One time I was trimming a huge set of overgrown bamboo/weeds in my yard, and this bird yapping slowly drifted into my consciousness like, pay attention, alert! I looked up and this tiny bird was darting around the power line and other branches above me, directly facing at me and chirp chirp chirping in a distressed seeming way.
I looked on for maybe 20-30 seconds a bit confused then went back to the trimming, but barely a moment later I saw what I realized was a nest filled with eggs wedged in among the top branches I was just about to cut down. I gave up on the trimming and went inside to ponder bird intelligence & cross-species communication.
I'm not surprised that animals can communicate "simple" signals like danger, fear, etc. But how would I love for them to be able to exchange finer and longer messages. That would be so fun to imagine we were deaf for thousands of years and also that would make lots of new things to experience. ps: cats and dogs
"Fern says the animals talk to each other. Dr Dorian, do you believe animals talk?"
I never heard one say anything," he replied. "But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention. Children pay better attention than grown-ups... Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more."
Paul Watzlawick in his "Pragmatics of Human Communications" explains that (at least so far) animals seem unable to meta-communicate (in the sense of communicating about communication).
If I remember correctly (it has been decades) he mentions as an example that cats are perfectly capable to communicate "I want food", using a combination of vocal and "gestures".
What they cannot do is communicate something like "Listen, I have used the meow for gimme food 9 times already, what are you? deaf? stupid? or just trying to punish me for when I threw up on the carpet?"
Quite possible, maybe that kind of meta level requires more gray matter.. That said the sentiment of exasperation (which triggers our "listen I did this and no result occured") is probably accessible to many life forms, except it's probably expressed as "body language" .. or a more violent behavior.
I suppose (but I am just a layman) that animals do not really have any sense of time.
They can express "I am hungry" or "I am extremely hungry" but they cannot express "I have told you I am hungry for the last 20 minutes" because they have no conceptual model for "things as they were 20 minutes ago".
This does not mean that they have no ability to learn (including learning to recognize humans) but for them I suppose it is just a bunch of "state" which classify me as "nice guy who feeds me" or even just "I know I can trust him not to be a menace" but they have no way to reminisce about when we met for the first time, etc.
("Future state" is probably even more inscrutable to them - they have strategies to cope with the present, some ingrained as instinct, some learned "by experience" but I sincerely doubt that they can contemplate something like "tomorrow I will try doing this").
Reminds me of another story in the What The Robin Knows about a group of elephants charging across the savanna, in the direction of some small trees (that would just get bowled over by elephants), and a bird getting the elephants to change direction by doing what you describe.
Given an animal that can produce sounds, if sounds are meaningful enough it can be a big advantage. Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information will survive.
It's weird to think that there's nothing between complex (human) and simple (sheep) when it was the result of a gradual evolution. Big jumps are rare.
What's the evidence showing it was gradual? Big jumps may be unusual statistically [what set are you sampling? 'planets with apex predators that are bipedal mammalians' looks like too small of a sample to make statistical inferences??] but then so is genesis and it seems that happened.
I remember a study many years ago that found that bird songs get longer and more complex for captive birds than they do for wilds ones. It seemed to suggest that a dense population and more free time were very important to the evolution of complex language.
I'm not sure if it's as clear-cut as you say. It seems like complex sounds could be harder to differentiate and could take more energy to recognize. What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information?
This expression is more symbolic than to be taken at face value.
> meaningful enough - OP
this means there's an optimum
> Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information - OP
This means animals below (a?) optimum threshold. Shannon called that threshold the bandwidth, I believe.
> [complex sounds] take more energy to recognize
So this is the other side of the equation. We have a signal to noise ratio that limits the bandwidth. Energy is Information and Energy conversion, ie. Information transmission is inherently lossy, because Entropy decreases in closed systems. The trick then is to use the information to expand the frame of reference, to grow as an individual and as a species. That gives a lower bound on what information has to be converted into the system - that's what OP is talking about.
> What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information
In the limit, not transmitting any information means heat death. So, OP was talking hyperbole, obviously. The question for a local optimum is obvious - birds proliferate and not in a small niche. A global optimum in the infinite, infinite bandwidth at some point, or infinitely increasing bandwidth in infinite time are obviously out of scope - even if we like to dream on cosmological scales. Hence, OP's leading statement is rather symbolic than to be taken at face value.
big jumps in the ___domain are rare, but bifurcations can easily be the result of little jumps in the ___domain. The map of genome to organism is not "differentiable".
These birds spending a ridiculous amount of time building intricate monuments. They are picky about colors and styles and one specie builds very specific structures.
This book [1] is fascinating, and there's not much out there with the same info that isn't buy the same author or his circle of friends. There are a couple youtube videos.
Humans (who's livelyhood depend on it) can understand what birds are talking about. There's a story in there about an african safari tour guide driving along slowly with tourists and when he hears a certain sound, pulls over and shows his customers a rad snake or a lion.
One of the themes of the book is (re)learning how to do this, and how it can be therapeutic(?) and is a great form of _meditation_
The book's site had bird call recordings (probably not the same bird as the OP!) for those that are looking for them.
I've recently rediscovered how intelligible birds can be. I can't claim to understand what they're talking about, but I suggest to anyone with some free time to go outside at a time when the birds are active and to spend minutes focusing on their different calls. You really will begin to recognize the sounds and link them to behavior or events.
The blue jays around my yard make a particular toot when a human gets too close. It's reliable enough that I know someone is walking by the house whenever I hear it. (There is not a lot of foot traffic here.) They don't seem to make the same noise for dogs and cats. The squirrels are better dog and cat alarms.
I've pondered whether the toot might mean "human" or "oh shit" or something else. Supposing it is denotational like "human", I'm also very curious if different populations of blue jays use vocalizations differently in places with different threats. That would imply the sounds are taught and learned, which I'd say is a stronger indicator of language than, say, sounds that are instinctively understood but happen to be compositional.
It doesn't make any sense to "approach the caller" and then scan for danger. The sounds could be understood non-compositionally and the actions worked out pragmatically. It's like saying that a monkey responds to "peel the banana, eat the banana" in the correct manner but not "eat the banana, peel the banana".
I'm not a linguist, but this seems like a wrong analysis to me. It seems to me you're imposing a specific word order paradigm where it may not be applicable.
Perhaps these birds "parse" compositions in order of most recently received (e.g. as something like a LIFO), or by some other rule that is nevertheless (compositionally) significant.
This study's "conclusion" is grossly unwarranted. But I don't think your criticism works either; the study doesn't mention any temporal order to the actions. It only states that when hearing a recorded compound call containing the directions "look for predators" and "come closer" in that order, the birds considered as a group take both of those actions at the same level that they do when hearing either direction in isolation, whereas when hearing a synthesized compound call of the same directions in the other order, they take neither action (again, considered as a group -- the overall level of scanning-for-predators behavior doesn't rise compared to hearing background noise).
They conclude that because synthesized cry YX gets a different (null) response than natural cry XY, the compound cry must conform to a compositional syntax. This makes no sense. For one thing, the compound cry carries zero additional meaning beyond that of its components -- as if hearing "the man ate the tiger" were no different from hearing "EAT TIGER MAN". But more importantly, the point of compositional syntax is that components may appear anywhere[1] within the structure of the phrase -- we can use "tiger" as the object of one sentence and the subject of another, or inside a clause embedded in a complex sentence, because the syntax will tell us which is which. All these people have demonstrated is that either (1) there is an ordering constraint on delivering two messages at once; or (2) these birds can tell the difference between recorded calls and synthesized calls.
Compare the English auxiliary verb system, which is non-compositional with ordering constraints. A verb may be modified by any or all of the following: first, a modal ("can try"), second, perfective have ("has tried"), third, progressive be ("were trying"), fourth, passive be or get ("got fired"; "was eaten"). While there are several different options in the first slot, and two (plus absence) in the fourth, it is impossible to substitute a meaningful phrase in for any of these.
[1] Obviously not anywhere, but inside many different component phrases.
I swear I have a blackbird that does the Star Wars theme song pretty regularly. I was floored the first time I heard it!
I also know the (surviving) magpies also have a name for me that is probably not polite. That's the price to pay to have any /other/ birds in my garden...
I would stay with MIT linguists, if you would permit me.
No animal signal system has a regular structure and no animal has a brain capacity for producing an arbitrary sequence of phonemes. Only mimicking capabilities.
Read about how much time and resources has been spent on monkeys and dolphins and what the findings are. Hint: no regular structure. Emotional signals and stress calls only.
Then you should know better than to make sweeping generalisations and talking in absolutes, I can show you many scientific books from the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's that are filled with untrue assumptions, to state that no animal is capable of language when we still no so little about 'brain capacity' seems, premature.
Linguistics, second edition by MIT Press is enough.
Knowledge of fundamental principles spares one from memorizing all the details.
A distinct area of the brain (which birds does not evolved yet) and related corpus collosum linkage are required for even basic language capabilities.
There is a huge gap between mimicking and deliberately producing arbitrary sequences according to the rules. It is a qualitative difference, not merely quantitive. Only humans have managed to cross this gap. All the legitimate, rigorous studies of animal communication systems only prove this principle.
The classic studies of actual brain injuries in humans which form the foundation of the field of cognitive neuroscience stand up in support of my position.
The avian brain is fairly different from the primate brain though, so if a bird language area were to exist, it wouldn't necessarily look like the human ones.
You're also giving birdsong fairly short shrift here. It is definitely not just mimicry--the songs that birds sing are not exact copies of their fathers' songs and the songs' length and complexity plays a role in attracting mates.
It's unclear if birds can learn sequences which are as complex as human languages but it's certainly not as settled as you make it sound. It looks like finches do learn regular languages, but the center-embedding stuff is a lot more controversial (and, as a counterpoint, humans don't actually nest center-embedding clauses very deeply either).
Thanks, you're right, I found this 'Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Language' and certainly scientific research supports this and i'd support that, I guess I am tripping up on semantics, language and communication are not mutually exclusive, so animals can communicate, this is clear, the argument is they cannot create the mental constructs that gives language its utility, is that agreeable ?
Exactly. Babies (before language acquisition) are communicating in the same way - only expressing emotions with cries and other forms of non-verbal communication.
I looked on for maybe 20-30 seconds a bit confused then went back to the trimming, but barely a moment later I saw what I realized was a nest filled with eggs wedged in among the top branches I was just about to cut down. I gave up on the trimming and went inside to ponder bird intelligence & cross-species communication.