I’m not seeing a breakthrough. It’s a little more analysis of sounds we don’t understand.
I ran across this being discussed in Hacker News and vaguely remembering that we had a thread here about it so I reposted the link to the research. You might check out the discussion there:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38571332
It’s like a few people agree with you; a few think there is something significant in the research and most are digressing into other discussions like AI. From one of those seeing something significant:
ChuckMcM 22 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from “whale songs are like groans” to “whale songs are like talking”. The ‘breakthrough’ they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex “words.” If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a “yes” groan, or a “no” groan. They can’t ‘tell’ you a whole lot.
As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me
[and later]
This from the paper’s abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought.
This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded.
The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of “singing” or “calls” that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a “song” suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than “threat” or “help” or “food here” etc.
I can see the potential significance some day. It’s clearly not enough to understand whale language, or even describe whale language beyond some possible constraints. There’s something curiously elusive to whale language, or else we’re fooling ourselves into believing there’s a language there.
Elephants certainly communicate with one another with a variety of methods, some of them infrasonic, below the range of human hearing. If you are ever invited to an elephant dinner party, you can be a polite guest and learn a few elephant phrases here. Sci-Am has a decent article about a multimedia website comprehensively compiling elephant communication and behaviors:
Call me crazy, but is a lot of overthinking going on here, maybe?
Q: If whales had language, would we know?
A: They do, and we know.
There’s a lot of hair-splitting about what constitutes a language, the net effect of which seems to be making sure it’s only human beings who can have one.
I’m as sure whales have language as I am uncontacted tribes in the Amazon have language. It’s so obvious, I can’t even imagine what source to cite.
That’s an argument of faith not of evidence. I can say I’m sure that whales don’t have language and my argument is just as strong as yours.
I have no doubt whales can communicate with each other. That doesn’t mean they use language to do it.
Right; it’s a question of how complicated the communication is. We can be highly confident that uncontacted Amazon tribes have complicated communication, because all humans we’ve encountered everywhere have complicated communication (though there are a few Amazonians who have significantly simpler language than most humans; it’s speculated that that tribe might have had some recent disaster that killed off most of the adults).
For whale songs, we’re just starting to get to the point where we can even begin to measure how complicated they are.
This does sometimes seem to be the thrust of many discussions about not only language but also intelligence, sentience, and consciousness: defining them in very anthrocentric manners, such that they are defined as what we do and have.
Yes we have a default that other human societies have language because they are like us. It may be unreasonable to look at a creature as huge brained, social, and complex behaviored as whales, and hold lack of language as the default belief.
It is clearly complex communication, that we are not yet smart enough to understand. I’d be wary of defining language such that being like human communication is requisite.
What does something use besides language to communicate with other things?
It’s not an article of faith. I have no idea how to argue for my belief that two and two are four, either. Or that other humans have internal lives and aren’t automatons.
Signals. Displays.
Homo sapiens sapiens evolved from earlier Homo sapiens populations in Africa sometime between 300,000 and 160,000 years ago. The first modern humans began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago and spread across the world.
The origin of language is a complex and debated topic. There is no definitive answer to when hominids developed language. However, archaeological evidence of cultural and technological innovations, such as art, music, and tools, indicates the presence of language or proto-language (a simpler form of communication) among early hominids. Some of these artifacts date back to more than 100k years ago. Proto-language may have emerged as early as 500k years ago or as late as 50k years ago—more research is needed.
One factor that probably influenced the development of language in hominids is the environmental and social pressures they faced. Surviving in the cold, harsh environment of Europe was an especially major selective pressure for modern humans. Research suggests that the coexistence of modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe around 35,000 years ago may have stimulated the cognitive and linguistic abilities of both groups, as they competed for resources. Modern humans also coexisted with another hominid group, the Denisovans, in Asia, but the environment there was not as harsh as in Europe. Therefore, the selective pressures in different regions may have affected the evolution of language in different ways.
Do other animals, such as whales, have complex language? Whales are highly intelligent, social animals, and they communicate with each other using various clicks, whistles, and songs. Humpback whales, have been shown to have elaborate and changing songs that may have syntax. However, whether these songs constitute language is unclear because we don’t know the meanings of these sounds, or how they relate to the whales’ behavior and cognition.
I’m confident that whales posses proto-language, not unlike humans did 500 – 50k yo. But, I don’t think they developed complex language, like humans did ~35,000 yo. They just didn’t face the same severe selective pressures that we did at that crucial period in our evolution—when our cognitive ability came into full fruition. Perhaps if whales survive the Holocene extinction event, and their environment becomes significantly more demanding, they will do so. I wouldn’t want to meet a pod of post-Holocene Killer Whales in a dark alley.
Also smells. (ask any ant)
As a simple example, human babies don’t have language. But they still have at least some ability to communicate, at least basics like “Something’s wrong! An adult needs to come here and fix it!”.
Of course some complexity built from communication before it reached what can get called language but boy, we cannot even agree on what language is, declaring something else proto of it starts getting more messy.
This claim is really the crux of it.
Do we need to understand the meaning to know it is language? Do we even need to understand how the communication relates to behaviors or cognition?
Can we recognize something as language without understanding what is being said and without understanding the behaviors involved?
Or is something sufficiently alien to us, of different concepts of different structures or behaviors we don’t understand, defined away from being language?
I am leaning towards the default the these intelligent highly social creatures have language and that our inability to recognize it is an indicator of how much trouble we are in when we come across a more alien sort of intellect: we won’t know it if we see it.
Oh, and it’s also not just a matter of complexity. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is certainly complex. But it’s also certainly not language, and it’s mostly not what most folks would think of as “communication” (it can communicate emotions, but it can’t communicate concepts). We could certainly come up with ways to encode language in the sounds of a symphony orchestra, but the result of a message in that encoding wouldn’t be at all the same as a Beethoven symphony.
For all we can tell, it’s possible that whalesongs serve no purpose at all beyond art, and it’s possible that that art is completely abstract, in the same way that human instrumental music is.
Or maybe it’s a combination of a component that is language and a component that’s abstract art, like the lyrics and tune of human singing. But if that’s the case (which we don’t know), then we don’t know what parts of whalesong are analogous to the lyrics, and which parts are analogous to the tune.
Nitpick: left out a ‘nuku’ there. Reef Triggerfish - “the fish that sews and grunts like a pig”. Aptly named…
You have something you say you believe is true while having no evidence to support the truth of the belief. That’s pretty much the definition of an article of faith.
As I wrote earlier, I feel we can determine if a language is being used without being able to understand the language.