Comments on: Book review – Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can

By: Book review – Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:58:45 +0000

[…] Irene Pepperberg’s work with the African grey parrot Alex, dogs such as Chaser, or decades of experiments with primates. Though some animals show impressive linguistic capabilities, the amount of training required is […]

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By: Book review – The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:44:18 +0000

[…] There are many, many other topics and experiments that Mathevon discusses here, such as acoustic communication in birds (primarily to attract mates and defend territories), crocodiles (the social life of reptiles is underappreciated and includes acoustic communication), and underwater (including vocal dialects in various cetaceans). He discusses how vocalisations are produced and heard, how individuals learn to vocalize, how vocalizations express emotions, and how some species communicate by infrasound, ultrasound, or ground-borne vibrations. He explores how vocalisations are uttered between parents and offspring, in competition for partners, and in the real-world setting of complex social networks, rather than the sender-receiver dyads that are easier to study and interpret. Finally, he explains his arguments for saying that animals have a language, many languages in fact, even if none seem to reach the sophistication of human language. […]

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By: Book review – From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 11:23:28 +0000

[…] and humans is real and we do not find anything resembling human-level cognitive skills (such as recursive language) in other species. And he is right to point out that where we have tried to train animals, the […]

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By: Book review – Genesis: On the Deep Origin of Societies | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:18:09 +0000

[…] or why it only evolved in humans (see e.g. Why Only Us: Language and Evolution or my review of Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can). From the hands of Wilson, you would expect a very capable and readable overview, so this feels […]

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By: Book review – Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 14:59:20 +0000

[…] Another powerhouse of innovation is DNA, and genetics can tell us much about evolution. These sections are a giddy ride where Shubin highlights one after another stupendous concept. Take the huge similarity between e.g. chimps and humans (see Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human). Genome sequencing revealed some 95%-98% similarity. Why are we so different then? Because DNA is not just a molecule containing gene after gene. Like a circuit board, it is a network, where some pieces of DNA function as switches that turn other genes on and off. This is the field of evolutionary development or evo-devo (see Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom) and offers another way for small changes to have big effects. (On a side-note, it would offer a possible mechanism for Noam Chomsky’s proposed single mutation that led to human language, see my review of Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can.) […]

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