Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans | Hacker News Reader

Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

ngm.nationalgeographic.com

93 pointsfezz31 comments

I want to say that they might've had a language at some point, but the damage whaling and fishing industries have wrought on them, might've had an effect on dolphins the same way more than a quarter century of no formalized school system, due to war, has been detrimental to Afghanistan's intelligentsia.

I can't prove this, but consider that hand writing is pretty much the only thing that allows humans to provide extended reach to their accumulated learning, across generations and centuries.

Without hand writing, or something like it, to act as a physical artifact and provide shortcuts to skip over expensive processes of trial and error, I doubt that a codified language, borne of strictly oral traditions among small pods of disorganized dolphin social groups, would survive across generations, to jump the inheritance gaps introduced by being hunted nearly to endangered status by predators like us.

If they're as smart as their neurology suggests, maybe they could learn our codified languages, or one we can develop cooperatively and share, through careful training on both sides.

If you put a bunch of humans (children) together, each with no previous knowledge of language, on an isolated island, they will in all likelihood come up with one. (Something close to this, as a live example, is a documented case I remember having read years ago of an all-new sign-language that emerged spontaneously among a large group neglected deaf-mute children at an institution a few decades ago. I think this was in Nicaragua or some other country in that region) What I mean is, our linguistic ability isn't dependent on culture (though tremendously enriched by it), it's biological. Why wouldn't the same hold for dolphins. I think they're very smart, but I don't believe they ever had something we could decently call a language.

Language is a strange and large territory. And, almost by definition, any social animal must be able to communicate with each other; And, in order to communicate, there must be shared formal rules. In essence: syntax.

Well, yeah, but those rules will only be unique and useful for probably 5 or 10 dolphins. The rest of dolphin kind won't have any innate concept of the vocabulary they've developed.

Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, implicit context, mood and tone. You'll be starting at square one, with every separate pod, with minimal potential of cross-pollination across pods, based on dolphins that leave one group, and join another, and whatever they bring with them, and manage to learn from new dolphins they meet.

Even the presumable token words, which surely must exist: air, water, fish, dirt. One pod in isolation from the rest might not build these conceptual ideas, or use their noises the same way, and then what of another pod halfway around the world, which they've never met?

Sure, the capacity for language remains, but there's no persistent implementation. Each variant of a dolphin language dies with the dolphin that knows it.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

What would they record it on? This seems to me the biggest drawbacks of seaborne intelligence: any dolphin could be twice as smart as the smartest human but it's really hard to develop technology when you don't have opposable thumbs and the environment is, almost by definition, more fluid and corrosive than the one we share.

Hah, that sounds almost like something out of a book.

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams, H2G2

Although I do think that without a way to store knowledge outside the brain it becomes much harder to form and maintain societies. Ian Stewart uses a wonderful term for that part of intelligence which we cannot hold inside our heads: extelligence. An external store of knowledge and (mis)information allows for sources of reference even when no other people with the knowledge happen to be available.

It's not that bad. The undersea environment doesn't suffer from erosion and weathering which basically prevents any long term construction from surviving very long on in the air. If dolphins carved words into the sea floor using a tool, they could easily be very long lived.

Why no erosion? There are still currents.

What would the tool be made out of? Would any rock do or would it have to be a specific type that requires modification? What would they hold it with?

>Without hand writing, or something like it, to act as a physical artifact and provide shortcuts to skip over expensive processes of trial and error, I doubt that a codified language, borne of strictly oral traditions among small pods of disorganized dolphin social groups, would survive across generations, to jump the inheritance gaps introduced by being hunted nearly to endangered status by predators like us.

There are many examples of Native American tribes that didn't lose their languages despite being nearly wiped out by disease and lacking written language.

The article mentions that dolphins are the only species known to use names in the wild, but that's not quite true:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/07/dont_call_me_polly_parr...

Penguins [1] might also be an example. At least according to a documentary I saw, when the one of a pair that went off to hunt returns to the egg or hatchling to take its mate's place so the mate can go hunt, it finds its mate by recognizing the mate's distinct call among the thousands of other penguins calling out for their mates.

Wouldn't that count as a name? It meets the dictionary definition: "a word or set of words by which a person, animal, place, or thing is known, addressed, or referred to" (assuming an animal sound can count as a word).

The article did say that the dolphins choose their own sound. The penguin documentary did not say how penguins get their distinct sound. I wonder if the article is only counting as names things that are chosen, so if the penguin's distinct sound is not something chosen by the penguin it does not count?

[1] I'm not sure what specific species I'm talking about here.

It is common for animals to have personally identifiable sounds. However, most animals only make their own sound, not the sound of others. For example, a penguin might identify himself as Bob, but a penguin will not ask where Bob is.

The tandem experiment is a very clever way to have them communicate.

This doesn't exactly prove anything about a language but it is a good way to obtain valuable sound data.

I wonder if higher order training could be achieved. I.e. Instructor signal one dolphin a secret command, dolphin communicate with second dolphin and second dolphin does the trick - to test if sounds used to organize the tandem are the same or related in any way to sounds used to relay the secret.

I tend to think dolphins communicating might have a huge technical advantage: Water transports waves way more exact and farer. Also the ability of echolocation points to a far better usable bandwidth. Humans read, speak and listen at a few bytes per second. What if dolphins send/receive information magnitudes faster?

Just imagine you could clearly hear everyone speaking within a radius of let's say one mile, regardless of walls or other sound absorbers. We would be forced to compress sentences into tiny time slices to avoid overlaps and distortion.

Just a thought...

Apparently they communicate in 3D with images. Considering what images are available to them ("Rock", "fish", "Another dolphin", "another fish") maybe they're not saying much that's so fascinating.

This was mentioned in Cosmos. Time was when whales could communicate flawlessly almost around the entire circumference of the earth. Then human sea travel, especially motor-powered ships, basically acted as a really loud fan that makes it hard to communicate over. So yes, they can stil talk over long distances, but the difference is between the ability to call someone on the phone, and jury-rigging one with two cups and a string.

"Herzing’s goal is to get a handful of juvenile females she has known since birth to associate each of three whistle sounds broadcast by the CHAT box with a specific object: a scarf, a rope, and a piece of [brown seaweed]."

I don't see how a dolphin can be expected to know what a scarf is. Helen Keller's first word was 'water'. Something she understood completely. If they'd tried to teach her 'guitar' she may not have gotten anywhere.

> I don't see how a dolphin can be expected to know what a scarf is.

Nobody has that expectation.

It's possible that dolphins already have sounds associated with familiar objects (like seaweed), which might interfere with learning a new sound. Hence the use of a foreign object.

Just as there are colors we cannot see, and sounds we cannot hear, it seems possible that there are thoughts we cannot think. That quite literally the dolphin thoughts are inconceivable to us. Thus by extension the language will be forever incomprehensible to us.

That our brains have led us to believe that our brains are universal and comprehensive thinking machines is a quirk of evolution. It doesn't make such a belief true.

The last time I read about the subject I understood that some researcher thought that communication not just involved whistles and clicks but also movements, postures and bubbles. I can't remember where I read that though.

Like Linear-A or the Voynich script this seems to be a difficult thing to decode - if there even is a meaningful symbolic communication. Perhaps the cynic Justin Gregg is right. But like that poster on Fox Mulder door says: 'I want to believe'!

More info: http://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576514...

"They’re a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet—watching them may be the closest we’ll come to encountering ET."

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Makes me wonder why, if dolphins are so smart, they aren't figuring out a way to decipher our language and communicate with us monkeys.

Without a Rosetta stone for dolphin language, we need a huge data set to distinguish how their language translates into ours and vice versa. This would be impossible to do without the technology we have now and this technology we have now would be impossible to create if we had no arms/materials to build things with.

It is not widely accepted by dolphins that humans have language. :-P

What if the dolphins know terrible secrets people shouldn't know?

Like seeing their climate being eviscerated around them with no way to deal with it. :(

Are you a dolphin?

They know the way to R'lyeh?

Okay, I tell you a secret first, little porpoise: We, humans, aim to wipe all the fish in the sea to fill small tins. We'll replace then fishes by jellyfishes and plastic bags as soon as possible.

(... And this is why dolphins no longer talk to us).

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