Letters to the Editor
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Occam's razor?
"One of them suggested to me that Nim might have thought he was going to grow up, lose all his facial and body hair and eventually look like the people who were around him. That would be a reasonable supposition."
That would be a totally ridiculous supposition. It would require that the chimp does some kind of mental extrapolation, which, as Chomsky theorised (and was proven) does not happen. Primates (and other animals) only respond to direct stimulus. If a chimp sees a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling and some boxes scattered all over the floor, he may be clever enough to build a tower to get to the bananas. But if you could somehow communicate and tell him there were bananas and boxes in another room, he could not describe how to get the bananas.
So, leaving aside airy-fairy rubbish about the chimp somehow believing he'd turn into a human, there is a much simpler explanation for his "nervous breakdown" when returned to a predominantly chimp environment - the poor thing was not socialised for that environment - he was trained to respond to human cues. In the absence of those cues, and given the fact he had not learned to respond to other chimp cues, no wonder he went into a withdrawn state due to the massive culture shock.
Imagine a native English speaker being suddenly dropped into a situation where they were surrounded by French deaf people who only communicated in sign language. I think most of us would find that challenging, to say the least, even given our being members of the same species and having at least some facial expressions and body language in common.