Doctor Doolittle attainable?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, sociology, communication

How do animals communicate? Why do they do so? What do they have to talk about? What are they saying? Can we eavesdrop? Can we horn in?

The first question has numerous answers, and has motivated a great lot of literature. The answers to the third and successive questions are still elusive at best, and impossible (to date) to answer. But the second question, now: Ah, that's a good one. Why, indeed, do animals communicate? To narrow the focus quite a bit: Why do animals talk?

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum takes up precisely that question. Were I the editor I would suggest adding a word to the title: Vocally. Dr. Kershenbaum states in the Introduction that this book focuses only on auditory communication, to keep the book's size manageable. And while I am making suggestions, may I offer that the cover picture, of a frog nose-to-nose with a snail, is way off the point? Frogs eat snails, and snails are remarkably mute. There's a pair with nothing, but nothing, to talk about!

In the context of biological evolution, vocalizing, in common with all kinds of communication, must serve the needs of the creature in its environment. Take up the question for yourself: what needs to you have? Shelter, food, a mate, and enjoyment. Each of these needs is different in detail from the similar needs of any animal in its own environment. Also, for most animals larger than a limpet, a fifth need would be a sense of purpose, even though that may be largely wrapped up in both providing and securing the first four needs.

The author illustrates the range of animal talk by discussing seven animals: Wolf, Dolphin, Parrot, Hyrax, Gibbon, Chimpanzee, and Human. In each chapter the animal's unique vocalizations are examined with this question in view: Is it Language? And a corollary: Is it a stepping stone towards language?

At first it seem to me that the order is a bit odd: Hyraxes weigh a pound or two, with a correspondingly small brain; dolphins are the heaviest on the list and, after humans, have the largest brain in relation to body size. I finally recognized a specific order, that of successive degrees of verbal complexity. I wondered why Dolphins were brought in so early. Most of us think of them has being closest to having a language. However, their whistles are variable, not repeatable, and nobody has yet been able to discern a vocabulary of "dolphinese". The author stresses in this chapter and others that language does not necessarily require discrete words. I am strongly skeptical about that. I personally tend to put "wordlessness" as distinctive on non-language, but I am willing to withhold judgment for now.

Can wolf howling be considered linguistic in any way? It must be pre-linguistic, as it is a kind of singing. Howling wolves are clearly enjoying the experience; howling is emotional. Considering that, in humans, the brain structures that support song are larger and more deeply established than those that support speaking and speech hearing, it is evident to me that song came long before speech, and perhaps by a million years or more…or perhaps by several millions of years.

The first animal treated that seems to have word-like utterances is the hyrax, a little marmot-sized relative of elephants—they even have little tusks! It may seem a stretch to call their chippy, chittery vocalizations as songs, but the author thinks they are. They are not random strings of the five distinct sounds a hyrax makes; they seem to have a syntax. That is, certain sounds never occur one after the other, while others are usually found in succession. Just as we have words that contain several syllables, it may be that, if hyraxes actually have "words", many are of several syllables. (In human speech, contrast monosyllabic Chinese with polysyllabic Japanese.)

Putting gibbons next in order, we find certain similarities in their "songs" to hyrax "songs" except that gibbons have 27 (or 28, the text says both at different points) distinct utterances, with a much more complex syntax than that of hyrax "songs".

Parrots are a really mixed bunch. While most parrots, and several other birds such as Mynah birds and ravens, can mimic human speech sounds (and doorbells, gunshots and sirens), they don't use these sounds in meaningful ways, with an exception or two. A bird named Alex, an African Grey Parrot, became famous for his ability to hold a simple but meaningful conversation with a human. Getting Alex to this point took a lot of training, of a special type described in the Parrots chapter. Alex has died, and another African Grey Parrot is being trained; stay tuned.

Was Alex an exceptional genius among birds? For one thing, his verbal abilities indicate that the arrangement of a bird's brain might be quite a bit more efficient and economical than that of a mammal's brain. His brain was the size of a shelled walnut and weighed less than a quarter ounce. A typical house cat has a one-ounce brain, and only a very exceptional cat can learn to recognize more than their name and the sound of a can opener. Regardless of Alex's skills, it is evident that parrots in the wild don't use language in any humanlike, or even Alex-like, way.

So, gibbons sing. Chimpanzees don't. What some (stress: some) chimps can do is learn either rudimentary ASL (American Sign Language) or other physical means of indicating a small number of words. Sentences longer than "give banana" seem to be beyond them. The gorilla Koko learned more ASL and was a better conversationalist. But neither chimps nor gorillas have a vocal apparatus that can produce uttered language, and it is pretty clear that they don't have the flexibility of mentation to support humanlike language at the level of a two-year-old human. Somehow, Alex the parrot could hold his own with a six-year-old human.

The author stresses again and again that animals communicate according to the needs imposed by their environments. The complexity of their utterances—and again, he is reporting only on audible communication—generally reflects the complexity of their social environment. It appears that only humans can maintain relationships with potentially thousands of other humans (The number of names in the Picasa face-name directory for my photos comes to about 1,200. There are a few hundred other people I know by name and face and converse with more frequently than yearly, whom I have not photographed). The largest chimpanzee "village" is less than 100. Similarly for dolphins, orcas, and their kin.

How and where and when did humans make a breakthrough that allows an actual infinite range of expression? We may not make many more unique sounds than the sound-repertory of a gibbon (English phoneme lists range from 44 to 46, and Mandarin Chinese requires 88 phonemes, but Hawaiian gets by with 24). We combine them endlessly, and we can distinguish them. Thus, most English speakers can speak and recognize about 10,000 one-syllable words, 30,000-35,000 2-syllable words, and a total of 60,000-100,000 total words, plus all the case inflections and conjugations needed to make grammar work. The author stresses this point: No other animal has grammar, or at least nothing like a grammar that we can recognize.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Firstly, that a great deal of research lies ahead, for us to begin to understand what any particular species of animal "means" by its utterances. Secondly, whether "words" really are necessary for the kind of flexible communication we call "human communication," which is what we usually mean when we use the term "language."

What Dr. Kershenbaum has given us is not the answer to "Why animals talk," but a few foundation stones, of a set of unknown size, the groundwork for learning why they do talk, and eventually, what they are saying (which we may find out is not anything we'd enjoy hearing!).