Will humans ever speak wolf? A scientist unravels the complexities of animal chatter
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Hi, Benjamin here. Welcome to episode 10 of Nature Hits the Books. In this episode, I'm joined by Arik Kirschenbaum, a zoologist from the University of Cambridge here in the UK. Arik's book, Why Animals Talk, The New Science of Animal Communication, was published earlier this year.

As its name suggests, it dives into the world of animal communication, looking at how different species get their points across, why they do it the way they do, and what insights they provide into our own use of language. A few of the things we talk about on the podcast. Arik, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for inviting me. So your book is...

is called why animals talk not do animals talk why have you gone with this as a title it does seem quite definitive it does i mean i would have thought in fact when most people ask me why did you choose that title they say why did you say why animals talk instead of how animals

talk. Most people are interested or think they're interested in the how. But of course, as an evolutionary biologist, we're always interested in the why. So how animals talk, do animals talk, those are very descriptive questions. Now, descriptive questions are problematic, partly because how you define them is really difficult. But also, they actually tell us very little. What we really want to know, or I really want to know,

as a zoologist, is what are the drivers for all this communication? Why is it that some animals have got complex communication, other animals have simple communication, some use sound, some use vision? What are the evolutionary processes that led to this distinction? And I think the big theme in the book, which hopefully I'm not spoiling anything, but by the time you get to the end, you realize that the answer to the question why animals talk is because of their social interactions. And that was really the point that I wanted to make.

And that certainly seems to link in with the evolutionary aspects as well. And before we get into that, I don't think it's unfair to say that humans have always been enamored with talking to animals or listening in, I suppose. Why is it something you think we're so desperate to do? Well, I do think that we as humans very, very clearly want to set ourselves apart from the rest of the natural world. That's certainly been a tradition since antiquity. We are different. We are special.

But at the same time, we don't actually want to distance ourselves from the animal world. We want to be able to speak to our pets and the animals we meet in the wild. I think throughout history, that's really been an issue. And ancient civilizations, ancient cultures were very happy to accept that animals talk. It was really only with the Enlightenment and the sort of systemized attempt to put humans in a special place.

that we start dismissing the concept of animals talking. Because animal communication, there are examples of it all over the place, right? You think the bee waggle dance. And there is some evidence that we might come to in a bit about animals having names for each other. So communication, there is incontrovertible evidence that that does happen, right? But actual talking is maybe a different thing. I would say that all animals communicate. There's always an exception to every rule. But the very definition of animal as a mobile heterotroph, right? Animals got to go out and do stuff.

got to go out and find food. I mean, okay, they're acetyl animals, that's true. But by and large, when animals have to move around, then they become separated from each other. How are they going to stay in contact? How are they going to find mates? How are they going to cooperate? So pretty much every animal communicates. Now, as you say, not all animals talk with sound, but for all kinds of other reasons, sound is a really, really, really...

way of communicating on this planet. We have a relatively dense atmosphere. Sound travels really well. It travels really far. It goes around things in a way that light doesn't. You know, you're hiding behind a bush but you can still be heard. So sound just has worked out to be the most effective means of communication in general. But a hard question

thing to write about when i picked up your book i must confess i did think about that frank zapper quote you know writing about music is like dancing about architecture right like you have to be able to hear it so how did you approach trying to describe what a wolf sounds like for instance the book's got a lot of anecdotes in it and that was very very intentional because i agree i think it's extremely difficult to understand animal communication unless you are out there with

with the animals. You really cannot study them except in the context in which they live, in the interactions that they have with their environment, with other animals. So I made a big effort to put in a lot of anecdotes from my experience in the field.

just so that people could sort of be drawn in a little bit to the world that those individuals occupy that really defines how they need to communicate. So that's one way. But then the other method that I used is to use a graphical representation. So when we research animal communication, we use spectrographic representation. So we convert the sound into an image that shows the progression of frequency with time.

And it turns out that humans are really, really, really good at interpreting images. So essentially what you do is you can place an image on the page. It's really a mathematical representation of sound.

Anyone can look at it and they can almost hear the sound. It's quite impressive. It's basically sheet music. You can look at sheet music and you can get an idea of what the tune is doing. So I use that quite liberally through the book. I think they work quite well. What was interesting to me is at the end of the book, rather than the start, you actually go into this is what language is, which to me seemed like a key question. If we want to know how mammals are doing it, we need to define what it is. But it seems like what language is, is a very...

very complicated thing, right? Because the things that make up human speech, you've got grammar, syntax, emphasis, all this kind of stuff. Why did you think that knowing what it was was not necessarily a prerequisite for explaining how it might work? Well, you can really get stuck in a lot of arguments about language. And I really did not want to do that because it's fairly clear to pretty much all researchers that however you define language, what humans do is different from what all other animals do.

And I think we need to start from that point. So I really didn't want to get into that argument until we start talking about the origins of language. We start talking about communication in our closest relatives, in chimpanzees, for instance. And then basically the answer to the whole question is many, many species of animals have many of the building blocks that are vital for language.

None of them have put it all together to make a true language like we have, but loads of those building blocks exist in birds and they exist in cetaceans and they exist in primates. They're all over the place. So I really want to sort of pick out those building blocks and then look at how they are assembled into what we do.

And as you say, you do focus on a few animals. Some of them will be familiar to our listeners and some not. And we'll dot about and choose a few. And let's start with one that you've maybe done a whole bunch of research on and that you seem to really love as well. And that's the wolf. And before we talk about the wolf kind of sounds, maybe you could tell me about your relationship with this animal. Yeah, they are incredible, all of these wild animals.

Animals are incredible. And one of the amazing things is, and really privileged, right, to go and work with these creatures in the wild. Because when you're out working with wolves or with dolphins or with gibbons or whatever, you feel them communicating you.

You are experiencing what's going on. Now, wolves have this very characteristic, very difficult problem, which is they're really scared of humans. And so it's really difficult to see. By and large, you catch glimpses of them and no more. But you hear them. You hear them all the time. And this really underlines

how crucial that vocal communication is for them. You can hear them for kilometres and kilometres. So that vocal communication, you really feel it bonding them across huge landscapes. Well, let's hear an example of some wolves howling. And this is a pack of wolves during the evening in Yellowstone National Park. Let me play this out loud. WHISTLE BLOWS

Wolf howls are long-range signals, so they're really intended to be heard a long way away. Wolves make lots of other sounds. When they're together, they sound much more like dogs, you know, barking and yapping and whining and things like that. But those howls, they are long-range howls. Now, when you have a sound that is intended to be heard a long way away, you lose a lot of information. It's not a very reliable channel to be heard six kilometers away. So the wolf howl

must contain information in a way that can be reconstituted at that kind of distance. And the way they do that is by focusing all the energy into a single frequency but varying that frequency up and down. So you have the rising and falling of the wolf hours, classic thing, you know, ooh,

And it's that up-down. That up-down is really well preserved over long distances. So can they contain a lot of information? No, not a lot, because it's really constrained to that frequency variation. But if you listen to the howl you just played, you'll see some wolves are going up and down in one way, other wolves going up and down in a different way. So there is potential for information there.

but it's restricted to that particular kind of encoding. And this comes back to it's perfect for the environment they're in, right? So the Yellowstone National Park is obviously huge. And that's the trick, right? This tonality is key. Exactly. That's the trick. And human speech is not like Wolf House.

Most of our sounds, the consonants in particular that we make, they've got lots of different frequencies in them. Vowels tend to be a bit more of a single tone, like E. But most of the information in our speech is through amplitude modulation. The varying amplitudes of the different frequencies in the sound of your voice.

rather than in modulating the pitch of a single tone, which is what wolves do. And you can see if you were standing on opposite ends of a football field or something like that and you try to talk to someone, they're not going to understand you because all of that amplitude modulation information is lost.

It's that pitch changing up and down. That's the thing that would be reliable. Yodeling, of course, is the equivalent human long-range communication. And this does appear in a bunch of places when there's communication over a wide distance. So the ocean is a fine example then. And another very well-studied organism, the dolphin, which we know love to chatter. They do the same sort of thing. They really do. And it's quite amazing. You take a dolphin whistle and you slow it down. It sounds just like a wolf howl. Well, let's have a listen to that, shall we? This is a slowed down dolphin whistle.

It's really quite striking. They're essentially the same signal, obviously much higher pitch, much shorter than wolf howls. But again, it's this long range signal. All the information can be in the way that the pitch is modulated. Now, dolphins, of course, like wolves, use other ways of encoding information. They have clicks, they have buzzers, they have visualizations.

They have visual communication as well. But this one type of communication, the whistle, which is where most of the research is concentrated, that's a fairly information-poor channel. So when people ask, well, you know, how do you know dolphins don't have a language?

There are a number of reasons that we know that. But one of the things to remember is that it's not a great way to communicate a lot of information. I mean, that begs the question then, if there is a limited amount of information in there, can it be decoded? I mean, you've done an approximation of a wolf howl. They're very good, I have to say. But do you think we can get to a place where we know that this wolf howl means this and you've said something in wolf there that they might pick their ears up and respond to? Well, we've got to be very careful when we talk about meaning in animal communication.

The meaning of meaning for humans, absolutely clear. But we were born with language and we were born with language capacity. So we have grown up comprehending this connection between a particular sound and a particular semantic object like a chair or something like that. Animals don't have that. If animals don't have language, we don't think they have language, then they don't have that kind of very clear conception of a connection between a specific sound and a specific concept.

Now, that doesn't mean there's no meaning. It just means that we have to have a different way of thinking about meaning. So there isn't a wolf howl that means bison. There isn't a wolf howl that means come here. We believe that there are, although it's extremely difficult to prove, there are wolf howls that convey different feelings, different concepts. So there may be wolf howls that are more attractive or more aggressive.

So there may be wolf howls that tend to say, come closer, and wolf howls that tend to say, stay away. But that's very different from saying that there's a meaning to a particular howl. And you can see that just from the sort of variation in the howling. One wolf howling, one dolphin whistling, it'll never be exactly the same twice.

And then the other thing to add is that a lot of animal communication is very closely tied to emotion. So how the animal is feeling at the time affects the sounds that they make. So it's not only natural that a lot of these animal sounds are going to be conveying emotional concepts rather than what we think of as concrete words. And so feeling then seems to be an important bit. And one of the things that I just wanted to talk to you about is the feeling imparted by music. Now, if we say that language...

and music, there's an element of maths to them, right? But that different songs can elicit different feelings in humans. But it seems that is the case in animals. And I need to ask you about playing Judas Priest and ABBA to dolphins.

So it seems pretty clear that there are different elements of the sound that elicit different responses, different emotional responses, if you like. And it's different for different species. But the simplest example is that if you think about screams of fear, screams of fear are really, really well understood across species. They all sound pretty much the same, and all of those species will understand what that means. So there are some sounds that have really very consistent emotional content to them.

Then there are interesting questions, which I don't think that I can say unequivocally that we know the answer to this, but there's some good indication that things like rising tones have a different emotional effect on many species than falling tones.

So with dolphins in particular, dolphins really like rising tones. They like it when the pitch goes up. So it could very well be that if you look at a dolphin whistle, which goes up and down and up and down, that the way that the rising tones combine with the falling tones could be the way that emotion is encoded in. Now you ask about Judas Priest, right?

So we did some experiments with some trained dolphins to try to get them to distinguish between different sounds and to say which ones they felt were similar and which ones were different. It's fantastic working with animals in the wild, working with animals in captivity, a little bit more challenging, but there you go. It's got to be done sometimes. And we thought it was very, very interesting that they really had no interest in ABBA.

But whenever Judas Priest came on, they got really, really excited. Now, why is that? Speculation. But clearly, they're very, very attuned to the way pitches rise and fall.

And it could be simply that the more up and down pitch of some types of music elicit more arousal in the animals than the Abba, which was quite a mellow, flat melody. So certainly not comparing Abba and Judas Priest. I'd love to publish it, but I think it's too small a sample. Obviously, we need to talk about heaps. But one animal I wanted to touch on before we get there is...

is one that I must confess I had never heard of before this book. And it looks like a cross between a rat and a squirrel, but it's actually more closely related to elephants. This is the hyrax. I'm going to play a quick bit of hyrax sound.

Tell me about the hyrax, Eric. Well, hyraxes are pretty odd creatures, really. They're small, simple, have pretty uncomplicated lives, really. They live in large groups, but they're not very complex social groups. But they have these amazing vocalizations, and the vocalizations are male display vocalizations. So we're pretty confident that there's not much information there apart from the male advertising his fitness. But because

Because they have a series of four or five different notes and they combine them into long, long, long sequences, we can look and see whether those sequences are random. And they're not random. They never are. Birds don't sing random notes either. That's fine. But what's amazing about the hierarchs is that they actually learn that syntax. They learn the way to combine notes from listening to each other.

You have a series of hyrax colonies, and really they're all sort of strung out in a long line. And if you look at the syntax of the males in each of those colonies, you'll see that any two males that are close together have a similar syntax, and the ones that are further apart have a more different syntax. They're clearly learning from each other and embellishing. That in itself is not particularly surprising. We know that other animals do that.

But the fact that this ability to understand syntax and to learn syntax is so widespread in the animal world is actually extremely interesting. Because some people have said, you know, oh, well, syntax, grammar, is one of the hallmarks of human communication. Well, no, it's actually really, really widespread. Many, many, many animals understand that putting notes in one order is not the same as putting them in a different order.

And how does this help the hierarchs with its kind of daily existence, do you think? So males are trying to make a more impressive song. They're trying to impress the females, trying to scare off other males. And the more complex a song they can sing, the better they sound. And we've done all kinds of

studies about how the complexity changes through the course of the song. So they try to end on a high, right? End on a really complex high and other animals pay more attention if the song is more complex. So this is a really straightforward display of complexity. And this comes back to, it's not necessarily talking, if you can use that word, but the complexity is the meaning, as it were. Yes, I think there's no additional meaning

meaning in there. This is a really interesting point because the more complex a sound, the more information it can contain. As it happens, the more complex a song is, also the harder it is to understand. So things like human speech are sort of balanced between simplicity and complexity. We want enough complexity to contain a lot of information. We don't want so much complexity that no one can understand what we're saying. But here's an animal who does a similar sort of thing

With no information content, it's the complexity itself that is the information. So the reason this is important is that there's clearly been an evolutionary trend to get that complexity, but not with the goal of encoding a lot of information. And it's another example of where a trait can evolve for one purpose.

displaying your complex skill and then be co-opted for a second purpose, encoding information in a complex signal. Let's talk about evolution then. And let's talk about us. Because I think in your book, you say that there obviously are no fossils of language, right? You can't see the stepwise how it necessarily came along. There are some anatomical fossils that may help that. But actually, what happened when is really, really hard to

So one way that researchers are trying to piece this together is looking at our relatives, I suppose, and the different evolutionary paths that didn't lead to language as we know it. And there's one I want to play in particular that I have played to so many people because I think this is absolutely astonishing. This is the call of a gibbon. Now, this one is a pileated gibbon singing. Gibbon singing.

Yeah, gibbons are really interesting because they're relatively closely related to us. Only about 20 million years ago, we diverged. And they have this really, really, really complex vocal communication. Now, we're pretty confident that the songs of these gibbons has two roles. It does have the role in a similar sort of way to the hyrax of displaying complexity, but it also contains information. So this is like that stepping stone between the hyrax and the humans.

evolve the complex songs because complex songs advertise to neighboring groups that you're a strong given group and not to intrude on your territory. But on top of that, you put information in. We know they encode information about predator types and about their current state, individual identity, things like that. Now, we don't know a great deal about the evolution of vocal communication in ape.

because with modern extant apes, we've got gibbons who are very vocal, humans who are very vocal. And then you've got chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans who are relatively...

quiet. But I just heard a talk from an orangutan researcher who has shown really quite convincingly that orangutans actually have quite complex vocal communication as well, much more complex than we used to think. So it could be that that sort of vocal complexity is actually the ancestral state and gorillas don't vocalize so much. They lost that ability. Chimps sort of in between. So it could well be that our

Vocal communication is based on this sort of ancestral gibbon-like communication, and we've taken that and evolved that in our own way. I have heard some chimp pant hoots, and they're quite well studied. One I heard, the chimp gets quite furious and starts sort of screaming to my ears, and then back to the pant hoot again. So chimps do vocalize, but you're saying there's a wide gap between them and us. Sure, and that vocalization, so the pant hoot, I think, is more of a long-range vocalization. And I think that when we're looking at origins of human language...

then it's in many ways much more interesting to look at chimpanzee gestural communication because that is really complex. So for some reason, chimpanzees have put their obvious need for communicative complexity into gesture rather than sound, as we do. So there's a lot of interesting research going on there. We don't have those answers yet, but for whatever reason, that communicative complexity seems to be more in the gestures than in the sounds.

And one through line for all the animals we've talked about today is they do live in societal groups of differing complexities, I guess. But that seems to be really, really important and something that you come back to a bunch about how communication evolved or evolved for a particular circumstance. Yes, it seems quite clear that the amount of information that's in the communication does seem to be very closely related to how complex those societies are.

So in a hierarch society, there's not a lot going on. You've got one male and a bunch of females. Then the information content is really quite simple. In dolphins, extremely complex social organization. They're always coming together, breaking up, going away, coming back a few weeks later, a few months later. There's a huge cognitive burden there to understand who individuals are, who's a member of your group, who isn't. More complex communication.

And then we get to chimpanzees and humans where we have this vital need to understand relationships that are higher dimensionality. So not just my relationship with you and with other people, but other people's relationships with each other because there's so much alliance building going on and so much manipulation going on. And it seems that evolution of language, evolution of complex communication is very often driven by relationships

that need to understand what other individuals in your group are thinking. If you do need to understand what other people are thinking, then your brain has just evolved in a very, very different way and a way that seems more amenable to language. And is that the central treatise then of your book? You looked at all these different animals and said there that you could argue that all of them have a building block of

of language, whatever language really means. But putting it all together, it's this evolution of needing to do what you need to do kind of thing. I mean, I'm wary of single word answers to evolutionary questions because they're rarely right. No, it's a process of things coming together. It's an iterative process. Sociality became more complex. Communication became more complex. That enabled more sociality. That enabled more communication. There's a lot of stuff going on at the same time. But yeah, they're definitely tied together.

On the podcast, we've talked about using machine learning to identify the X factor in Finch songs, which humans can't pick up, but the birds inherently can tell there is this difference between

there. Obviously, AI is becoming super popularized across science and society as well. Do you think that this will help work out what the X factor is, what animals are communicating to each other? On a day-to-day basis, we're using it all the time, and it's really useful. It can do amazing things in terms of breaking down sounds, analyzing them, clustering them, seeing which ones are similar to other ones, and things like that.

What a lot of people would like to know is, oh, could you make an AI translator for a dolphin? And that's like, no, that's not what we're doing here. Once again, it's a question of, is there something to translate? Are there words? Well, no, there aren't. We're pretty confident that animals don't use words in that sense. You know, there are a few examples of animals having different alarm calls for different types of predators and things like

that. There's some slight referential communication where there may be a fairly strong connection between a sound and a concept, but it's a very, very small number. So we're not looking to translate. And I think looking to AI to be able to translate animal sounds is misguided because I don't think that translation is the correct paradigm there.

But using AI to be able to understand animal communication, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, this will tell us things like, for instance, here's a set of wolf howls. Let's say the algorithm says, well, there are five different kinds of howls that are here now. Which of those howls are aggressive? Which of those howls are territorial? Which of those howls are broadcast to other members of the pack to say it's time to come and hunt? That kind of level of understanding, I think, is achievable.

I mean, what has this told you about yourself? I mean, wider than that, about humans in general, right? Because I think it's so easy to fall into this human-centric view of the world. We have to consider ourselves better or more advanced than other animals or even our forebears. Well, the most important thing, in my opinion, is that when we think about animal communication, when we think about animals at all, we always want to project ourselves onto them.

And that's so unfair and it's so unrepresentative. You know, if we can understand animals talking for their own purposes, for their own benefits...

for their own adaptive advantage, we will understand them much better as they are. It's a difficult thing to take ourselves out of the picture and not think of, oh, that dolphin is talking to the other dolphin about what they did today or something. No, you've got to put that aside and understand what they really need to say to each other. And that will give us a much fuller, a much more satisfying understanding of what animals are. And finally, then where do you think it ends? Obviously, research is coming out all the time. We know that

elephants and dolphins, marmosets even, have names, inverted commas, names for each other. So we are learning so much more about how animals communicate. I think you've made the point there's not going to be a one-to-one commonality, a dictionary, but what does knowing more about it allow researchers to do, do you think?

I think we will understand more about the way that animals have evolved, why they have evolved the way that they have. As I said, you know, a lot of answers that we tend to give for evolutionary questions are a little simplistic, single reasons. Clearly, there's something very complicated going on there. In practical terms, it has huge conservation implications as well. If we can manipulate animal behavior, if we can understand what is preventing endangered species from dispersing, for instance, through communication. So it's a good thing.

Well, listen, thank you so much for using grammar and syntax and emphasis today with me. Eric, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much. Eric Kirshenbaum there. His book, Why Animals Talk, The New Science of Animal Communication, is out now. And that's it for episode 10 of Nature Hits the Books. If you have any feedback about the show, why not ping us an email to podcast at nature.com with the subject line, Nature Hits the Books. Otherwise, look out for the next episode soon.

The music used in this episode was called Cloud Jumping by SPD via Triple Scoop Music and Getty Images. Head over to the show notes for details of where the animal sounds came from. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys.

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