Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Bonobos Can Imagine Things Detached From Reality

Apes share human ability to imagine | Hub

A paper published recently in Science should give creationists something to think about. It shows how our close relatives, the bonobos, can imagine things completely detached from physical reality — rather like children playing games of pretend, or creationists pretending they are leading experts on biology and understand the subject better than the actual experts.

In this study, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that bonobos can engage in imaginative “pretend play”, an ability long assumed to be uniquely human. In doing so, they dismantle yet another supposed human-exclusive trait that creationists cite as evidence of special creation.

In one experiment with a captive bonobo, Kanzi — a 43-year-old individual living at Ape Initiative — a researcher pretended to pour juice from an empty jug into a transparent empty cup, and then pour it again into a second empty cup. When asked, “Where is the juice?”, Kanzi correctly identified the second cup.

In a similar experiment, an imaginary grape was taken from an empty bowl and placed into an empty jar. When asked, “Where is the grape?”, Kanzi again correctly pointed to the jar.

These experiments show that Kanzi was able to imagine and successfully track the movement of invisible, non-existent objects — something human children can typically do by the age of about two.

Background^ Who Is Kanzi? Kanzi is one of the most famous bonobos ever studied, and for good reason. Born in 1980, he has spent much of his life at research centres in the United States, where scientists have investigated the cognitive abilities of our closest living relatives.

Unlike most animals in captivity, Kanzi has been raised in an environment rich in communication and social interaction, and he has demonstrated abilities that were once assumed to be uniquely human.

Language and Symbol Use

Kanzi is best known for his use of a lexigram keyboard — a board of abstract symbols that represent words. By pointing to these symbols, he has shown that he can:

understand hundreds of spoken English words
respond appropriately to novel sentences
communicate basic requests and intentions

Importantly, Kanzi was not trained through repetitive drilling in the way animals traditionally are. Instead, he appears to have acquired much of this understanding naturally, in a way loosely comparable to how young children pick up language through exposure.

Understanding and Planning

Research with Kanzi has shown that he is capable of more than simple conditioned responses. Experiments suggest he can:

follow multi-step instructions
recognise relationships between objects
anticipate outcomes
solve problems creatively

These are cognitive skills that overlap strongly with what psychologists call executive function — the mental toolkit involved in planning and flexible thinking.

Tool Use and Learning

Kanzi has also demonstrated an ability to learn practical skills through observation. In controlled settings, he has been able to:

make and use simple stone tools
understand cause-and-effect relationships
learn tasks by watching humans rather than by trial-and-error alone

Such behaviours are deeply relevant to questions about early human evolution, since tool-making and cultural learning were once claimed as exclusive markers of humanity.

Why Kanzi Matters

Kanzi’s abilities do not mean bonobos are “human”, of course. But they do show that many traits once promoted as evidence of special creation — language-like communication, planning, imagination, even pretend play — exist in evolutionary continuity.

Rather than humans appearing abruptly as a separate category of being, Kanzi represents exactly what evolutionary biology predicts: a close relative with overlapping cognitive capacities, shaped by shared ancestry over millions of years.

In other words, the gap creationists insist must exist between humans and other animals continues to shrink — not because science is trying to erase human uniqueness, but because nature simply does not conform to theological requirements.

Bonobos and Social Intelligence

Bonobos are often described as the more socially tolerant cousins of chimpanzees. While chimps tend to form rigid dominance hierarchies and frequently resolve conflicts through aggression, bonobos are notable for their comparatively cooperative and peaceful social structures. They rely heavily on social bonding, reconciliation, and group cohesion, which may help explain why they show such advanced sensitivity to communication, intention, and even imaginative play. In evolutionary terms, this suggests that intelligence is not just about tool use or problem-solving, but also about navigating the complex social worlds that primates inhabit — the very same pressures that shaped the cognitive foundations of our own species.

The experiment and its wider significance are explained in the Johns Hopkins University Hub by Jill Rosen.

Apes share human ability to imagine
A Johns Hopkins study is the first to show that the capacity to pretend is not uniquely human
In a series of tea party-like experiments, Johns Hopkins University researchers demonstrated for the first time that apes can use their imagination and play pretend, an ability thought to be uniquely human.

Consistently and robustly across three experiments, one bonobo engaged with cups of imaginary juice and bowls of pretend grapes, challenging long-held assumptions about the abilities of animals.

The findings suggest that the capacity to understand pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape, and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now. Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human. And this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures.

Assistant Professor Christopher Krupenye, co-author
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA.

The findings are published today in Science.

By age 2, human children can engage in pretend scenarios, like tea parties. Even at 15-months-old, infants show measures of surprise when they see a person "drinking" from a cup after pretending to empty it.

There had been no controlled studies of pretense in nonhuman animals, despite several anecdotal reports of animals seemingly engaging in pretending behavior from both the wild and captivity.

For example, in the wild, young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying and playing with sticks, holding them like mothers would hold their infants. And a chimpanzee in captivity seemed to drag imaginary blocks along the floor after playing with real wooden blocks.

Krupenye and co-author Amalia Bastos, a former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow who is now a lecturer at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, wondered if they could test this capacity to pretend in a controlled environment.

They created experiments very similar to a child's tea party to test Kanzi, a 43-year-old bonobo living at Ape Initiative, who had been anecdotally reported to engage in pretense and could respond to verbal prompts by pointing.

In each test, an experimenter and Kanzi faced one another, tea party-style, across a table set with either empty pitchers and cups or bowls and jars.

In the first task there were two transparent cups on the table, both empty, alongside an empty transparent pitcher. The experimenter tipped the pitcher to "pour" a little pretend juice into each cup, then pretended to dump the juice out of one cup, shaking it a bit to really get it out. They then asked Kanzi, "Where's the juice?"

Kanzi pointed to the correct cup that still contained pretend juice most of the time, even when the experimenter changed the location of the cup filled with pretend juice.

In case Kanzi thought there was real juice in the cup, even if he couldn't see it, the team ran a second experiment. This time there was a cup of real juice alongside the cup of pretend juice. When Kanzi was asked what he wanted, he pointed toward the real juice almost every time.

A third experiment repeated the same concept, except with grapes. An experimenter pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars. They pretended to empty one of the containers and asked Kanzi, "Where's the grape?" Kanzi again indicated the location of the pretend object.

Kanzi was never perfect, but he was consistently correct.

It's extremely striking and very exciting that the data seem to suggest that apes, in their minds, can conceive of things that are not there. Kanzi is able to generate an idea of this pretend object and at the same time know it's not real.

Dr. Amalia Bastos, co-author
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA.

The findings inspire continued study, especially trying to test whether other apes and other animals can engage in pretend play or track pretend objects. The team also hopes to explore other facets of imagination in apes, perhaps their ability to think about the future or to think about what's going on in the minds of others.

Imagination is one of those things that in humans gives us a rich mental life. And if some roots of imagination are shared with apes, that should make people question their assumption that other animals are just living robotic lifestyles constrained to the present. We should be compelled by these findings to care for these creatures with rich and beautiful minds and ensure they continue to exist.

Assistant Professor Christopher Krupenye.

Publication:

Abstract
Secondary representations enable our minds to depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality, supporting many of our richest cognitive capacities such as mental-state attribution, simulation of possible futures, and pretense. We present experimental evidence that a nonhuman primate can represent pretend objects. Kanzi, a lexigram-trained bonobo, correctly identified the location of pretend objects (e.g., “juice” poured between empty containers), in response to verbal prompts in scaffolded pretense interactions. Across three experiments, we conceptually replicated this finding and excluded key alternative explanations. Our findings suggest that the capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

Once again, the natural world refuses to conform to creationist expectations. Time and again, claims of uniquely human abilities — language, tool use, empathy, self-awareness, imagination — are steadily eroded as research reveals the same cognitive foundations in other animals, especially in our closest evolutionary relatives. The dividing line creationists insist must exist between humans and “mere animals” continues to dissolve under the weight of evidence.

This is exactly what evolutionary biology predicts. Humans did not appear abruptly, fully formed and categorically separate from the rest of life. We are part of a continuum, shaped by deep time and shared ancestry, with traits emerging gradually, being refined, and sometimes appearing in recognisable form in other species. Bonobos imagining the movement of an invisible grape is not an affront to science — it is a confirmation of it.

For creationism, however, such findings are deeply inconvenient. If imagination and symbolic thought are not gifts bestowed uniquely upon humans, but capacities with evolutionary roots, then the theological narrative of human exceptionalism becomes just another retreating position, abandoned as the evidence advances.

The story written in nature is not one of special creation, but of continuity, connection, and evolution — and no amount of denial can make the bonobo, quietly pointing to the “imaginary grape”, disappear.

Reality, as ever, cares nothing for dogma — and evolution keeps winning the argument simply by being true.

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