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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Corvids are bloody amazing. Arguably, they also have language.[0] Nightingales too.[1] But bird languages are very different from mammalian ones. Maybe more like neuronal activity directly mapped to sound.

[0] Mates (2016) Locally Periodic Signal Estimation and Pitch Detection, and Acoustic Communication in American and Northwestern Crows (PhD thesis) https://dlib.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/35...

[1] Weiss et al. (2014) The use of network analysis to study complex animal communication systems: a study on nightingale song http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1785/2014...

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Hey mirimir, it's awesome to see posts from someone else that thinks birds are cool. I hadn't seen those papers before--that Weiss study looks like it's worth reading in depth.

Just wanted to say that most people who study birdsong and bird calls wouldn't describe it as a "language"--as far as we know, humans are the only animals with language, unless you believe that one guy who wrote the article about dolphins. But you're right that birdsong is a lot more like language than most other animal vocalizations; often the songs have "syntax" (like in the Weiss article you posted) where the structure follows rules. But the syntax doesn't convey meaning in the same way it does in our language. No bird has ever written a philosophy book, right? They're just communicating stuff like "this is my tree and I'm so manly I can sing in this tree for hours in the middle of the night".

Along the same lines, I think birds are pretty close to us evolutionarily speaking. You're not the first person I've heard compare them to aliens, but their brains are actually a lot like ours. Here's a grumpy blog post I wrote about it if you want to have a look: http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/09/snakes-on-brain-or...

As the article above demonstrates, along with many other behavioral studies like those you mentioned, birds behave a lot like we do. So: their brains are a lot like ours and their behaviors are a lot like ours. This is why we should study them even more, if we want to understand intelligence.

Think of it this way: you're an alien and you want to figure out how a computer works. If you could only carry out your experiments with MacBooks, it would probably take you longer than if you could also use e.g. Lenovo ThinkPads (just trying to draw an analogy, I'm not throwing shade at Mac or anything).

I hope that wasn't way too "tl;dr" but I just wanted to build a little bit on your comments.

> Just wanted to say that most people who study birdsong and bird calls wouldn't describe it as a "language" ...

Yes, I get that. And maybe they're looking too hard for something like human language. Maybe it's more like communication protocol. I mean, if you down-shifted Ethernet traffic and listened to it, would it sound like language?

> They're just communicating stuff like "this is my tree and I'm so manly I can sing in this tree for hours in the middle of the night".

Well, if you didn't know any human languages, and your system clock were really slow, maybe English would sound like that to you. So if I'm out dancing, I'm wasted, and I'm using earplugs, casual conversation does sound a lot like that to me ;)

> Along the same lines, I think birds are pretty close to us evolutionarily speaking. You're not the first person I've heard compare them to aliens, but their brains are actually a lot like ours.

Yes, I get that too. The basic layout is the same. But when reptiles and mammals diverged, their brains were much simpler, and arguably neither line was very intelligent. So brains and intelligence have evolved in parallel in birds and mammals. And maybe structural similarities just reflect the shared lineage.

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