There's so much we don't know about this imaginary world that I don't think this is a fair assessment.
If, early on in the evolution of animals with brains, it was typical for them to communicate through these connections, wouldn't it make sense for all descendant animals to also have this ability? If contact between divergent species was still frequent, and the contact was positive and mutually beneficial, why not communicate through this channel when needed? Spoken language may have been unique to their humanoids. Indeed, spoken language is a bit more odd than directly connecting to the brain of the other.
To me, this is just as unusual or counter to evolution as our ability to use sign language to communicate (albeit primitively) with apes, or give spoken orders to dogs. That is: it isn't.
Evolution. Animals suddenly gain all sorts of competencies when the competitive pressure is on. Most animals already have linguistic ability, I don't think human language is all that special. We can do all sorts of fancy things with our brains that seem to defy explanation through the simple mechanics of evolution, but communicating the state of your brain to another of your species, that feels like basic stuff to me.
We can already communicate with animals. They don't have a secret language. We're probably better able to understand them than they each other because we research and look for signals that are irrelevant to the daily lives of wild creatures.
There's a lot of media depiction of scenarios where someone can talk to animals, either via magic or by technology (a different magic). So it does not surprise me that a lot of people just believe animals can talk to each other if only we could understand.
This isn't to say there aren't some unknown communications going on - we regularly find new ones. But we're never going to find what we would consider a language.
> There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate.
This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.
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But you're probably right about gestures.
Wild chimps have a vocabulary of about 66 signs. We can also observe tribes with languages more primitive than ours (no pronouns, for example). But there's a missing link of several millions of years of evolution between both.
What are the (known) intricacies of the evolution of our ability to communicate?
There's no definitive proof for the statistical argument, but a growing amount of (neuro)scientific evidence points to it. What's (are) your alternative hypothese(s)?
The "entirely different" part is about specific claims about language.
There are many different ways animals are able to communicate with each other, and with humans. Sounds, gestures, songs, body language, scents, and so on.
They can get quite creative, they can be used to communicate emotion, they can indicate that the animals have some sense for the mental state of who they are communicating with, and so on. Almost all of this is fairly obvious to anyone who's ever owned a pet (though there are plenty of cases in which there can be some subjective bias there, so it can be good to devise better tests if you're really skeptical).
But none of them have been demonstrated to have the arbitrarily complex, abstract, compositional nature that human language does; in which a finite (but large) set of words or signs can be strung together in arbitrarily complex ways, allowing a countably infinite number of different ideas to be potentially conveyed.
This is qualitatively different than any other communication method that has been demonstrated in other animals.
There's no dogma about it; it's just something that is unique to humans, as far as we know, just like the amazing ability to manipulate skin color and texture is something that's unique to cuttlefish. There are some things that certain kinds of animals can do that other kinds of animals can't, like flight, breathing via water or air, producing venoms, and so on.
It would be a pretty big scientific breakthrough to discover that there was some mammal that could change its skin like cuttlefish, or to discover that a mammal could be trained to breath water.
Likewise, discovering that non-human animal can learn a human-like language, with its arbitrary complexity through compositionality and ability to express abstract thought, is a pretty big claim too. The problem is, some people make this claim, without sufficient evidence to back it up.
Hmm I haven't really thought about this but I was hoping there was some new development in the understanding of animal communication. I'm not a linguist but as far as I understand communication is not language. Language is communication however.
As a sci-fi nut, I've often thought that we're unlikely to be able to talk to aliens if we can't even manage a crude dialogue with intelligent animals on earth (not even our closest relatives in the ape family.) Sure, we can instruct a dolphin to put a ball through a hoop, but we've made almost no progress in understanding their speech. Stuff like this[1] suggests that some information is being conveyed between whales, but does it qualify as language?
And what about our definition of 'language'? It's not the same as it was a a millennium ago. James Gleick's book "The Information" talks about the fundamental changes in human thought that came about after the development of writing. We think completely differently now that we have a concept of stored ideas. Could it be that writing has made it impossible for us to communicate with animals that don't have it?
But a lack of altruism as a possible reason, though? Fascinating. Chimpanzees have developed tool use and even a way of 'teaching' other chimps what they've learned[2]. Is this contradictory?
Dolphins have complex language using sound, and they are very distant cousins. The fact that chimps don't talk is likely to be 50% because of inadequate throat construction, and 50% lack of intelligence. Past extinct lifeforms could have easily had vocal cords and intelligence. We just don't know. That's the point of my post. The possibility exists that language first evolved billions of years ago.
> Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language.
That isn't proven. There is plenty of evidence, that "complex" is relative and humans have limited sensory organs, compared to other species. Naturally our vocalizations have had to diversify.
It's important to remember that the vast majority of all interspecies communication is non-vocal (this includes non-written). The ability to write is unique to humans, as far as I know. There are more, but they aren't related to vocalization (or communication at large).
I'm sure De Waal addresses this in more detail in his book, but the omission is perhaps less glaring and capable of destroying the entire argument as you present it to be.
Although it is clear that human language is unique and appears much more developed than any animal communication system observed in nature, no one knows what exactly property of language makes it unique. Indeed, infinite use of finite means, or syntactic structure are often put forward as candidates but syntax and generativity have also been observed in bird song. We simply don't know what the defining feature is that sets language apart from animal communication systems.
Similarly, we can't identify the unique cognitive ability that differentiates us from other animals. Since, as De Waal points out, humans are genetically speaking very close to our nearest sibling species, and we simply don't understand what precisely makes us cognitively different from, say Bonobos, the standard assumption should not be that we're somehow gifted with very special cognitive abilities, but that animal cognition is much more similar to our own cognition than is often assumed. Rather than studying where animal cognition, especially in genetically related species, resembles human cognition, we should be studying where it differs from human cognition.
Keep in mind that anatomically modern humans have only been around for two hundred thousand years, and the explosion of human culture only happened around ten thousand years ago. Not a lot of time for massive evolutionary changes.
You shouldn't dismiss the abilities of our fellow mammals too quickly. Of course they are very far from equal to us, but there are several species of mammals that have showed non-trivial use of language, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that all mammals have at least very basic language building blocks in their brain, even if vestigial.
While it's easy to be skeptical, it could be useful to ask whether animals of different species find ways to communitcate with each other, and if so, could the same kind of ability be distributed unevenly among humans?
As people, how much of what we interpret as physical body language from each other gets translated into language in our inner monologue for a kind of narrative reasoning, which we then act on? To say that's projecting intent on others because we can't truly know someones intentions without language is ridiculous if you've ever managed to get by somewhere without knowing a language. Extending that way of relating to animals to me is absolutely viable. Especially sophisticated intelligent animals like crows.
It's a skill you can practice and develop to where strange animals will accept your presence and respond to cues. It takes practice to walk into a herd of horses in a field without them stampeding, to get panicking dogs to relax, or even to shoo off a bear. It's like shifting them out of their instinctual reactions and activating or stimulating their capacity to reason. It's also a huge element of human charisma, where if you have ever met someone who can command a room with very minor gestures, or quiet a kid in a tantrum, it's the same ability.
I think there is something universal that people can develop (or have terrible deficits in), and this crow whispering person seems to have really mastered it. What a pleasure to read.
What's really wild is how impenetrable animal languages are. We know they exist and have studied them for decades but they are still utterly opaque. I think this really shows how hard inter-species communication is. We even struggle to translate ancient human languages and we share the same mental architecture. Animal or alien languages are really going to stretch our minds to comprehend.
They’re biologically related to us, and yet we still can’t communicate with them. That should show how motivated or able we are to figure out language with other species.
You see a difference of kind where I see one merely of degree, and your confidence in the sufficient extent of knowledge of nonhuman language and communication, to draw such clear delineations as you do, strikes me as unwarranted. It is a relatively recent innovation in modern understanding even to recognize that any animals beyond our own species have language; where come you by this idea that we know enough about how nonhuman language works to even attempt so broad a conclusion? - or, for that matter, even enough about how human language works? Anyone who's ever tried to explain a complex idea to someone and have them comprehend it, or tried to become a polyglot beyond the age of about ten, should have a better sense of our own limitations than you evince here.
Our dog has surprisingly rich "vocabulary". That is, the modulation of sounds she can make is surprisingly high. She "talks" to us in the evenings and tries to convince us that she needs some extra food (her weight says otherwise). There definitely is an apparatus for quite evolved communication only if we could somehow agree on the communication protocol.
175 million years ago all continents were merged into one, and about 65 million years ago primates appeared. If there is an actual historical link to this language pattern, one possible explanation is that animals were able to make sounds with vocal cords well before (like 100 million years before) we actually were primates. This is not far fetched at all. Recently dolphins were found to be having actual conversations. I mean mammals had been around 20 million years BEFORE the continents broke apart so perhaps there has always been a "segment" of mammals that had the right brain nodules to control speech and the requisite vocal cords also. Possibly the dino killing asteroid killed off most of the 'talking mammals' and only left one group of mammals that had these verbalizations, which were for some reason only transferred down one evolutionary branch of the tree that ended up at humans. It makes sense that it would always follow the branch of the volutionary tree that represents the highest intelligence. Language and intelligence reinforce each other in an evolutionary sense, so perhaps the value of speech just died out because it had little value in most animals because they had no intelligence to develop it further.
It doesn't attempt to. To the extent that whales/dolphins/parrots have language, it evolved independently from human language. There is no particular reason to assume it evolved along the same path.
If, early on in the evolution of animals with brains, it was typical for them to communicate through these connections, wouldn't it make sense for all descendant animals to also have this ability? If contact between divergent species was still frequent, and the contact was positive and mutually beneficial, why not communicate through this channel when needed? Spoken language may have been unique to their humanoids. Indeed, spoken language is a bit more odd than directly connecting to the brain of the other.
To me, this is just as unusual or counter to evolution as our ability to use sign language to communicate (albeit primitively) with apes, or give spoken orders to dogs. That is: it isn't.
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