metonymy4u

Humans commonly assume that we are superior to other species in our communicative abilities. That human language is more complex, more abstract, more precise, more useful, and more sophisticated in some fundamental way than non-human language. But does the data support this assumption? In what way is human communication essentially more advanced than animal communication? Elephants and whales perfected long distance communication millions of years before humans invented email and text messaging, canids are some of the most gregarious species on the planet, and were probably that way long before their domestication by humans 16,000 years ago, and birds and spiders regularly complete astonishing feats of engineering that would challenge the most advanced graduate student in our most prestigious universities. I think that the problem is that animals that seem to have a predilection for human study, like cetaceans, apes and elephants, just haven’t figured out how to teach us the complexities of their language yet. That, or they’re not sure yet whether they really want to have anything to do with those bat-ass crazy humans.