The term itself – “Forbidden Experiment” – is often attributed to the title of a book by Roger Shattuck about the “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” a so-called “feral child” that was reported in southern France in the early 19th century.
One scientist who toyed with this idea was American psychologist Winthrop Kellogg. Upon hearing about a case of Indian children “raised by wolves,” a case reported in the American Journal of Psychology in 1927, he became fascinated with “feral children” and their potential to teach us about ourselves.
He noted that any actively designed experiments would be both “illegal” and “immoral”, so he dreamt up another way to explore his ideas: he and his wife raised a chimp alongside his infant son to study the effects of the environment on behavior and development.
The chimp, Gua, would reportedly walk upright and respond to 20 vocal commands. It was even claimed she was “smarter” than than the kid, Donald, when they were both 12 months old. By 16 months old, though, Donald began forming words and Gua could not. Unsurprisingly, as the child grew older, he became increasingly capable, leaving his pseudo-sibling Gua behind in the dust.
Although Kellogg is considered to be a “forerunner of contemporary animal-behavior science,” the experiment with Gua and Donald didn’t unearth any invaluable evidence. Sure, chimpanzees are very intelligent, but they won’t be equal in cognitive ability to humans just because they wear clothes and eat at a dinner table.
While many thinkers of the past have pondered about conducting their own Forbidden Experiment, perhaps there’s another reason they should be consigned to history, beyond the massive ethical concerns: they don’t really prove much at all.
“The Forbidden Experiment and its inverse have largely failed. First the philosophers and then the scientists have left records of frustration,” Sandra Swart, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, concludes in a chapter of the book The Evolution of Social Communication in Primates.
“The grand questions about human nature have been mainly unanswered and remain unanswerable by such experiments. The experimental subjects (both human and simian) have often died young, or been discarded, and others have been revealed as innocent (or witting) frauds, frequently exploited due to their own incapacity,” Swart adds.
“Mostly, they have acted as blank screens upon which people project their issues – as breathing inkblots in humanity’s Rorschach test,” she concludes.
