Why can’t we talk to the animals? | Hacker News Reader

Why can’t we talk to the animals?

wellcometrust.wordpress.com

33 pointsczr8021 comments

As a sci-fi nut, I've often thought that we're unlikely to be able to talk to aliens if we can't even manage a crude dialogue with intelligent animals on earth (not even our closest relatives in the ape family.) Sure, we can instruct a dolphin to put a ball through a hoop, but we've made almost no progress in understanding their speech. Stuff like this[1] suggests that some information is being conveyed between whales, but does it qualify as language?

And what about our definition of 'language'? It's not the same as it was a a millennium ago. James Gleick's book "The Information" talks about the fundamental changes in human thought that came about after the development of writing. We think completely differently now that we have a concept of stored ideas. Could it be that writing has made it impossible for us to communicate with animals that don't have it?

But a lack of altruism as a possible reason, though? Fascinating. Chimpanzees have developed tool use and even a way of 'teaching' other chimps what they've learned[2]. Is this contradictory?

[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9457000/945... [2]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688904/posts

My previous understanding was that chimps imitate, but don't teach: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/ape-genius.html

The article you linked said the chimps were teaching, but was rather vague about how. It seemed to be more focused on the nut cracking behavior, so it's hard to tell if they are actually teaching or just learning by example.

As with most other traits, it may be that it's not that other animals don't teach. Instead maybe it's matter of degrees: chimps don't teach much, humans teach a lot. The lack of altruism might explain why chimps mostly don't bother to teach other chimps, even though they have the ability.

> As with most other traits, ...

Interesting point, thanks. What's 'teaching', though? Kindergarten is largely imitative. "Play" in the broad sense is imitative.

>Could it be that writing has made it impossible for us to communicate with animals that don't have it?

Not an answer to your question, but more a clarification. There are lots and lots of people who do not know how to read or write. I don't think enlisting the help of illiterate people (or societies, the small ones that there are) would be any help in better understanding animals.

I don't buy it.

Look at a pack of lions or African dogs hunting. They engage in lots of kinds of cooperative behavior. But, you say, they only do so because there is something in it for themselves? Well the same is true for most humans.

If you want something more than idle speculation, I'd suggest reading up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2 for a gene that we KNOW is needed for speech in us, which differs in close relatives.

I'm also skeptical. My dog has shown me things many times, in a "hey, come look at this, it's interesting" way (e.g. a hedgehog). This theory doesn't explain that, and, from what I gather, precludes it.

Ants (we have lots of them in the garden) cooperate to build shelters and bring food. Bees do the same thing.

More developed animals (like birds) cooperate to raise children.

This article seems very narrow and at least a bit wrong. I talk with a Gorilla on occasion (yeah, literally,) and she talks back. Her name is Koko. She understands much spoken English and uses a variant of ASL to speak back. She talks about her life and what's going on with her on that particular day. She wants to know about my life and what's going on with me. She talks about other people and her mate Ndume. She's self conscious at times and gregarious and fun at times. She enjoys watching television and even has favorite movies.

And Koko isn't the only one. There are other apes that speak with humans regularly and richly. But beyond that, we also know from decades of research on gorillas in their native habitat that they have a very rich gestural language that they depend on for survival. It's that native gestural language, it's thought, which makes it so easy for apes to pick up sign language as a means to talk with humans.

Interesting research, although it seems like it has a very narrow view of what talking means. I can't speak chicken, but I have been around them enough to know that they have several different sounds that can be combined to mean different things, such as predator approaching, behave, etc.

This seems to contradict results that show animals have a sense of fairness, like http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_moral... .

I think the idea that animals don't have altruistic abilities is incorrect. Besides the occasional news stories of animals doing seemingly altruistic things (sometimes even for other species), the common act of an animal raising it's young is inherently altruistic.

It's necessary to distinguish between kin and non-kin altruism in these cases.

Kin altruism follows easily from the perspective of gene replication. Genes that lead parents to ignore infants that require care tend not to get replicated; genes that encourage nurturing helpless infants tend to survive on to subsequent generations.

Non-kin altruism is much rarer, but not impossible. There's a lot of cool math and game theory revolving around reciprocality rates and cost-benefit analyses in demonstrating rates of non-kin altruism in non-human species. (E.g., vampire bat blood-sharing, prey warning calls.)

Of course, humans are the major outlier, since we will frequently hold a door open for a complete stranger with no realistic expectation of reciprocation.

Lastly, some cases of cross-species altruism represent, not real altruism, but instinctive nurturing and bonding activities that have been "hijacked" by circumstances. E.g., a lioness whose cubs died will allow piglets to feed, which will placate motherly instincts.

"virtually all of mankind’s greatest achievements, such as science, religion and government, are based fundamentally on cooperation"

Science isn't based on cooperation at all, maybe some scientific accomplishments have been the result if cooperation, there's an awful lot of that has been done by individuals.

And listing religion as one of mankind's greatest achievements is ludicrous, and cooperation had nothing to do with it.

While there's a whole lot of small cases of individual achievement in science, the enterprise as a whole depends heavily on cooperation.

Newton didn't work on a team. But he did share his work with others, and the ones who thought he was doing interesting things shared his insights with still more people, until his discoveries were widely disseminated. In return, he's widely recognized and credited as the founder of modern physics. And that kind of arrangement is frequently what cooperation looks like on a grand scale.

The same point from a slightly different angle:

In The Information, James Gleick notes that Cambridge was a mathematical backwater after Newton -- due to its uncritical reverence for Newton and ignorance of subsequent advancements on the continent -- until Babbage came around in the 19th c. to shake things up.

Hate to disagree so thoroughly with you, but...

1. "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." - Isaac Newton - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

2. "Sky Cake!" - Patton Oswalt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55h1FO8V_3w

The Newton quote was less an expression of humility than a dig at Hooke.

The point stands, though. There's certainly variance between the accomplishments of specific individuals, but each little innovation builds on the last. Each breakthrough is dependent on the ones that preceded it.

Even an inventor working in solitude is collaborating in a way with all the inventors, discoverers, and authors who influenced him.

There's very little of modern science that looks anything like an isolated hermit doing research on their own. Everything is heavily cooperation-based these days. Sometimes in a formal sense, of large teams or initiatives like the LHC, and other times in a more informal sense, like the large amount of dialog and idea-swapping that goes on around arXiv.org.

There's probably a bit more of the "lone genius" sort of work in mathematics, but even there, cooperative initiatives are probably the norm. Erdős was famously collaborative, and a lot of progress has come from group initiatives, such as the Bourbaki group. Nowadays, folks such as Terry Tao and Tim Gowers are pushing "massively collaborative mathematics" as a promising direction for mathematical research to go. The idea is that almost a whole sector of mathematics would pitch in around a wiki (e.g. the Polymath Project) to try to solve a major open problem together, rather than small teams competing to scoop each other on incremental papers.

This is the epitome of a "middle-brow" comment on HN. It takes issue with a nearly inconsequential piece of the original article and does nothing more than say, "that's wrong", but does it in a way that sounds important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com