I was watching a Nova special on corvids, and it mentioned that the meaning of over 250 distinct calls in one species of crow had been deciphered. And I got to thinking about the implications of this, combined with our recent discoveries of syntactical language in prairie dogs and natural sign language in bonobos. I concluded that we should make ( Read more... )

Sometimes, a story is just so perfect that you can scarcely believe it's true ( Read more... )

There has been strong resistance from the scientific community to the use of the terms "language" and "culture" to describe animal communication and learned behavior. But this resistance seems to me to be essentially irrational and unscientific in nature.

( Chatty Cultured Animals )

This is a reprint of a _Times_ article forwarded to me. My own comments follow.

( Read the Article and My Comments )