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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any indication that the chatter contains information related to solving the puzzle rather than, say, simply expressing their emotional state. There are plenty of animals which mutter to themselves while thinking --- humans included!

The obvious experiment here is to have two groups of dolphins positioned so that they can hear each other but not see each other; give one the puzzle, and then, later, give the other the same puzzle. If the second group solves it consistently faster than the first one then probably information is being transferred. (Although it could just be that the second group is more motivated after hearing the first group get excited about something.)

Actually arranging an ethical but meaningful experiment with bottlenose dolphins, which are quite big and are highly opinionated, is left as an exercise for the reader...

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The evidence that they are using a complex "language" is definitely weak. For example, how does it prove that they aren't simply saying, "Hey, hey!" to each other like the Far Side cartoon[0]? I would have preferred more interpretation of the different noises the dolphins make over the fact that they are making them in the first place.

[0] https://pupster.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/dog-translator.j...

They same way we are almost certain that the Voynich manuscript contains an undeciphered written language, by applying a combination of information theory, computational linguistics, and statistics.

For those who don't know (like me): "The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

It's probably more informative than "Hey! Hey!", but it's not clear that it rises to the level of language, as opposed to communication.

To be precise: not all communication is language, language involves grammar, which hasn't (yet) been conclusively demonstrated in any other species.

Source: was a neuroscientist who TAed for a guy who tried to teach a chimp language in the 70's.

Or maybe they speak spanish:

https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/209666_f520.jpg

> If the second group solves it consistently faster than the first one

They can also transmit cooperation information non-verbally, by posture for example, so your experiment testing for speed would test two things, possibly cancelling each other. It's possible that the verbal communication exists but lowers the efficiency of the cooperation (maybe one of them is yelling at the other how stupid he is and that they should use his superior technique).

How about have one dolphin watch a group solve it then add that dolphin to a second group and see if the second group consistently solves it faster.

TFA covers this:

> During the trials when one dolphin opened the canister unaided, one or more of the other dolphins was present nearby, watching the task. On these occasions, there was no increase in chatter.

You'd expect the uninvolved dolphins to at least be chiming in with unhelpful advice.

I didn't realize that Idea Fairies translates to the animal kingdom too. :-)

No, they weren't trying to get the projector to connect to their laptop.

Ok, we changed from the article title to a shortened version of the first sentence, which makes a narrower claim.

Thanks. What always gets lost in these articles is the difference between communication and language, which has a precise difference that most people are unaware of.

Ah, but Rupert Sheldrake observed this effect with rats running through a maze significantly faster after a previous group of rats did it before without any communication whatsoever. He tested it with humans and puzzles as well. You also have to account for the morphogenetic resonance.

If you're not trolling, morphic resonance doesn't stand up to scrutiny and is not accepted as a real phenomenon.

I'm not trolling. Perhaps you mean to say that his theory is difficult to falsify or even non-falsifiable. I disagree with that, it predicts a specific outcome under certain conditions. His experiments show results, these experiments are difficult to reproduce, that doesn't mean there isn't some unknown mechanism at work and it's just methodological error as you assert. So if you are going to do this dolphin experiment and you have to account for this hypothetical mechanism I'd do the experiment at the same time overlooked by the same scientist (skeptic or believer doesn't matter in the psi hypothesis). Also read: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ruperts-resonance/

surely the maze situation is best explained by the first rats leaving a scent trail behind, which would be easy to follow for the next rat?

I don't know how sound that data was, but in one of the cases the rats were solving a maze on the other side of the world (Australia) ... and yet started solving it better than the first rats in the UK. I'm not sure what the conclusion or the methodological error is. But it's not as simple as you paint it.

[0] http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/rat-lea...

This would be an example of stigmergy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

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