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We cannot deny for one moment that animals think, understand, plan, and navigate the world just as humans do.
They just can’t use language as much as we can*, & mostly aren’t as big as us. But they’re way smarter than we’ve been taught , as every farmer in history would tell you.
And a lot of modern scientists. One cognitive science PhD met once said: the closer we look, the more we see non-human animals doing things we used to think only humans did. Tiny animals, she meant. Snails. Mites. Bacteria.
*can’t use language as much as we can: AS FAR AS WE CAN CURRENTLY TELL. Which isn’t all that much tbh
Me, I think birds are already there, full nouns & verbs. And I highly suspect insects have language systems too. I don’t mean some loose definition like like ants and chemical markers, or emotional expressions.
I mean what linguists mean: units of expression- sound (hand shapes, in signed langs) which recombine to signify different things, in a productive way, allowing for level upon level of transmission of thoughts. It’s a high bar to qualify as human language. And I think probably some nonhuman animals have it, and we’re just not listening closely enough.
But the closer we look.
(And yes there’s a Ted Chiang story about this)
Large parrots are in fact as smart as a toddler. African Greys, apparently, can memorize human language words (just the sound, no grammar or anything complex like that) and apply them to identify objects, colors and materials - even to objects they see for the first time!
And even smaller birds like budgies usually know the sound of their own name and can even assign "names" in form of sound sequences to other birds and humans they live with. You wouldn't think they have enough brain size for that, but somehow they do
My cat 100% has a name for every human he meets, and he can even say those names in higher or lower registers (and volumes) depending on how he's addressing that person.
I tell people this, and they think I'm insane. I even point out the sound that means that specific person's name, and they don't bother to learn it!
Temba, his arms wide.
DNA is language, my dude. it's like programming code.
interesting thought …I’m curious - who would be talking to who, in this framing of the idea ?
well it's more like a script, a book or library basically. It's not so much the transport of information, but the storage of information.
Is it? It's probably more like binary code for computers that our machines run on but that we as individuals cannot comprehend. But you cannot call it a language as individual organisms are not able to use it as such.
How do you figure that DNA/RNA isn't language? It's a system of abstract symbols that carry information, it uses highly complex syntaxes, there are even different dialects, large parts of it is higher level than Assembly Languages, and it can carry context between organisms.
Limiting your definition to organisms is shortsighted. Fully sapient organelles, computers, crystals, superorganisms, or whatever else could could create vast galaxy spanning civilizations with dizzyingly deep culture and art, and you'd argue that they don't use language because they're not specifically a certain kind of individual?
Hm, interesting point regarding not limiting the definition of language to individuals only. Maybe I should have said entities? And my point is still valid, just because everyone of us carries DNA with us, we still cannot "talk" DNA. I meant this mismatch in various levels of the complex multicellular entities we are.
Does DNA/RNA really pose an example of complex communication? It certainly is some highly specialized form of storing and transferring information. Calling it dialects sounds more like anthropomorphizing it to make it sound more like a language. Not sure if it is my human bias accustomed to human-style languages, but it somehow doesn't feel like a language to me when the information is just past further down the line and there is no real back-and-forth?
But even if I'd agree that DNA was a language, it would be something fundamentally different to what we commonly understand as language. So what is it worth? We probably need different categories of language then. And on the level of individuals, DNA would be an unintelligible form of language while humanlike language would be unintelligible on cellular level.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not set on rejecting DNA as a language. I just try to explore the opposite position to yours ;)
Maybe I should have said entities?
How would you define entity them? Why not have the state of fitness communicating with possible future states, or evolutionary processes communicating with themselves, like a massive comment thread unbroken over 3+ billion years?
Calling it dialects sounds more like anthropomorphizing it to make it sound more like a language
Anthropomorphization? Kinda, sure. But different brances of life do use DNA/RNA differently, like us with separate chromosomes and one-way genes, prokaryotes with circular chromosomes that can be read in both directions, and viruses with free genes to hijack other DNA/RNA systems. We don't understand all the ins and outs of genes yet, and I'm certainly not an expert in the topic, so maybe it would be more accurate to call these variations "language groups" and instead use the compatability of the proteome and metabolome to define languages, with genes simply being the words and some syntax.
it somehow doesn't feel like a language to me when the information is just past further down the line and there is no real back-and-forth?
different categories of language
This I can almost agree on. A technical manual or a journal is definitely a form of language, but you can't have a conversation with it. A category of languages that can be used for conversations would exclude most genetic languages, as well as all programming languages. Both could still be used to define a communication protocol though, which might still be considered a conversational language. For example neurotransmitters or HDMI. The depth of this communication could be quite shallow though, even if they carry greater meaning in a different format.
Going further than this we could define a catergory that has enough communication depth and mutability to directly transmit arbitrary ideas, which would pretty much cover only primate, corvid, and cetacean language. At this point we've moved beyond the details of grammar and vocabulary and into the methods and capabilities which generate and use grammar and vocabulary. Certainly an interesting category to define and explore the limits of, but definitely not what most people think of when you say "language". Perhaps "laguability" would be a better term for this?
In my opinion, there's definitely a huge amount of difference between our conversation and what bacteria do with and between themselves, but language probably isn't the right word to differentiate them. It's the difference between a die cast toy car, a pickup truck, an ICBM, and a novel; vastly different yet all called vehicles.
Hm, I think I start to see your point. I guess the thought of language as something like human language is biasing a lot what we consider language. It feels kinda weird, but if I shake off this narrow view on what a language is, all sorts of alternative ways to look at it come to mind.
I think it helped that you mentioned a technical manual that is a form of language but that doesn't count as a conversation. And having a conversation in itself is very much biased by our human form of language.
And now that you mention the proteome and metabolome, it really seems like a much richer form of information and that much more back-and-forth is happening. I guess epigenetics have shown that the DNA/RNAs are much more plastic than we thought, too.
Thanks for this conversation, it did actually help me get to explore this much more and change my mind :)
I think part of this confusion comes from the general usage of language to mean specifically human art and culture, like "Language Arts" or "Vernacular Language". Thinking about language as the simple components and systems that carry information might seem disrespectful to the totality of human expression, but I think it helps to see just how unique our flavour is, and how much we could grow.
Well I'm glad to have expanded your horizons! And also glad I got to use "proteome" in a conversation. It's such a cool concept that most people won't appreciate. :D
Haha yes, it is sometimes sad when other people around cannot really appreciate certain thoughts or concepts of one's own.
One book that really got me excited about studying biology well over a decade ago was Evolution in four dimensions, which touches on some similar topics as in our conversation. Or maybe even in reverse, how language is actually some dimension of evolution in itself. Since then my knowledge on evolution and genetics got a bit rusty because I specialized in ecology. But I find it deeply fascinating how evolution works and what mind-boggling stuff it came up with.
I think the advantage of thinking of DNA as some kind of program code is that we can draw inspiration about what can/can't be done from IT. And the other way around, nature's DNA code might give inspiration to computer language development.
But thinking of DNA as code is pretty different than thinking of it as a language, isn't it? That's why I brought up the example of binary code in the first place. And sure, I completely agree that DNA is very much like binary code (just more complex). But code written in a human readable form is again different to that because we need language to understand machine readable code. There needs to be some kind of translation for us. Because language is a form of abstraction that is not present in neither code nor DNA.
Well, there is people that write assembly language code directly.
Yeah well I guess it depends on whether you call bytes on a computer a language.
What if those bytes represent characters that compose language that carries meaning? Because precisely that happens in DNA. An individual fraction of DNA might not carry much meaning, but in its sequence (ATGCCAT...) it encodes blueprints, and therefore meaning.
I think it rather depends on how you define language. For example, Wikipedia says the following:
Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.
What kind system of complex communication do we have in DNA/RNA? It sure is a mode of storing and transferring information. But does this make it a language? And if yes, who is speaking the language of DNA/RNA? Can cells talk then? Because I would argue that this (hypothetical) language of DNA is then always "spoken" by individual cells and isn't transferrable to a multicellular entity? (I mean, sure all your cells are "speaking" DNA in this way, but you yourself aren't.) But back to the question of the "complex systems of communication". I would argue that while DNA is a mode of transferring information, it isn't a language in itself. Because you don't have a back-and-forth. It is a pretty simple progression of reusing information again and again. But it isn't a mode of communication and especially not complex communication.
DNA is a long molecule that is made of many individual smaller molecules (called nucleotids) that come in four variants (called A, T, G, C). So a DNA molecule is a sequence that can be represented as ATGCTGCCTA...
This is a sequence of characters in this representation, but it's also a sequence of something resembling characters in reality. The cell has a component called "ribosome" that can take this sequence of characters as input and uses it kinda like a blueprint, and produces a protein (enzyme) depending on the blueprint. That enzyme can have many varying functions. So yes, this is a complex system.
The flow of information goes mostly in one direction: that is, from the cell nucleus's DNA to mRNA (intermediary step) and then to the ribosomes, where proteins are produced. Still, many parts of this process resemble script and communication (the transport of information), which I call "language".
I do understand how DNA works, I'm actually a biologist. And I don't doubt that it is complex. What I doubt is that it is a complex system of communication. But sure, I see your point that is some form of complex transferral of information and that yes, if I stretch my understanding of language a bit, it probably is one as well. Maybe the next question would be: what is this useful for? What can we learn from that? Like I said (not sure if in this or in another comment), maybe we then need to have various categories for language?
E: and we could explore the new fringe cases a bit more, too. If DNA/RNA is a form of language, then even non-living entities can have language like in form of viruses. If abiotic things get complex enough, would we also call it language at some point? Like chemical reactions?
I am interested in taking ideas from historical costuming and applying them to modern garments ("history bounding") and something that keeps jumping out at me is how smart people in the past were, especially regular, working people. In modern times, people tend to act like people were stupid just because modern medicine and science didn't exist, but if you study enough to understand some of the reality of historical people's lives, there are some really nifty solutions. It makes me think a lot about "intelligence", and how limited our understanding of it is if we are so unable to think of pre-modern people as intelligent.
That's a big tangent to your comment, but it's ultimately heading in the same direction. I'm also jazzed to see cognitive science continue to increase its understanding of non-human intelligence; it's really cool to see what we can discover when we stop projecting ourselves so hard onto other creatures.