Inter-Species & Human / Animal Communication

[Ria777]

recent news stories about a very verbal intelligent birds able to use human language has me thinking.

has the morphic field of human language use influenced other animals?

(my theory does sound something like the novel The Dreaming Dragons by the great Damien Broderick in which human ability turns out to come from a field generated by a supercomputer from another timeline, much like a superscience version of WiFi. if, theoretically, you couldn't access the field, your intelligence would drop.)


edited by TheQuixote: fixing title spelling

 

[wembley8]

"has the morphic field of human language use influenced other animals? "

No. Unless you have some evidence of the existence of morphic fields...


Seriously though, I can't see why you'd need an explanation like this - animals do a lot of communicating too, but we're only just beginning to crack the secrets of how it all works. In decades to come, people will be amazed that we did not realise that animals had 'languages'.

 

[Ria777]

non-human animals do a lot of communicating with each other, just as we do. that has an obvious survival advantage.

the ability to speak English and understand abstract concepts doesn't confer a direct survival advantage. or maybe it does. in which case I just answered my own question without making recourse to morphic fields.

not literally, the ability to speak English, but whatever unknown facility they have that allows them to do that as a added bonus.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

The old sea dogs claimed that the parrots perched backwards on their shoulders weren't pets but neccessities.

"Two guys. Kniife. Club."

 

[OldTimeRadio]

In decades to come, people will be amazed that we did not realise that animals had 'languages'.

Isn't it at least interesting in this regard that the folktales of almost all cultures speak of a time long ago when men and animals, mammals and birds alike, did share a common language?

 

[QuaziWashboard]

In decades to come, people will be amazed that we did not realise that animals had 'languages'.

Isn't it at least interesting in this regard that the folktales of almost all cultures speak of a time long ago when men and animals, mammals and birds alike, did share a common language?

I can see how that can be true. If we're talking about a time before man developed speech and was more animal-like than he is today, then he would have shared an awareness of his surroundings that other animals seem to have but that we modern humans seem to have lost. As hunters they would also be able to recognise the sounds of not only individual animals but what those sounds mean. Even today, there are remote tribes of hunters living in jungle areas that seem to have an affinity with their surroundings.

 

[wembley8]

We all tend to have an affinity with our surroundings. Those of us used to an urban life can read the signs around us and instantly tell what sort of area it is from the shopfronts and the architecture in a way that would baffle a jungle dweller. I can hear the bin men coming two streets away, tell a police helicopter from a passing air ambulance, and distinguish a fire engine from an ice-cream van without thinking...

The common language thing is an interesting myth, but even now animals all speak different languages. Even those from the same species can be baffled when they meet if they are from remote locations, and birds can be identified from their 'dialect'.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Even those from the same species can be baffled when they meet if they are from remote locations

I know how they feel...I went to Newcastle a while ago.
It's interesting how one creature in a forest or jungle or on the plains can call an alarm because of a predator approaching, and all the other animals act on that warning. It that sense, animal language is very real and creatures as diverse as monkeys, squirrals, wart hogs, cheetahs and every bird in the area all know what the phrase 'Look out, there's a lion coming!' is in meercatian. Meercats can even tell from the warning whether the threat is from the sky, like an eagle, or something that may be hidden, like a snake, ect. because they have a different warning sound for each of these.
Now if that's not language, I'll eat my hat.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

If we're talking about a time before man developed speech and was more animal-like than he is today, then he would have shared an awareness of his surroundings that other animals seem to have but that we modern humans seem to have lost.

Though I suspect that human speech is far older than we currently credit it with being. I doubt that bi-pedal humanoids sat around together and crafted fairly sophisticated and serviceable stone tools, and especially passed those techniques on to subsequent generations, without some effective means of oral communications.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Those of us used to an urban life can read the signs around us and instantly tell what sort of area it is from the shopfronts and the architecture in a way that would baffle a jungle dweller.

'

Yes, but that can in itself be very misleading.

When I first moved to Cincinnati proper from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River I soon discovered an inner-city neighborhood that had to be an extremely dangerous one with an exceedingly high crime rate - dirt-poor people, garishly neon-lit liquor stores, second-rate saloons, cheap restaurants, hole-in-the-wall stores selling worn-out garbage, badly-blighted houses and tenement apartments, abandoned buildings, several small warehouses, three or four tiny "manufacturing plants," free clinics and welfare offices....and a lot of store-front churches.

But I quickly learned that this neighborhood has one of the lowest crime rates in the entire city! It is much lower than the affluent and "safe" suburbs.

The only major crime I can think of from the area occurred nearly 20 years ago - a 10-year-old boy was tortured and raped to death in an abandoned building. The police knew immediately that the atrocity had NOT been committed by a local! [They were right - the miscreants were two alcoholic male drifters with no ties to the neighborhood.]

Now why is this? It's because the neighborhood is not only dirt-poor, it is generationally dirt-poor and has been for more than a century. "People enter only through birth followed by marriage and leave only by death from natural causes." Everybody's each other's cousin! You can't even think about committing a crime there without your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins reading the riot act to you or indeed reporting your plans to the cops.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Reminds me of a line by Billy Connoly I heard on T.V. the other night.

'We may be divorced but at least we're still cousins!' :lol:

 

[OldTimeRadio]

You want a REAL Jungian synchronicity?

In last evening's post I mentioned the murder of the 10-year-old boy many years ago.

It was front-page news in THIS morning's CINCINNATI ENQUIRER!

It seems that the two murderers are on their last appeal before the death penalty takes effect. They're attempting to demonstrate that they're both mentally retarded and thus cannot be legally executed.

This is the first news account of these birds I've seen for at least a decade.

 

[Ria777]

back on topic, this article on the Indonesian hobbits has a quote:

"People refused to believe that someone with that small of a brain could make the tools," said Professor Falk.

She said the Hobbit brain was nothing like that of a microcephalic and was advanced in a way that is different from living humans.

A previous study of LB1's endocast revealed that large parts of the frontal lobe and other anatomical features were consistent with higher cognitive processes.

"LB1 has a highly evolved brain," said Professor Falk. "It didn't get bigger, it got rewired and reorganised, and that's very interesting."

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Does it never occur to anthropologists that the tiniest adult midgets, perfectly formed but less than three feet tall, have small but functional brains?

 

[Ria777]

in the quote she did say, "people refused to believe it", not that she or other scientists refused to believe it.

 

[rynner2]

Does it never occur to anthropologists that the tiniest adult midgets, perfectly formed but less than three feet tall, have small but functional brains?

..which brings me back to the primordial dwarf children seen on richard and judy on monday (and already mentined in Coincidences..)

 

[QuaziWashboard]

I saw a very interesting program about neanderthal man yesterday. In it, a human brain expert took a look at a plaster cast of a neanderthal brain and said that although there were slight differences in shape, they basicaly had everything we had. They also had some throat experts figuring out that they were probably capable of speach, although they reckoned that their voices would be high pitched and whiney.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

in the quote she did say, "people refused to believe it", not that she or other scientists refused to believe it.

I wasn't criticizing Professor Falk.

 

[dan_uid0]

It's interesting how one creature in a forest or jungle or on the plains can call an alarm because of a predator approaching, and all the other animals act on that warning.

Exactly the same thing happens in big cities. We all know that feeling of walking through an area, when suddenly everything seems too quiet; nobody much about and even the buildings seem to be holding their breath.

This is common to both countryside and towns; this sort of effect can be observed the day after a wood has been hunted through by a foxhunt, everything is dead quiet and hiding, hoping the hunt isn't going to be back.

On this score, this is one reason why I don't think there are as many big cats loose in the countryside as people think there are; there are a surprisingly large number of official and unofficial hunts about the place, all of which will riot onto a cat given half a chance (commonplace in US hunting; the usual result is the cat runs for a bit, then heads up a tree to wait it out).

Hunts do not commonly report seeing big cats in the UK, nor do they get many unexplained runs on unseen but hot scents; the cause is usually a deer or a hare and is always explainable.

 

[dan_uid0]

Does it never occur to anthropologists that the tiniest adult midgets, perfectly formed but less than three feet tall, have small but functional brains?

It did.

Human midgets have much bigger heads, proportional to their size, than did the Flores people, and midgets are inside the normal human brain size range.

The Flores apes/people, on the other hand, are inside the normal chimp brain volume range and ought not to have been particularly good tool users.

Yet they were.

Also interesting is that parrots are known to be very intelligent, yet work with much smaller brains than we do, which raises the question of how much brains do you actually need to make a human-grade inteligence?

I'd wager that you can actually make do with a much smaller brain than ours commonly are, and do the same things, if only it is better organised than ours are. This would explain the parrots' anomalously high IQ, and the Flores people.

It also raises the question of human genetic engineering: can we make people smarter without needing bigger brains?

 

[PeniG]

The chief obstacle, IMHO, to assessing the capabilities of nonhumans is eliminating ourselves as the standard. Consider the hugeness of the difficulty in defining an experiment that will distinguish between natural and culturally-guided behavior in humans - a test that will have similar results regardless of whether the taker is from Tokyo, the jungles of Cambodia, San Antonio, the Sudan, or Yorkshire. Scientists from all of these places would design experiments based on assumptions they don't know they have which will skew the results of people from the other places. And that's all within the same species!

We can't define or measure intelligence reliably in humans, but we assume that humans are smarter than chimps, cats, parrots, alligators, and extinct branches of our own species. When animals display behavior that appears humanlike, we call it evidence that these animals are more intelligent than other animals who do not display this behavior. But, if you turn a parrot with a sophisticated vocabulary loose in the jungle - how well will it survive? How does the captive parrot experience its vocabulary skill? In what behavior has it trained its trainer that the trainer thinks he is conducting independently?

The measure of intelligence is not resemblance to the (undefined) human standard but success in being the creature you are. My cats may well be better at being cats than I am at being a human. Certainly if you asked the cats, they'd think so (though they can't hunt worth beans).

We'll learn more about ourselves and our animal neighbors once we learn to stop making irrelevant comparisons, or at least to make the comparisons primarily in order to find what the irrelevancies have to show us.

For instance - I remember reading an article, more than ten years ago now, describing how the lookout for a tribe of monkeys gave the "snake" call "inappropriately" when hawks were in the offing - but due to the spatial arrangement of terrain and monkeys, the defense reaction normally used against snakes happened to be the most effective defense against the hawk at that time. The person writing the article was sufficiently incapable of shaking himself loose from his preconceived notions to describe this as using the wrong signal in a context that would elicit the correct reaction - rather than realizing that the warning cry was an imperative verb which the observers had wrongly identified as a noun.

The monkeys, of course, don't know or care about the difference between nouns and verbs, as long as the cry they hear prompts them to take the correct evasive action.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

For instance - I remember reading an article, more than ten years ago now, describing how the lookout for a tribe of monkeys gave the "snake" call "inappropriately" when hawks were in the offing - but due to the spatial arrangement of terrain and monkeys, the defense reaction normally used against snakes happened to be the most effective defense against the hawk at that time. The person writing the article was sufficiently incapable of shaking himself loose from his preconceived notions to describe this as using the wrong signal in a context that would elicit the correct reaction - rather than realizing that the warning cry was an imperative verb which the observers had wrongly identified as a noun.

The monkeys, of course, don't know or care about the difference between nouns and verbs, as long as the cry they hear prompts them to take the correct evasive action.

So instead of a translation of the monkeys saying 'SNAKE! SNAKE!' or 'HAWK! HAWK!' it'd actualy be saying 'HEAD FOR THE TREES!' or 'HEAD FOR SHELTER!'
Absolutly fascinating!
When you think about it, it seems so obvious. Of course if monkeys have a language of sorts, it makes so much more sense that in an emergency situation, they would shout out what sort of avoidence tactic they should use rather that describing what kind of creature is just about to eat them.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

This is common to both countryside and towns; this sort of effect can be observed the day after a wood has been hunted through by a foxhunt, everything is dead quiet and hiding, hoping the hunt isn't going to be back.

On this score, this is one reason why I don't think there are as many big cats loose in the countryside as people think there are; there are a surprisingly large number of official and unofficial hunts about the place, all of which will riot onto a cat given half a chance (commonplace in US hunting; the usual result is the cat runs for a bit, then heads up a tree to wait it out).

Fine, but doesn't this presuppose that there is never any Paranormal element in "big cat" and similar phantom animal sightings?

But what if the animals may simply not be there when the hunt takes place? What if there is at least some bit of truth to were-animal legends and tales? To ogre and monster legends? What if there are creatures who exist only at night? What if they occasionally wander over "here" from the "goblin world"?

I'm not saying that all such accounts are Paranormal in nature - perhaps only a very small fraction should be so considered. But I've read enough cryptozoological reports down the decades to realize that there are quite a few which are seemingly both sincere and downright s-t-r-a-n-g-e. British Black Dog encounters come first to mind.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

It's interesting how one creature in a forest or jungle or on the plains can call an alarm because of a predator approaching, and all the other animals act on that warning.

Isn't this explained by natural selection? The mammal who doesn't learn to react to the distress cry of a bird, or vice versa, is soon known by a new name - extinct.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

It's interesting how one creature in a forest or jungle or on the plains can call an alarm because of a predator approaching, and all the other animals act on that warning.

Isn't this explained by natural selection? The mammal who doesn't learn to react to the distress cry of a bird, or vice verse, is soon known by a new name - extinct.

Yes, but another way of looking at it is that the clever ones who survive learn the part of the 'bird's' language that means 'I'm in distress!'
I know that for the most part it's damned obvious that a creature that's screaming and kicking up a fuss in general is in distress, but there are quite a few creatures out there who's distress call is maybe not as obvious. Some creatures even forgo an aural distress or warning call in favour of a visual message like for instance a particular flash of plumage in some birds. Yet other creatures in the same viscinity, also act on these 'not so obvious' warnings. In that respect, a species has learned part of a different species' language.

 

[triplesod]

The old sea dogs claimed that the parrots perched backwards on their shoulders weren't pets but neccessities.

"Two guys. Kniife. Club."

ARRGGHHHH!!

I hate it when someone says something interesting without offering any actual information!!

Sorry, I just find it frustrating. Can you please tell us anymore abouty this?

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I hate it when someone says something interesting without offering any actual information!!

Sorry, I just find it frustrating. Can you please tell us anymore abouty this?

While I've read this several places over the years, my main source was a Public Broadcasting System educational television program around eight or 10 years ago, probably either NOVA or NATURE. It was concerned with the intelligence of parrots (possibly approaching human) and this was one of the examples the program used. I was especially impressed because PBS science programming tends to be of the accepted, orthodox, don't-rock-the-boat variety.

 

[wembley8]

It was concerned with the intelligence of parrots (possibly approaching human)

I'm afraid I don't find this very plausible.

Parrots can be cued to say lot of different words - Einstein the parrot gives a very impressive display http://www.funlol.com/funpages/einstein-the-parrot.html
- but it's just a show, there's nothing to suggest that they can actually master any of the basics of language. and I'm not convinced anyone ever actually used a parrot as a warning (though many sailors did bring back parrots from the tropics and sold them, hence the association).

As you know, ape signing is controversial and many of the claims made for them are highly contested http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030328.html - and birds are well behind apes.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I'm afraid I don't find this very plausible.

That's precisely why I was so surprised to find a government-funded, tax-supported, Establishment-oriented, highly orthodox, semi-official Science program supporting the contrary position.

 

[wembley8]

I'm afraid I don't find this very plausible.

That's precisely why I was so surprised to find a government-funded, tax-supported, Establishment-oriented, highly orthodox, semi-official Science program supporting the contrary position.

But do you have any evidence of it?