how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
It seems to be the "conversation" part, not necessarily "communication", one of the early stages in children's language acquisition is teaching the flow of back and forth responses and pausing for the other to speak: which seems to be what they're indicating in this article.
Read the "Results and Discussion" section of the actual paper[1] and tell me how it wouldn't apply to someone meowing to their cat. The authors even use the word "conversing" (in quotes), so the paper itself and the write-up posted here seem to be in agreement that this experiment should be wildly overblown.
This isn't bad science, but it's not exciting or any kind of breakthrough. It's some preliminary work that might lead to something more interesting in the future. It seems that the authors were desperate to make it seem more important than it was.
It’s interesting for sure but ‘conversation’ seems like an oversell here. That implies some sort of exchange of information at the least which doesn’t seem like what happened?
I’m extremely interested as well but the article talks about so much other stuff than the headline. In decades of whale communication research no one has thought to play whale sounds at whales to see what happened, or is this just the first time one has responded? What does “matching intervals” mean? He matched their greeting, I’m meant to assume, which I guess could qualify as “conversation” but the researchers still don’t really know what information was exchanged, right?
Simply matching a greeting is a lot of information. It conveys shared context, it conveys an acknowledgement by the party doing the matching that the party doing the original communication was recognized and understood, it conveys an acceptance by the matcher of the possibility of further interchange, and so on.
The fury at this article in the comments is puzzling to me
> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we are as a species.
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.
The tendency of the scientific community to cling to ignorant and clearly false notions about the intelligence of animals just baffles me. Its maliciously dissonant.
Well said. It seems they got it excited, but what seems to us as exciting might be them being confused and dumbfounded. Or even laughing or mocking us.
"In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.
So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods."
the article reads like a press release talking about how innovative and exciting their product is for dozens of paragraphs, but never actually giving details about what the product is
Sometimes I play random YouTube budgie sounds to my real budgies who promptly respond in a similar way. This sounds like the same except the animal is longer than 4 inches long?
Probably worth pointing out that the budgie thing is also an interesting and noteworthy example, if you're trying to suggest this is commonplace you should reconsider
Johnny Pneumonic, the little-known Kafka-esque Gibson follow up in which a data courier's internal systems get a virus and he lives out his life in suffering, fully convinced that he himself is an embodiment of poor software/hardware implementations; a "bug", if you will.
> Here we report on a rare and opportunistic acoustic turn-taking with an adult female humpback whale, known as Twain, in Southeast Alaska. Post hoc acoustic and statistical analyses of a 20-min acoustic exchange between the broadcast of a recorded contact call, known as a ‘whup/throp’, with call responses by Twain revealed an intentional human-whale acoustic (and behavioral) interaction.
Re-wording this in less-technical language, and including excerpts from the lead researchers didn’t make the article less informative, in my opinion.
I wonder where this whale Twain got its name? assuming the whale-namers named a bunch of whales (at once or over time) it's really appropriate that this particular whale participated in this particular landmark conversation.
One of the most popular, distinctly-American authors of all time, humorist Samuel Clemens, wrote under the pen-name "Mark Twain". He was very skilled in his use of language for communicating his musings, and the "sound" of Twain's phraseology is quite pleasing.
his pen-name comes from the phrase "mark twain" which was shouted by sailors on riverboats as part of their measuring the depth of the water, mark twain (2) referred to 2 fathoms (12 feet, 4 meters-ish but it was measured with a weighted stretch of rope, so is "twine" a stretch?)
Measuring the depth of water is alternatively called "sounding", and not even because of sonar, but because nautically speaking a sound is also the name for a small but deep enough to be navigable body of water. Whales dive into the depths of water, and that is also called the whale sounding.
But of course, this communication is using the audible sounds of whale vocalization. A connection between two parties communicating could be called "where the twain (2) shall meet". or if it's groundbreakingly successful moving forward, e'er the twain shall meet. (compare "ne'er the twain shall meet")
I can't imagine all these literary allusions were part of the naming decision, unless she/he was named as part of the experiment, so I think it's just a fun sequence of collisions.
> an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales.
I realise they can only work with what they have but I'm not sure how much a whale's behaviour can tell us about extraterrestrial behavior any more than our own behaviour can. As mammals whales are relatively closely related to us and their social behaviours aren't dissimilar to our own.
