7 ms·

Biologists and dolphins have created a new inter-species language

67 points by lotusleaf1987 16y ago

patio11 16y ago
I find it amusing to think dolphin/human is a prototype for communicating with ET. Seems to me ant/Toyota would be more likely... and we're the ants.
- TheSOB88 16y ago
  Personally I think that's assuming too much. We know so little about what life is like even if sentience has evolved on other planets that pretty much everything is pure speculation. Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? Not really. And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children. So, I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us without having to resort to redesigning itself.
  - callahad 16y ago
    > I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us I'm not so sure. In that scenario, there's something that we're communicating with, right? Given humanity's limited capacity in that regard, the mere fact that we've found something that can reciprocate would, to me, indicate that it's likely to be a little further along than we are. It's really a matter of who goes to whom. If we meet aliens on our turf, well, they had to get here somehow. And since we can't really get there too easily, they must be a bit better off.
    - BluePoints 16y ago
      Extremely valid point. Though isn't it possible they could have advanced in certain fields that we never or haven't advanced in and vice versa?
    - noibl 16y ago
      Distance travelled can be a measure of many things (technology, wealth, ambition) but not intelligence. We can't say that X achievement in distance shows intelligence higher than ours just because we haven't matched it yet.
  - pmichaud 16y ago
    I think the fact that he used "Toyota" as the alien was kind of a nod at the idea that they would probably be a self-designed sentience a la your "redesigning." Also, re: "ability to have more children"--that is exactly what the evolutionary definition of fitness is. Your concept of fitness as an animal that's strong and smart and whatever else is purely a byproduct of that definition.
    - radu_floricica 16y ago
      I thought Toyota as a corporation would make for a more interesting example.
  - jshen 16y ago
    "natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful" Define "wildly successful". Humans have clearly changed overtime. Look at the color of skin relative to geography. The closer to the equator you get the darker people get. That's natural selection. Another example is sickle cell and malaria. Natural selection in action! Look at modern domesticated dogs. They've all evolved from wolves in a fairly short time frame.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    >Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. It provides pressure for the species to change to adapt to its wild success (e.g. to become "fat and lazy"). That development of the wild success may also lead to significantly changed conditions (e.g. global warming as a result of the wild success of homo sapiens) >Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? it is only 10000 years, and yes, we had. The physiological changes are observable even for the last 100 years. >And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children. that phrase sounds like oxymoron. Anyway, natural selection is like Newton's laws - it can't be turned off. It works non-stop. It ensures fitness to whatever current conditions are. In particular, right now, it ensures fitness of human species to the condition of "medicine is becoming so effective".
    - true_religion 16y ago
      I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce. Now natural selection is still occurring, but it may be leading to specization rather than intra-species evolution.
      - VladRussian 16y ago
        >I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce. That just even more shifts the weight of human species selection machinery from r-selection (muliple, and thus more diverse, offsprinfgs, i.e. selection mainly by the best static fit) to K-selection - selection mainly by the best ability for behavioral adaptation. Ie. the natural selection, in the classical sense, is still there. It is the most important traits for defining best fit that are changing.
  - chris11 16y ago
    Practically the existence of other extraterrestrial life forms can't really affect humanity that much.The closest star is over 4 light years away. I doubt communication would be very successful with a 4 year gap between any response. Any physical travel would be incomparably slow, so I doubt any life form would be able to intentionally visit Earth. So we are pretty much limited to searching for life in our solar system.
    - danohuiginn 16y ago
      I dunno. Empires have been built where it took months to communicate with the outer edges. Until pretty recently, it might have taken years for news of a scientific discovery to reach another country. Instant communication is a nice luxury, but it's by no means essential.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - wlievens 16y ago
      Except if you have a life span in which a 20-year round trip is insignificant.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  We've only been capable of even low earth orbit for 52 years from a recorded history of civilisation of a good few thousand years, archaeological evidence pointing at a few hundreds of thousands of years of species existence and hundreds of millions of years of advanced multicellular life forms. The technology that enabled us to reach LEO also enabled incredibly destrictive wars including a near-apocalypse in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also required resource use in such a way to sigificantly alter the natural environment and, in some scenarios, significantly threaten our survivability. I've no idea if there's other worlds out there capable of supporting advanced multicellular life (though it seems far from impossible). I've no idea if any of them are presently inhabited with such life. Based on the timings alone though, it seems far from impossible that the level of advanced civilisation to enable interstellar communication is sufficiently short-lived and accident-prone as to entirely preclude it from happening. Or - we might as well just enjoy working out how to chat with Dolphins.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
logjam 16y ago
I went looking for the full text of the article, which I couldn't find. There are some related papers on the Wild Dolphin's Project site by the paper's author: http://wilddolphinproject.org/dev/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=6 http://wilddolphinproject.org/dev/index.php?option=com_conte...
zdean 16y ago
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=50710 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=50710
- endlessvoid94 16y ago
  > Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of good manners. That's....nonsense.
  - ramidarigaz 16y ago
    Yeah. Try expressing good manners to fish... It might be a mammalian thing, but I doubt it goes outside that.
  - rickdangerous1 16y ago
    Yes agree. There are plenty of cultures around the world where making direct eye contact with a 'superior', or someone older than you is disrespectful. Indigenious people from Arnhem Land Australia will signal their intention to speak with you by standing off to the side of your peripheral vision and then wait for you to approach/invite approach. Any first year anthropology student knows that human social behavior is never universal...
    - Natsu 16y ago
      It seems like a smile is pretty close to universal, though. Maybe you can tell me in which cultures it means something different?
      - icegreentea 16y ago
        Everyone smiles, but for slightly different reasons. North Americans often smile to appear polite, which makes the rest of the world think we're weird (cause forced smiles never reach the eyes). Spontaneous smiles activate the major cheek muscles (pulling the lips up), as well as the muscles just around the eye. Forced smiles only activate the cheek muscles (it's apparently nearly impossible to consciously activate those eye muscles). There's also questions of degrees of smiling, as in amount of teeth.
szany 16y ago
Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point about ETI though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E "When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm?"
- rewind 16y ago
  He's a brilliant guy, but this is a terrible example. Worms can't communicate with us, so obviously we're not going to try to have a conversation with them. If we found a worm-like species on another planet and their vocabulary consisted of nothing more than a couple hundred words, I can guarantee you we would stop and try to have a conversation with them. If a vastly superior race came upon us and we were the first species they ever found that they could communicate with, I'm pretty sure they'd do the same.
  - bellaire 16y ago
    Tyson's entire point is that alien life, even life that appears to do things we associate with intelligence and language, may be so different from us that we are fundamentally unable to communicate, just like us and worms. What if their language is undetectable (or even absent) and their intelligence is inscrutable? He's assuming radical differences rather than assuming any similarity.
    - szany 16y ago
      His point is not that we might be unable to communicate, but that we might be so comparatively stupid that communication would be laughably pointless.
- wlievens 16y ago
  Fallacious. If worms would actually reply, and converse even with very limited intelligence about their state of mind, it would lead to an entire new branch of science and new sectors of entertainment and industry. Pets are cool.
dkarl 16y ago
Funny, I just watched an episode of the Outer Limits ("Tourist Attraction") in which a biologist proposed communicating with a strange sea creature by decoding its vocalizations and synthesizing messages in its language, the same way people talked to dolphins. I didn't realize the part about dolphins was fiction, not science, and my reaction was, "Of course! If we know what the sounds mean, then obviously we can synthesize our own messages. Huh, if people have been doing it since the sixties, I wonder why I've never read about it...." Now I'm wondering why it has taken us so long to do something that science fiction predicted fifty years ago and which wasn't blocked by any technological limitations.
- noibl 16y ago
  I suspect stigma may play a part.. [John Lilly] studied other large-brained mammals and in the late 1950s he established a centre devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication: the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the early 1960s, Lilly and co-workers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns.[7][8] Subsequent investigations of dolphin cognition have generally, however, found it difficult to replicate his results. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly Interesting guy but with a tendency to... go off at the deep end.
mkramlich 16y ago
... and unfortunately, it once again reinvents half of Lisp's features, but poorly
ryanjmo 16y ago
For what it is worth, I feel like a huge part of having a startup is to have some outrageous goal you want to achieve. My goal is to own a pair of dolphins that I keep at my beach house area and ride around around the ocean in my spare time. I'm glad to know that I will be able to develop deep relationships with them as planed :)
- TheSOB88 16y ago
  Why would you want to own another sentient being? I think they have a term for that.
fierarul 16y ago
And for just $31.5 I could be reading that PDF. Flagged.
- protothomas 16y ago
  Sadly that's the standard for academic papers. The linked page does contain the full text of the paper however.
  - fierarul 16y ago
    I don't see the full text, just an abstract on that page.
    - protothomas 16y ago
      Apologies - I'm at a university, it makes the pdf free, I wasn't aware that it would also change that page. In the interests of science - http://pastebin.com/8A89hGC9 http://pastebin.com/8A89hGC9
- nickpinkston 16y ago
  Completely with you - when will someone solve the closed "open" information problem. If you can't patent math/science, why can you copyright it?

67 points by lotusleaf1987 16y ago

I find it amusing to think dolphin/human is a prototype for communicating with ET. Seems to me ant/Toyota would be more likely... and we're the ants.

TheSOB88 16y ago
Personally I think that's assuming too much. We know so little about what life is like even if sentience has evolved on other planets that pretty much everything is pure speculation. Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? Not really. And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children. So, I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us without having to resort to redesigning itself.
- callahad 16y ago
  > I don't think ET will be vastly more intelligent than us I'm not so sure. In that scenario, there's something that we're communicating with, right? Given humanity's limited capacity in that regard, the mere fact that we've found something that can reciprocate would, to me, indicate that it's likely to be a little further along than we are. It's really a matter of who goes to whom. If we meet aliens on our turf, well, they had to get here somehow. And since we can't really get there too easily, they must be a bit better off.
  - BluePoints 16y ago
    Extremely valid point. Though isn't it possible they could have advanced in certain fields that we never or haven't advanced in and vice versa?
  - noibl 16y ago
    Distance travelled can be a measure of many things (technology, wealth, ambition) but not intelligence. We can't say that X achievement in distance shows intelligence higher than ours just because we haven't matched it yet.
- pmichaud 16y ago
  I think the fact that he used "Toyota" as the alien was kind of a nod at the idea that they would probably be a self-designed sentience a la your "redesigning." Also, re: "ability to have more children"--that is exactly what the evolutionary definition of fitness is. Your concept of fitness as an animal that's strong and smart and whatever else is purely a byproduct of that definition.
  - radu_floricica 16y ago
    I thought Toyota as a corporation would make for a more interesting example.
- jshen 16y ago
  "natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful" Define "wildly successful". Humans have clearly changed overtime. Look at the color of skin relative to geography. The closer to the equator you get the darker people get. That's natural selection. Another example is sickle cell and malaria. Natural selection in action! Look at modern domesticated dogs. They've all evolved from wolves in a fairly short time frame.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  >Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful. It provides pressure for the species to change to adapt to its wild success (e.g. to become "fat and lazy"). That development of the wild success may also lead to significantly changed conditions (e.g. global warming as a result of the wild success of homo sapiens) >Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture? it is only 10000 years, and yes, we had. The physiological changes are observable even for the last 100 years. >And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children. that phrase sounds like oxymoron. Anyway, natural selection is like Newton's laws - it can't be turned off. It works non-stop. It ensures fitness to whatever current conditions are. In particular, right now, it ensures fitness of human species to the condition of "medicine is becoming so effective".
  - true_religion 16y ago
    I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce. Now natural selection is still occurring, but it may be leading to specization rather than intra-species evolution.
    - VladRussian 16y ago
      >I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce. That just even more shifts the weight of human species selection machinery from r-selection (muliple, and thus more diverse, offsprinfgs, i.e. selection mainly by the best static fit) to K-selection - selection mainly by the best ability for behavioral adaptation. Ie. the natural selection, in the classical sense, is still there. It is the most important traits for defining best fit that are changing.
- chris11 16y ago
  Practically the existence of other extraterrestrial life forms can't really affect humanity that much.The closest star is over 4 light years away. I doubt communication would be very successful with a 4 year gap between any response. Any physical travel would be incomparably slow, so I doubt any life form would be able to intentionally visit Earth. So we are pretty much limited to searching for life in our solar system.
  - danohuiginn 16y ago
    I dunno. Empires have been built where it took months to communicate with the outer edges. Until pretty recently, it might have taken years for news of a scientific discovery to reach another country. Instant communication is a nice luxury, but it's by no means essential.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - wlievens 16y ago
    Except if you have a life span in which a 20-year round trip is insignificant.
eftpotrm 16y ago
We've only been capable of even low earth orbit for 52 years from a recorded history of civilisation of a good few thousand years, archaeological evidence pointing at a few hundreds of thousands of years of species existence and hundreds of millions of years of advanced multicellular life forms. The technology that enabled us to reach LEO also enabled incredibly destrictive wars including a near-apocalypse in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also required resource use in such a way to sigificantly alter the natural environment and, in some scenarios, significantly threaten our survivability. I've no idea if there's other worlds out there capable of supporting advanced multicellular life (though it seems far from impossible). I've no idea if any of them are presently inhabited with such life. Based on the timings alone though, it seems far from impossible that the level of advanced civilisation to enable interstellar communication is sufficiently short-lived and accident-prone as to entirely preclude it from happening. Or - we might as well just enjoy working out how to chat with Dolphins.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

logjam 16y ago

I went looking for the full text of the article, which I couldn't find. There are some related papers on the Wild Dolphin's Project site by the paper's author: http://wilddolphinproject.org/dev/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=6 http://wilddolphinproject.org/dev/index.php?option=com_conte...

zdean 16y ago

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=50710 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/?p=50710

endlessvoid94 16y ago
> Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of good manners. That's....nonsense.
- ramidarigaz 16y ago
  Yeah. Try expressing good manners to fish... It might be a mammalian thing, but I doubt it goes outside that.
- rickdangerous1 16y ago
  Yes agree. There are plenty of cultures around the world where making direct eye contact with a 'superior', or someone older than you is disrespectful. Indigenious people from Arnhem Land Australia will signal their intention to speak with you by standing off to the side of your peripheral vision and then wait for you to approach/invite approach. Any first year anthropology student knows that human social behavior is never universal...
  - Natsu 16y ago
    It seems like a smile is pretty close to universal, though. Maybe you can tell me in which cultures it means something different?
    - icegreentea 16y ago
      Everyone smiles, but for slightly different reasons. North Americans often smile to appear polite, which makes the rest of the world think we're weird (cause forced smiles never reach the eyes). Spontaneous smiles activate the major cheek muscles (pulling the lips up), as well as the muscles just around the eye. Forced smiles only activate the cheek muscles (it's apparently nearly impossible to consciously activate those eye muscles). There's also questions of degrees of smiling, as in amount of teeth.

szany 16y ago

Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point about ETI though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E "When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm?"

rewind 16y ago
He's a brilliant guy, but this is a terrible example. Worms can't communicate with us, so obviously we're not going to try to have a conversation with them. If we found a worm-like species on another planet and their vocabulary consisted of nothing more than a couple hundred words, I can guarantee you we would stop and try to have a conversation with them. If a vastly superior race came upon us and we were the first species they ever found that they could communicate with, I'm pretty sure they'd do the same.
- bellaire 16y ago
  Tyson's entire point is that alien life, even life that appears to do things we associate with intelligence and language, may be so different from us that we are fundamentally unable to communicate, just like us and worms. What if their language is undetectable (or even absent) and their intelligence is inscrutable? He's assuming radical differences rather than assuming any similarity.
  - szany 16y ago
    His point is not that we might be unable to communicate, but that we might be so comparatively stupid that communication would be laughably pointless.
wlievens 16y ago
Fallacious. If worms would actually reply, and converse even with very limited intelligence about their state of mind, it would lead to an entire new branch of science and new sectors of entertainment and industry. Pets are cool.

dkarl 16y ago

Funny, I just watched an episode of the Outer Limits ("Tourist Attraction") in which a biologist proposed communicating with a strange sea creature by decoding its vocalizations and synthesizing messages in its language, the same way people talked to dolphins. I didn't realize the part about dolphins was fiction, not science, and my reaction was, "Of course! If we know what the sounds mean, then obviously we can synthesize our own messages. Huh, if people have been doing it since the sixties, I wonder why I've never read about it...." Now I'm wondering why it has taken us so long to do something that science fiction predicted fifty years ago and which wasn't blocked by any technological limitations.

noibl 16y ago
I suspect stigma may play a part.. [John Lilly] studied other large-brained mammals and in the late 1950s he established a centre devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication: the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the early 1960s, Lilly and co-workers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns.[7][8] Subsequent investigations of dolphin cognition have generally, however, found it difficult to replicate his results. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly Interesting guy but with a tendency to... go off at the deep end.

mkramlich 16y ago

... and unfortunately, it once again reinvents half of Lisp's features, but poorly

ryanjmo 16y ago

For what it is worth, I feel like a huge part of having a startup is to have some outrageous goal you want to achieve. My goal is to own a pair of dolphins that I keep at my beach house area and ride around around the ocean in my spare time. I'm glad to know that I will be able to develop deep relationships with them as planed :)

TheSOB88 16y ago
Why would you want to own another sentient being? I think they have a term for that.

fierarul 16y ago

And for just $31.5 I could be reading that PDF. Flagged.

protothomas 16y ago
Sadly that's the standard for academic papers. The linked page does contain the full text of the paper however.
- fierarul 16y ago
  I don't see the full text, just an abstract on that page.
  - protothomas 16y ago
    Apologies - I'm at a university, it makes the pdf free, I wasn't aware that it would also change that page. In the interests of science - http://pastebin.com/8A89hGC9 http://pastebin.com/8A89hGC9
nickpinkston 16y ago
Completely with you - when will someone solve the closed "open" information problem. If you can't patent math/science, why can you copyright it?