Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans
on.natgeo.com
on.natgeo.com
To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on those inferences. That's how players running at full speed are able to improvise complex plays involving long passes.
This is how I think of the communication between smart social animals like wolves or dolphins. They are like a football team. Every individual is an athlete, with essentially similar physical characteristics and skills. And they interact to accomplish essentially athletic goals, like hunting, or asserting dominance, or mating.
So, I'm not holding out hope that dolphins have a secret rich language, or even an interest in developing one. Heck, even among humans, professional athletes do not have a strong reputation as deep thinkers. But they think a lot about their particular sport.
The movie Avatar, while terrible overall, got this right, I think. Scientists failed utterly to make a connection with the big blue natives. It wasn't until a warrior (by accident) took on the task that the connection was made. The big blue natives were themselves warriors, so of course that is the type of communication they valued most.
Edit just for fun:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrzuj_the-life-aquatic-wit...
Just because dolphins possess a possible capacity for language doesn't mean that any language exists.
I'd figure the mutlitude of dolphins in the wild all establish personal colloquial parlances, organized according to the whims an experiences of each individual pod.
Kind of like in that movie Nell, where the children grew up learning to make noises like their stroke-afflicted mother. If there are no regimented social constraints to enforce teaching and learning, wild animals have no externalized motive for establishing the codified norms of a symbolic language.
Even among humans, with our highly codified and atomic language, there is a lot of research that hints at how important nonverbal cues are to communication.
Dolphins can seemingly identify themselves verbally, but does that mean it's part of language? It doesn't seem to be conceptually different the fact that big cats and dogs identify themselves to each other, although they do it with complex chemical markers instead of sound waves. But I don't think anyone expects to find a highly codified chemical language of "words" among cats.
If the dolphins, in their signature whistles, invent arbitrary symbols that are assigned meanings in a social context, that's ultimately linguistic behavior that outmatches even the most precocious sign-language-using ape.
However, this could also just be a matter of educational opportunities, as most dolphins spend their time swimming around in the sea. Even in captivity they are often made to perform and do not usually have a lot of time to code or for self-study, and obviously enrolling in computer science programs and attending lectures, despite ADA, is logistically prohibitive.
Someone should do a kickstarter to give captive dolphins access to Udacity or Coursera education. There is a large educational gap here and it would be interesting to see what they come up with.
https://www.youtu.be/qf_BR1StMxQ
Sorry