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Examples of Scientists - Maurice Temerlin

She's mentally retarded in the classroom and brighter than Einstein in the woods - Maurice Temerlin - on his chimpanzee daughter Lucy

Index

Maurice Temerlin's background

What makes Maurice Temerlin such a great example?

Maurice Temerlin's background

Maurice Temerlin was an American psychotherapist and professor at the University of Oklahoma who, with his wife Jane, took in a two-day-old chimpanzee named Lucy in 1964 and raised her in their own home exactly as if she were a human child, dressed, fed at the table with cutlery and eventually taught around 140 signs of American Sign Language. The experiment, an extreme test of nature versus nurture, ran for over a decade before Lucy was relocated to a rehabilitation project in the Gambia, and Temerlin wrote up the project in his 1975 book Lucy: Growing Up Human.

What makes Maurice Temerlin such a great example?

Birth of Maurice Temerlin

Maurice Temerlin makes an unusual chart to test because the 'great example' at stake is not really his own life, but a deliberate, decade-long experiment he ran on someone else's, raising a chimpanzee as a human daughter specifically to see how far nurture could override nature. It is a good test of whether astrology can register that kind of sustained, close, cross-species parenting commitment.

The chart shown is Maurice Temerlin's birthchart, together with transits for the arrival of Lucy in the Temerlin household in 1964, guessed at midday, around the outside. Aspect lines [traditional] are between the transits and his birthchart.