Whereas most races are content to evolve slowly and carefully over thousands of generations, discarding a prehensile toe here, nervously hazarding another nostril there, the Haggunenons would have done for Charles Darwin what a squadron of Arcturan Stunt Apples would have done for Sir Isaac Newton.

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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • My understanding is that 14% of the time that a chimp made a gesture to another chimp, there was a gesture used as a response. The result of this would be that there are not many long conversations happening with gestures, but like the paper said, they did see one that went on for 7 rounds.

    Many animals do use call and response in communication, but long back and forth conversations are quite rare. Whales of some species have especially long back and forth communications. Sometimes, even for over an hour at a time, they will float near the surface and go back and forth, making sounds to each other. There was even a study earlier this year where humans had a 10+ minute back and forth with a humpback whale named “Twain”. The conversation was essentially both sides going back and forth, claiming to be Twain.

    Sperm whales also have long, distinct back and forth conversations. They have even been found to have certain types of calls that, when made by the dominant individual, indicate that the conversation is coming to an end. They have not decoded the meanings of their calls yet, but they have very complex structures that resemble human language in many ways. They have small units that are location/tribe dependent(think accents) that are combined into larger units that follow fairly predictable rules.








  • Maybe you would enjoy this radiolab podcast if you haven’t heard it before.

    We’ll kick off the chase with Diana Deutsch, a professor specializing in the psychology of music, who could extract song out even the most monotonous of drones. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller. Bueller … Bueller …)

    For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news—the problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out, speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute—aka ‘perfect’—pitch. And, nope, English isn’t one of them.