Koko the gorilla you are a sham

Holy crap! I just found out yesterday that soon my lab will be working with evolving robots! How could my job get any cooler? Answer: robots.

If there is one "scientific" phenomenon that bugs the crap out of me it is Koko the gorilla. Koko is brought up a lot in attacking animal research because she can supposedly communicate on a human level, thus proving that animals have "thoughts" and "feelings" just like us. I have always heard little rumblings here and there about the scientific community having doubts about Koko, so here are some issues that have come up:
Koko's trainer, Penny Patterson, has published very little about Koko in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In fact, I searched two of the major scientific databases (one of which contains just about every journal that could pertain to this subject) and found no peer-reviewed papers, only a book that Penny Patterson had written. This basically amounts to saying that you can't call this science. Your scientific peers must be able to subject your work to intense scrutiny and accept it as fact, or it's nothing. In contrast, that slightly weird lady at MIT that has been training her grey parrot to communicate for 25 years has at least 23 papers published. That parrot knows hundreds of verbal commands and can perform complicated tasks, yet would anyone put it on a "human" level? You can train a rat to punch keys in a sequence to get food, and if you wanted to you could hook these keys to a synthesizer that could produce sentences as the keys are pushed, but is the rat "talking"?

Here is an exchange between Penny and Koko:
Question: Koko are you going to have a baby in the future?
Koko signs: Pink
Patterson explains: We had earlier discussion about colors today.
Question: Do you like to chat with people?
Koko signs: Fine nipple.
Patterson explains: Nipple rhymes with people, she doesn't sign people per se, she was trying to do a "sounds like..."
Question: Does she have hair? Or is it like fur?
Koko signs: Fine.
Patterson explains: She has fine hair.
Question: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you?
Koko signs: Lips, apple give me.
Patterson explains: People give her her favorite foods.
Wow! It seems like good ol' Penny can come up with an explanation for any random thing that Koko signs! I have also heard somewhere, although I could not confirm it with a source in my limited research, that Koko's signs are very hard to read and that to most sign readers they look kind of like nonsense. Somehow only Penny can read everything that Koko signs.

There are quite a few linguists that have a problem with the idea that Koko is using language and they point out that Koko has not graduated to using even the simple syntax that a young children would use and that it is curious that some of the abilities that these marvelous talking gorillas exhibit in captivity are never seen in the wild. For instance, why aren't wild gorillas making art out of mud and sticks and whatever they have laying around?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not against gorillas in general. I think they're great. And they have all kinds of cool behaviors like, I don't know, layin' around, sniffing their poop, jerking off, whatever, but they're animals and they don't use language in the way that humans use language.