If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys? | Hacker News Reader

If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

english.elpais.com

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A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones!

>Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms.

>This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded that other primates could not produce as many vowels as humans because of the position of their larynxes [which] cemented the idea that a descended larynx is a prerequisite for speech.

>Towards the end of the 20th century, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch realized a crucial fact – all the existing evidence was based on the anatomy of dead primates. Surprised that this had not been done before, Fitch used x-ray imaging to study the vocal tracts of live animals while they were voicing sounds. He was amazed to observe that their larynxes at rest remained high and then descended during vocalization to a position very similar to the human larynx.

>All these studies indicate that apes have all the anatomical characteristics necessary for speech. The reason they don’t is purely neural. Humans have much better control of the larynx, not because of its position, but because of the neural connections that connect it to the brain. Parrots don’t even have a larynx, but they have wonderful control of their speech organ, which enables them to articulate intelligible words and phrases.

Fascinating

Now do dogs. Are they missing any anatomy for speech or is that also neural?

The fact that parrots and humans with different anatomies can speak means it’s likely just neural.

I'm amazed at the range of vocalizations from huskies

My chihuahua-pit mix has such a range I often describe it as “singing the songs of her people”.

Anyway, what qualifies as speech is very subjective and generally anthropomorphic. I understand what my pup is saying almost all of the time, which wouldn’t qualify it as talking by most standards but it’s plain as day to me.

Ya, humans are really good at pattern recognition. I can understand what my parrot (who can’t speak) is communicating.

But did I learn my parrot’s patterns or is he intending to communicate with me? Hard to say.

If he is intending to communicate, did he just learn what works through operant conditioning? Hard to say.

If it is just operant conditioning (for both of us) and a pinch of antropomorphizing from me, does that even matter when the end result is that we are successfully communicating? Hard to say.

Whatever it is, it works. We can’t have a philosophical discussion, but he can usually get what he needs from me and I can usually understand what he wants and get him to change course of action when needed or get him to perform tricks on command.

Haha, meanwhile my chihuahua-pit mix only communicates by trembling, booping, performative sneezing, huffing (as opposed to a woof), sometimes grumbling, and yelling at the mailman. Mostly trembles.

Sounds like they got a more pitbull with the singing and the howling, and you got more of the chihuahua with the shaking and huffing.

My first beloved Chihuahua was similarly very expressive, but almost never barked. Lots of trembling, sneezing, some cute vocalizations while sneezing, growling, grumbling, stamping her feet, pointing with her eyes, but no barking... unless other dogs she affiliated with were barking.

I was so amused, I always used to praise her for it. I'd say

> That's right, baby! Good job!! That was a good, family bark!!!

Chihuahuas are wildly underrated dogs. :)

My gorl doesn’t get the chihuahua shivers, but she definitely does some big sneezes and huffs. She also does a big performative snorty sigh when she settles into a snuggle. And she has the loudest sing-songy yawns I have ever imagined, sometimes while dismounting the couch with her front paws and letting them slide across the floor before she can bother with even moving her hind paws.

Sounds very sweet :)

Here’s a picture of my little beast: https://instagram.com/p/CYuvs6rPLZP/

"Mostly trembles"

LOL

We had a greyhound that was completely silent (besides the odd sigh), her communication was completely nonverbal - pawing at the door at best.

Came to say that. I've seen videos of huskies actually talking, in a much lesser capacity than parrots, but talking nonetheless.

That video where the husky literally says "Woof!" "Woof!"

https://www.tiktok.com/@maxthehussky/video/71506133065275179... You are welcome.

Remove the text and the man's voice and I doubt you can actually understand what it says.

"Al-va-ro" and specially "Ma-no-lo" are perfectly clear to my ears (I'm spanish).

You're biased because you already know what it's supposed to be saying. The brain really likes to make us hear the sound it knows it's supposed to hear.

Samoyeds are maybe even more amazing, look them up if you haven't

Now do cats. Are they missing any anatomy for speech or is that they just don't feel like performing?

I would not be surprised if cats actually are capable of communication, but don't because they feel superior.

Cats don't even meow or purr at each other much. They just stare each other down and, as my parents told me when I was a lil kid, they speak through mind reading. I still believe that.

They do communicate, usually in the form of yelling to indicate they want food, pettig, to be let outside or let back in. That's err... all the communication they need, the rest of the time they sleep.

"Hey human, why should I make all of that effort to make myself understood, when you've got that overgrown brain of yours?"

They did develop fine control in their eyebrows to appeal / communicate to humans. And cats developed mewling similar to human babies to draw their attention.

> And cats developed mewling similar to human babies to draw their attention

So that is a "developed" trait? As in wild cats don't have it? Very interesting.

Lion cubs mewl and call, as do other cat kits.

https://youtu.be/WyhadRy4GJM?t=7

Fun, irrelevant fact: William Tecumseh Fitch is a direct descendant of General William Tecumseh Sherman of the US Civil War.

Human exceptionalism has poisoned so many studies.

My pet-theory why primates do not vocalize is that the neural difference is not even that cemented, it has to be some difference at the language acquiring stage as babys and children, were one human pattern matching center for sound fires constantly, acquiring the language "keys" and theirs dont.

And it all cascades from there.

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

It would be really fascinating, to help them acquiring language and uplift them. Maybe its even mammal universal applyable.

I like that theory but the question still stands that why can parrots do it? And they're no monkey

Why can't English speakers pronounce R?

I don't see how this is relevant or even correct. English speakers certainly can pronounce R.

One sort of R, sure. But native English speakers often have trouble with the "voiced alveolar trill" R which is present in many other European languages, unless they speak one of the less common English dialects where it is used.

“have trouble with” is a far cry from “can't”.

When I was younger my tongue was physically unable to produce R because it wasn't able to reach back far enough.

20th century hubris poisoned so many studies I would rather say.

I have this example but there are literally hundreds:

You know about the 5 μm particle size limit for it to become airborne? Washing hands for protecting against aerosols? It’s parroted bad research; and wrong.

The main infection path of upper respiratory diseases is through aerosols. The medical literature says it’s through hands that are touching the mouth and the nose but this is wrong. It was shown in the 1940s that viruses can spread through aerosols and that aerosols are particles under 100 μm. Research was done on tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that must infect the deep inside parts of the lung. For that it needs an aerosol size of 5 μm. Other diseases can do with aerosols of 5-100 μm.

Now, a meme was born that only 5 μm particles can get airborne.

And this was just accepted by the Western medical canon and the WHO.

Note that people have tried raising baby monkeys with human babies. The monkeys still can't speak.

> Human exceptionalism has poisoned so many studies.

…then goes on to describe a human exception.

Monkeys have a much easier time learning sign language than spoken, so there's probably something about vocal chords too. I suspect it's because humans and parrots independently developed music as a bonding mechanism and apes did not.

I'm pretty sure descended larynx is not prequisite for producing vowels. Vowels are merely overtones which occurs because the waves generated in the vocal folds(with a charachtrized fundamental frequency) travel the vocal tract in 3d, which causes destructive interference for most frequencies except those with constructive interference (overtones / formants) When humans move that tongue and lips we basically change the vocal tract shape which changes the overtones, the larynx is behind the lips and behind/in the back of the tongue anyway.

"require" is a fuzzy term. If you force your lips and tongue to stay in place, you can get partial intelligible vowel sounds from your larynx, and feel your larynx changing as vowels change.

We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.

A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of slightly differentiated and mostly to get people's attention

This isn't true for other animals (based on our reading of academic papers) and a commonality we've seen in the papers: as animals have more individuals they interact with across their life especially not directly related, their vocalizations are more structured. Within family units they tend to rely more on touch, body language, and some intermittent vocalizations. Though marine mammals are very vocal given they operate within acoustic environments in the ocean and it gets dark around 100m - 200m.

Basically, as number of sustained individuals in a group goes up and the number of non-related individuals increases, vocalizations get more diverse. We see cows, pigs, goats, and other herd animals are also very vocal which is how scientists have been decoding their speech recently similar to prairie dogs.

Much of what I've written here is a super simplification but happy to get deeper into the weeds.

We had an old dog move in with us and it’s been interesting because it has developed a new dog culture based on my existing dog. It now barks when someone comes home, barks to go outside etc. It didn’t do any of that before but it has started doing it by watching the existing dog communicate and having people who are more attentive to its needs.

Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.

If you ever deliberately raise a puppy, you'll watch the formation of many communication patterns that you create both deliberately (like barking or ringing a bell to go outside) and by accident.

The more I learn about domesticated animals, the more impressed I am by their intelligence and attunement to humans, natural and learned.

> Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.

If you haven't check out whataboutbunny [1] on Instagram to get an indication of how far dogs can go when given an opportunity. Bunny is trained to use buttons to "speak". A lot of it is very simple and functional ("outside", "play") that could easily be handled by body language and the odd bark, but occasionally you get fairly complex conversations which seems to indicate introspection and fairly complex reasoning that as you say they "just don't seem to need" to be able to express in language in normal conditions.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny/

> We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.

Can most dog owners not already understand or differentiate their dogs' barks? I can tell from the quality and context of my dog's barks, whether he

  - wants something (food, water, attention)
  - is angry
  - is scared
  - wants to play
  - is excited
  - is voicing a territorial dispute

and I think most dog people can also be confident in interpreting a fair range of basic emotions and also perhaps unique behaviors they've accidentally trained or organically developed with their dogs.

What additional things can your tech detect or identify beyond stuff like that? Are you using AI with human coders on training data, and if so, do they need special training or is the wisdom of naive dog-adjacent crowds good enough here?

I thought the other info you shared about canine and other animal vocalizations was very cool and interesting. I'd love to learn more about that any time, from anyone!

While maybe not very useful, it would be fun to have a real translation of dogs (and other animals). I have a lot of questions that I'd like them to answer.

In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place.

There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with the help of their translator, but only because they were trained on how to use it.

What about communication between animals?

My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does.

It would be nice if it were translatable, though.

I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.

One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for.

In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'communicate' by calling the other's attention, and then observing the same thing together. Maybe they'd like to tell stories for some of the things that one of them misses.

> I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.

I haven't yet seen an example of it. I think pets learn to use the buttons to make requests or answer them, but they never do that with each other because they never really have any requests or answers for each other, if that makes any sense.

Correct. Dogs will vocalize and use touch with one another but the buttons are exclusively (at least from what I've observed) used for communicating with people. Though dogs & cats have specific vocalizations for speaking with people. Though we're now seeing vocalizations in new species that we didn't expect such as plants[1] & turtles[2].

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-record-... 2. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1132951238/what-sound-does-a-...

That's exactly right so you can expand the vocabulary of animals especially dogs with training similar to how they train dogs to press buttons. This research is much more extensive with captive dolphins and now we're seeing the same with domesticated animals.

Speaking of Dogs and Human interaction: I remember a study stating that wolfs lack a certain muscle, which dogs have. A muscle above the eye; believed to be directly linked to dogs’ long time interaction with humans.

The Husky is also missing this. Thus their strange staring appearance.

Can't we just train an LLM with lots of recorded sound of whale song then let it produce the most probable whale song response given a context?

Then we can just ask the LLM to translate the same whale song to english.

(I would dismiss trying this with dogs as in my experience they communication channels revolve more around touch and smells than barking)

I do chuckle at one of mine, who definitely has a range of meanings to her barks. One solitary "WOOF", repeated at an interval means, "I'm stuck in the paddock, please let me out." She has another for "I've got a raccoon up a tree," and a gruff huffing noise for, "get off your ass and take us for a walk!"

I'm pretty sure I'm at least as much the trainee as the trainer here though.

Please please write an article on this. There's not information online about canine communication

Strange that this article doesn't mention any of the current research into what the cause is. [Erich Jarvis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Jarvis) has done research into the neurological mechanisms and seems to have discovered that animals capable of complex speech patterns have some mutations that permit a neural connection to grow from the motor cortex to the larynx (or syrinx in birds) by way of the brain stem. In other words, we can make complex vocalizations in part because we have fine motor control over our voice box, whereas most other animals do not.

This is only part of the story — there's still the question of how auditory information makes it in as an input so that we can replicate sounds we've heard — but it's a pretty big part for TFA to omit.

Yet people can make perfectly intelligible speech without using the larynx at all - whispering. People can also speak using a vibrator pressed against the throat.

more importantly, people can make perfectly intelligible speech using a completely different set of symbols, for example writing, whistling^1, hand gestures (sign language), pictures, etc.

Of course language is purely neural!

^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

This is an almost copy/paste in 2023 from another article from 2016:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/monkeys-brain-power-talk-la...

It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human sounds, with the debate over whether chatGPT is intelligent or not. Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was.

Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?

I believe there is significant scientific skepticism as to whether Koko was communicating to the degree popularly portrayed.

The short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chaing feels very relevant here.

> The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?

I think the dark forest theory rings very true here. The risk/reward equation for communication is skewed so far towards the risk end that, as the joke goes, maybe the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has contacted us.

Or Peter Watts’ much more succinct take: if they do exist, they’ll be mean.

Maybe there is some truth in this. Wisdom and truth can be found in silence.

Parrots are extremely intelligent.

And like most birds they also have superior spatial navigation skills.

I'm not sure how obvious it is; that story seems just as likely to have been fraudulent as true.

I think Koko's trainer really did believe her more extravagant claims. So did Clever Hans's. But there was a lot of wishful thinking along the lines of "Koko's making a weird gorilla joke that doesn't make sense to human minds" when a more likely explanation would be "Koko really doesn't know what she is saying".

Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of language.

Koko primarily communicated via repeating individual words that she'd been able to correlate with getting immediate effects. "Food", "Water", etc. When she did use multi-word phrases, they had no semblance of grammar: human babies will quickly work out the difference between "Me bite him" and "him bite me", whereas Koko never did. Frankly, despite being billed as a decisive blow against the Chomsky school of linguistics, Koko probably stands as strong evidence for it.

IMO, the massive complexity gap between human-level language compared to the relatively tight pack of merely possessing vocabulary animals, pretty directly correlated with levels of problem solving skills and tool use, should signal that there's something to the idea that our cognitive and language abilities are pretty closely linked. Mimicking human behavior may not be necessary for intelligence, but some kind of language likely is.

Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.

> When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.

This is commonly believed for no reason that I'm aware of. It is obviously not true.

>It is obviously not true.

Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness.

It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.

And some people, like myself, have no monologue or internal dialogue. What then? I have no consciousness or intelligence?

We call people like you "philosophical zombies". ;D

Worse than that. Manners of speaking, narration, works of fiction, etc. will - both for convenience and from actual bias - focus strongly on people quite unlike you. So strongly that many people will start to doubt that your kind even exist.

Welcome to the short and dirty end of yet another dimension of human cognitive bias.

> And some people, like myself, have no monologue or internal dialogue. What then? I have no consciousness or intelligence?

I don't have this either, but I would still say I think in language. It might be concepts that link together in hierarchies or graphs, but those concepts are described in words.

The concepts are described in words, but you're not describing your thoughts to yourself. You have your own thoughts directly. The words are a side effect, to be called upon when you want to talk to someone else.

Saying that you think in words is saying that the computer from GalaxyQuest thinks in words because every time it does something, it reports what it has just done over the loudspeakers. You're confusing the effect with the cause.

> Saying that you think in words is saying that the computer from GalaxyQuest thinks in words because every time it does something, it reports what it has just done over the loudspeakers. You're confusing the effect with the cause.

This seems a bit silly. I'm not saying that speaking words is what constitutes thought. I'm saying concepts generally need names before we can reason about them.

You're saying that mental instances of words are what constitutes thought. That is incorrect. Mental words are an output of a mental process downstream of thought.

> I'm saying concepts generally need names before we can reason about them.

This is also false. People adapt to patterns constantly; they rarely bother to name those patterns.

> This is also false. People adapt to patterns constantly; they rarely bother to name those patterns.

I'm trying to maintain an open tone in the face of this, but I might stop soon. To address this particular point: "adapt to patterns" - such as? From context you seem to be saying this is identical to reasoning, but I don't see why that would be.

> "adapt to patterns" - such as?

This is difficult to answer in terms other than "everything in the world".

People do not have trouble recognizing different types of pain that they experience and seeking different treatment based on the difference in the pain. They do not use words to represent the differences, and if you ask them to describe those differences, they will become frustrated.

People don't have trouble recognizing smells. They are generally not able to describe smells. This is why you see frustration among chemical engineers over papers describing the smell of various substances as "characteristic".

People routinely recognize behavior without having any name for it. If you choose a strategy for making a presentation to your boss, you are doing this based on a mental model of his behavior. In some cases, people do give names to behavior that they worry about, but in almost all cases, they don't.

I recently described the behavior of dancers in a dance video in these terms: "they're being like him". You may notice that there is zero descriptive content in that sentence. But the meaning was clear to both me and my interlocutors.

Consider a hypothetical conversation planning out a strategy. (For anything.) Person A describes a plan. Person B responds "What if he does that thing he does?". A and B both understand what is being referred to, but, obviously, B has no name for it.

All of these are just examples of a phenomenon that applies to everything. If you've ever observed anyone struggling to put their thoughts into words -- and I know that you have -- you should be able to realize that their thoughts cannot have been embodied in words to begin with.

You already received a fantastic response with many examples, but I want to pile on another thing. Talk to an accomplished autodidact. That is, somebody who learned a skill on their own using only trial and error. Examples I'm familiar with are music (playing an instrument) and computer programming. Autodidacts regularly recognize and apply patterns, methods, systems, procedures or strategies, long before they find out whether people have a word for them. For instance, a basic bit of music theory is that you can resolve a C-major melody by returning from a G chord back to C. Autodidacts regularly discover that, and that it translates analogously to other modes, without knowing the terms “dominant” and “tonica” (or even “major” and “chord” and “resolve”).

This doctrine is called 'linguistic determinism', for those curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism

I don't think it's well-supported but it seems to intuitively appeal to a lot of people.

I sometimes use words, but just as often use pictures or schemas, or nothing specifically name-able at all.

"what language do you think in?"

"um... I think in pictures?"

> Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was.

Sadly, I don't think this is actually true, despite the popular belief.

See https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4

TL;DW - Data was VERY cherry-picked to make it look like she could communicate via sign language. At best, she was responding via rote memorization and had no idea what she was actually communicating.

The story of Washoe is arguable more relevant than Koko.

I remember seeing this on TV when I was a kid.

https://youtu.be/UwZWWsc5xDk

The part that starts at 32:00 to around 38:00 is quite interesting, they programmed a PDP-8 to function as an icon-based chat mechanism. I always remembered the "grooming" part.

It depends on which behavior is mimicked.

The vast majority of people would say that no unintelligent, or parrot-level-intelligent, entity can explain a joke like this: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/gpt-4-jokes

I also personally asked GPT-4 to solve an easy CodeForces problem dated March 2023 and its solution worked perfectly the first time. (I haven’t yet tested it on a harder Codeforces problem.) Although the problem is relatively easy, it’s still much harder than the Fizz buzz test.

Geoffrey Hinton has updated his AGI timeline significantly in the last 2 years. He is definitely worth listening to: https://mobile.twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016...

Thanks, the explanation of jokes was very interesting, although both GPTs made the wrong interpretation of the goat/toga party joke. The joke is that the speaker thought it was a "goat party", not a "toga party" (rather than that they dressed as a goat in a toga party).

Similarly for the intelligence joke; the joke there is that the speaker can only get an unintelligent girl, rather than that he seeks an unintelligent girl.

I was more impressed by the glove and ball interpretation, to be honest.

Speech and language are two different things.

> Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?

Depends on how you define them. We love to anthropomorphize everything. If an animal shows language comprehension, that's bigger than speech.

> obviously greater intelligence of apes

Apes are not more intelligent than parrots, despite not having hands like apes parrots use tools with the same sophistication as chimps, and Crows surpass all great apes except humans in tool use and complexity. Parrots have been able to solve complex puzzles of equal or greater complexity to what a Chimp could solve. And when it comes to social behavior parrots/corvids are far more sophisticated and complex.

Honestly if I had to bet which animal would outsmart which in a real world game of wits I would bet on the parrot or crow over a chimp every time. I apes have hands which are perfect for tool use and making, but crows make more complex tools using their beak.

I recall that the origin of the word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greeks, who interpreted foreign languages as simply "bar bar bar". So, other animals may be communicating vocally, it's just that all we hear is "woof woof woof".

Or it might be that because we aren’t teaching them the way we teach babies. With a baby you are constantly reinforcing the language and encouraging them to match you. They obviously don’t have a human voice in there but they may be capable of a richer dog language than they currently use if they were taught it from early life.

I think whales are just being sarcastic. Oooo look at the floating man in the boat he's so brave ooooo

> There was also a communications problem. Though they had an equivalent IQ of sixty, and could understand several hundred words of English, they were unable to talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords either to apes or monkeys, and they therefore had to express themselves in sign language

- Rendezvous with Rama (1973)

Guess it's more fiction than science fiction now.

It would be impossible to give them useful vocal cords. Just not because of the vocal cords.

There should be a category specifically for invalidated science fiction. Things found to be unpossible in any timeline, assuming consistent laws of nature.

I believe this category is referred to as "uplifting" [0]. And while it certainly hasn't been proved to be viable so far, are you really sure it's time to rule it out as a possibility?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)

No, invalidated science fiction. The science being invalid. Meaning the vocal cords were the weak link. When it was not.

Eeh, just 'poorly aged'? I dont think how likely the principle of the thing was is all that important for science fiction which tends to concern itself with the consequences of a given technology.

Mind you, I tried to think up a fun word for this and failed which is why you're getting this answer instead of a word.

Just change the emphasis - "...give useful vocal chords...".

Important note on context - IIR, the "they" in that story were a spare-no-expense domesticated hybrid "working breed" of apes. Designed to replace expensive human astronauts doing repetitive, menial "housekeeping" jobs on space ships. One can read this as creative and edgy in context (1973, Civil Rights, "race riots", etc.) - but having the story's housekeeping apes able to talk might have gotten a "too big a risk" veto from the author's editor.

On the other side: Parrots cannot recognize themselves in a mirror https://talkieparrot.com/behavior/can-parrots-recognize-them..., while monkeys can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test . I consider the mirror test a better test for a higher form of intelligence than simply being able to simulate talking. So the real question nowadays would be: Can GPT-4 pass the mirror test? Can it detect it‘s own output, if you echo it back to it?

The problem is also that intelligence isn't on some kind of a line where a specific test tells you that you're closer to a base amount of intelligence needed for sentience. It's a whole bunch of things combined in some yet to be defined way that ends up allowing for the development of intelligence.

As for GPT-4 - it can't even recognize for itself whether data is good or bad, and it can't even recognize that it doesn't know something; IMO right now it's still basically just a black box that takes an input and produces a statistically matching output. A very good one, but still.

What's with all this stories from El Pais being submitted by the OP all of a sudden? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=elpais.com

>> And once again, Darwin was right.

We should write that on the sky. A terrifying amount of things can be explained with evolution and natural selection. It can even be applied to social groups and systems of thought, i.e. religion, politics and economics.

The article is also an illustration of how dangerous is to attempt mechanistic explanations in biology. It's almost never one factor that bolsters or prevent an outcome, but a lot of factors working together in ways the human mind can only very poorly model without mathematical and computational tools.

I've heard as well that some animals, like Gorillas, have a hard time understanding human speech. However, they can communicate in other ways (using simple signs) that make it clear they have some understanding of language (in the sense of concepts like position, individuals, etc.) and context.

To me this suggests either their sound processing is also insufficient to understand human speech, or not their vocal anatomy, I wonder, but their auditory anatomy could be not ideal for understanding human speech.

Infrasound aside, it seems that it's neural after all. Apes scream and grunt, so vocalisation follows gross mood. (I don't know if anyone has tested apes for ultra low frequency communications)

I don't follow why screams and grunts can only encode gross mood. Presuming I can differentiate them enough to have some amount of vocabulary, why can't I make a well reasoned and abstract grunt?

According to birds, we just emit a bunch of low pitched grunts and noise all day.

Honestly, when you speedup or slow down the playback to be in proportion to their size, all animals sort of sound the same. This goes for whales all the way up to birds. Whale sounds sped up are hilarious btw.

You can, and arguably Apes do. I do not reject the possibility the range of grunts encode information beyond "stop behaving like the 9 month old ape you are before I rage quit and beat my chest"

This was a good show, about the relationship between birdsong and human language:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tz9jr

Parrots are smarter. QED

Well we are the apes/monkeys that could?

"If parrots can speak, why can't monkeys?" would be a more accurate headline.

I've seen this movie and it doesn't ever end well for us.

I’ve seen this comment and it doesn’t end well for the poster.

Talk or imitate?

tldr; larynx position

Huh, according to the article it's not larynx position. It's that chimps seemingly lack the neural wiring to exercise fine motor control over their larynges. It's like humans comparative lack of control in wagging our ears compared to what dogs can do.

Parrots can't talk

Parrots parrot parrots?

Parrots parroting parrots parodying parrots.

Obviously we are the smart ones with our wonderfully clear, expressive, and concise language. /s --kind of.

We really need to be aware of our own biases and biological limitations if we actually want to study and understand the ability of other animals to have complex communications. Birds experience reality differently than we do - they see more of visible spectrum, they can make multiple sounds at once, etc. I wouldn't be surprised that what they can hear and how they perceive things like time is very different then us. Anyone observing parrots, crows, and other highly social avians can see they have complex relationships.

Guess it depends on what you mean exactly with "talk". They can articulate phrases, isn't that enough?

It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.

Noam Chomsky on Nim Chimpsky and the Emergence of Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a39vcatTCVU

Chomsky has a few other interviews where he addresses this.

You don’t need a language to communicate (ask my cat — or any cat/dog). You also don’t need words, but colloquially, “talking” means using words, not using language. Someone talking to you with random noises you can reproduce would still be called “talking” whether or not it was a language.

In other words a baby saying “milk” because it wants milk doesn’t mean you should ignore it because it isn’t using a “language.”

> (ask my cat

Ok. Hi cat. Do you need language to communicate? Plz respond.

> It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.

I owned a parrot for a few years. The speech she had was like a tape recorder, she could mostly only play back what she heard in an identical manner. But she was able to play back pieces of appropriate snippets in the right context to express herself to a level that I'd call it talking. It's not normal "speech", but if you gave an otherwise normal human with damaged speech centers in their brain a tape recorder it's very much like that.

You are correct. It is speech not language.

But it's almost not communicating as humans do -- something most commenters are implying.

[deleted due to unintended double-entendre]

Well now I gotta know

Parrots talk to each other.

Only stochastically.

They can certainly communicate their wants and needs with words.

Some have shown the ability to communicate abstract thoughts and feelings.

Why do you say they can't talk?

yes i can

I have a parrot. He can talk, both contextually and randomly (the former much less often, but does still happen).

Not sure what your criteria for "talking" are but, by all of my own measures, my parrot sounds pretty much exactly like me in most cases, and like a child in most others. The words are clearly distinguishable, understandable, and in multiple languages (he lives in a multi-language household).

So, yes. Parrots can talk. Can they converse? Sometimes loosely, usually not at all. But they can very much talk.

If you mean that parrots do not understand the words and construction they are speaking, sure. But at that point you're splitting hairs. My parrot says "do you want it?" when he wants a treat. He says "good night" when he wants to go to bed. He says "c'mon!" when he wants me to come to him. He absolutely talks.

Weird hill to die on.

My parrot will on every occasion that it stumbles, let out a surprised "Oh!" followed by a "Good boy!" when he gets back up again. I didn't sit around all day teaching him to say "Oh!" whenever I pushed him off the branch and praise him when he got back up again. I also don't tell myself I'm a "Good boy!" whenever I get back up from a stumble (which thankfully doesn't happen often at home to begin with). I'm sure my parrot doesn't know what "Oh!" or "Good boy" means, that is what the words mean in a human context. I'm also sure that he doesn't know what snapping finger noise followed by a stern "Ah-ah!" means, but he has used that on one occasion when he was mad at me and wanted to tell me to back off if I treasured the skin on my hands. (A learned behaviour from his first and previous owner).

...but at the end of the day, speech is in many ways "just" a series of correct sounds at correct times in correct situations, right? Does my parrot have a conversation with me? Well yes, sometimes, but not with words. Does my parrot mimic human words and phrases? Also yes, and sometimes in the most perfect situations possible.

From your description, it does sound like your Parrot has some understanding of meaning, much like dogs do. Not that they understand the grammar or can make out the individual words, but it seems like it can correlate <real world event> with <sounds>. <get back up> -> "Good boy"; <caught you right where I wanted you> -> "<snap> + Ah-ha!". Similarly, a dog may not understand that "sit" is an English word, but it can clearly understand "sit" -> <get that ass on the floor> (or whatever language you used to train them, they couldn't care less). That association is meaning, even if they are not fully acquainted with the works of Shakespeare.

My parrot will take a little nibble of you and then chuckle to himself cause he knows it strikes fear into you. And he’ll say “whatchya doin?” when he wants your attention.

I love these little tyrants.

Parrots can't use sign language, but some great apes can(koko)[0]!

Even thought monkeys don't have the vocal complexity to generate all the vowels(a,e,i,o,u) I think "great ape language" communication is more complex and nuanced than a fricking parrot repeating some phonemes after some form of stimulation.

Fascinating.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

I think you are underestimating avian intelligence. Despite the term "parroting," if I recall correctly, they're estimated to grow to about the intelligence of a 3 year old human child:

> ...parrots demonstrate sophisticated problem solving abilities, they can communicate their desires, they can count, add and subtract, and remarkably, they even understand the concept of zero

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2018/07/12/what-m...

It's not uncommon for people to underestimate avian intelligence, for some reason I never quite understood.

At times I wonder if it's some sort of tiny vendetta from humans themselves. You know, like how (Eurasian) magpies are considered pests, even bad omens, despite being intelligent and crafty...only because they are able to get past human-made traps. I guess a lot of humans are sore losers, heh.

But corvidae are legitimately intelligent, specially crows and magpies. The behaviors of crows in Japan are well-known, and magpies were proven to not only being able to recognize themselves in a mirror, they also used the view from the mirror as a tool (in the controlled experiment, to try to remove a sticker put on them by researchers). They can also remember humans visually (and therefore being able to hold grudges, or consider individuals "safe"), use and/or make rudimentary tools to achieve goals.

Not to mention that a bunch of birds can go literally (and visibly) insane in captivity. You can't have insanity without sanity.

It's difficult to use sign language without hands/arms.

Sorry but I was going to sleep, the article title was intriguing to me but was 12+ paragraphs long, so I ask ChatGPT the same question and I got 3 short paragraphs. Hope I'm not missing too much.

> If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

> Parrots are able to mimic human speech because they have a specialized vocal organ, called a syrinx, that allows them to control the sounds they produce. This ability is not shared by all birds, but it is particularly well developed in parrots.

Monkeys, on the other hand, do not have the same type of vocal organ as birds, and so they are not able to produce the same range of sounds. While monkeys do communicate with each other using a variety of vocalizations, these sounds are not as complex or as adaptable as human speech.

Additionally, language is not just about making sounds, it is also about understanding and using complex grammatical rules and abstract concepts. While some primates have demonstrated a degree of language comprehension and production in scientific studies, their abilities are still far from the complexity and flexibility of human language.

That is not a very good answer. What ChatGPT basically said was: “Monkeys can’t speak because they don’t have a bird-only organ and because syntax is hard”

I think you would have had a much better result if you had asked it to summarize this (fun and interesting) article.

It’s silly enough that you did this but rather annoying that you posted it here

A couple more "whys" in you get:

> Parrots are social animals that live in complex environments such as rainforests, where communication with other members of the group is essential. The ability to produce a wide range of vocalizations, including mimicry of other animals and human speech, could provide an advantage in communicating with other parrots and navigating the complex social dynamics of their environment.

> In contrast, monkeys and other primates evolved in a different ecological context, where visual communication and social cues may have played a more important role than vocalization. Additionally, the physical constraints of the primate vocal tract may have limited the evolution of more complex vocalizations, including mimicry of human speech.

Although it doesn't make sense to me now - monkeys also evolved in rainforests right? Maybe they stayed closer. After all birds can fly.

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