Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds

140 点作者 sohkamyung3 个月前

8 条评论

This does not prove that whale songs are natural language, as Zipf's law is also true for random texts: <a href="https://www.nslij-genetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ieee92_pre.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nslij-genetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ie...</a>Nor does it prove cultural learning, as various physical phenomema also follow Zipf's law: <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Newman-2005-distributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Ne...</a>

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PaulHoule3 个月前

That Science paper<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055</a>ought to be retracted, it is using the same ad-hoc methods that we used to wrongly fit power laws to statistical distributions when I was a grad student 30 years ago. I wrote a trash paper too and I'm still angry about not feeling psychologically safe to bring the issue up.A postdoc who was there wrote a paper many years later about the right way to do it<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062</a>I don't think anybody read it. Note that the Science paper uses the "Pearson product moment correlation" which is "can only be used to measure the relationship between two variables which are both normally distributed" -- and there's nothing normally distributed here.

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mmooss3 个月前

The paper:Inbal Arnon, et al. Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science 387, 649-653 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adq7055<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055</a>Abstract: Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These properties facilitate learning and may therefore arise because of their contribution to the faithful transmission of language over multiple cultural generations. If so, we would expect to find them in other culturally transmitted systems. In this study, we applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovering in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. This commonality, in two evolutionarily distant species, points to the role of learning and cultural transmission in the emergence of properties thought to be unique to human language.

lithocarpus3 个月前

Relevant study of prairie dog language: <a href="https://animalstudies.org.au/archives/8211" rel="nofollow">https://animalstudies.org.au/archives/8211</a>It amuses me greatly how resistant many people are to the notion that animals who clearly communicate with each other might have something akin to "language". Or for that matter, how plants who exchange myriad signals to each other might be "communicating". Or for that matter how plants who send electrical signals between distant parts of their bodies might have something akin to a "neural network". <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8331040/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8331040/</a>Like most arguments it's an argument about the definition of the word. And many seem to define anything related to intelligence and communication as only applying to humans. And maybe dogs. And maybe to a lesser extent cats. And maybe certain parrots. Maybe dolphins.

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ericrallen3 个月前

This is an interesting way to frame the finding:<pre><code> We suggest we found these similarities because humans and whales share a learning mechanism: culture </code></pre> I feel like we often have such an anthropocentric view of intelligence, learning, and culture that it’s fascinating to consider what we’re not seeing from other species just because we aren’t looking for it, especially with a growing list of potentially sapient[0] species.<pre><code> Cultural evolution inevitably leads to the emergence of properties that make learning easier. </code></pre> I wonder if this idea about cultural evolution could apply in some tangential way to model distillation[1] and synthetic training data and active inheritance[2] and the gains in efficiency and efficacy we've seen lately:While Zipf’s Law[3] might not perfectly apply to every language and also applies to some data that isn’t linguistic, it is an interesting indicator that something we don’t understand might be a language.There was also similar research[1] into bottlenose dolphins years ago, and some researchers speculate that if we ever detected a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence[4] it would also follow Zipf’s Law.[0]: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#examples" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#example...</a>[1]: <a href="https://www.datacamp.com/blog/distillation-llm" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacamp.com/blog/distillation-llm</a>[2]: <a href="https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/active-inheritance-a-smarter-way-to-train-models-with-synthetic-data/" rel="nofollow">https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/active-inheritance-a-s...</a>[3]: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law</a>[4]: <a href="https://www.seti.org/animal-communications-information-theory-and-search-extraterrestrial-intelligence-seti" rel="nofollow">https://www.seti.org/animal-communications-information-theor...</a>

mellosouls3 个月前

In its Dr Doolittle implications the article is comforting to read but not convincing as a scientific discovery; this "law" seems to be of the same class as things like the Pareto (80/20) principle and possibly more abstract and nebulous than attributable to some shared intellectual co-living space with our fellow animals.

goatlover3 个月前

Even if whalesong is actually a language, translation to human language could prove challenging if Wittgenstein was correct that meaning is use. Whales won't be using sounds the same way we do. Thus the "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him" quote.It's a problem we'll face if an extraterrestrial signal is ever detected. We can hope they'll use familiar mathematical patterns to help us translate like in Contact, but we can't be sure about that. They might be too different from us physiologically, culturally and technologically.