Posted by
michael
on from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-touchscreens dept.
zephc writes "Wired is reporting that a group of researchers are working with an artificial language of whistles in an attempt to communicate with dolphins."
If the assumption was valid, the conclusion would also be valid.
However, other dolphin researchers have noted that dolphins are primarily visual in clear water and use sound most when visibility is impaired.
Dolphins are also tactile animals, using touch as a method of communication.
The idea of borrowing skills and ideas from people who are familiar with a non-visual world is great, IMHO. It only works, though, if that's the problem you're trying to solve.
IMHO, there are too many "dolphin experts", with too many contradictory ideas. Dolphin studies, right now, are not much more advanced than medieval alchemy. Without the benefit of being able to recognise either lead or gold.
-- It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Dolphins resemble humans in a couple aspects:
First they both talk incessentantly, far more than
is needed for survival. Second, they both have
sex far more than needed for procreation.
Perhaps they'd undersatnd each other's bawdy jokes.
For dolphins, the primary route to assimilate information is via sound.
Perhaps they could use blind people.
Somehow I don't think the "Seeing Eye Dolphin" would really catch on. What? You ment...
Oh. Never Mind.;)
-- This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
"Uplifting dolphins" reference
by
dcs
·
· Score: 3
This expression comes from the Uplift series, a couple of science fiction trilogies by David Brin. The central theme in the series is that no sentient species in the universe, except one fabled "progenitors", has ever attained sentience by itself. Instead, they all have been genetically engineered into sentience, a process known as "uplifting".
Humans, naturally, uplift dolphins and chimpanzees (and then proceed to dogs, what a waste!).
Mind you, I hated the first book, the second book is terribly annoying and it's story is continued (and finished) only in the fifth and sixth books. Third book is actually ok, but no dolphins there.:-)
-- (8-DCS)
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
by
divec
·
· Score: 3
High intelligence is far rarer than almost any other animal characteristic. [...] From reading your post, I can't tell whether you're the sort who would cry for days upon rubbing your hands and inadvertently killing some bacteria, or the type who would gleefully kill monkeys for fun. In either case, I'm not impressed.
Interesting. Reading between the lines, I take it that you think that intelligence is the important characteristic when deciding if killing is wrong.
So what about the case when it's a human, but with very low intelligence and very low awareness? Say, less than the average chimp. Do you think it's worse to kill them than to kill a chimp? Just to make it easier, assume they do not have any [close] living relatives, so we're not talking about the amount the killing would upset other people.
I believe most people would say "intelligence is the [main] deciding factor when considering if it is acceptable to cause an animal to suffer". But I think most of them would also say "It's wrong to kill a human, no matter how low their intelligence is".
--
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Possible things to say...
by
DrEldarion
·
· Score: 3
Bassos-Hull agrees. "It won't be free-floating conversation," Bassos-Hull said. "We'll be able to ask questions and they will be able to answer in very simple terms."
I wonder how long it will take for someone to figure out how to ask the dolphins who all their base are belong to.
Maybe that's not such a good idea, though. They may decide to retaliate by moving 'Zig'.
This kind of research on animal intelligence is indeed groundbreaking, and is opposed from many sides who believe that animals cannot really communicate with humans, and any signs of communication are really just imitation. It's like with SETI: Trying to get people to finance a project where you tell them you want to talk to chimpanzees, or dolphins, or parrots (some interesting experiments there, too) is similar to requesting grants for funding a nanotechnological molecular assembler that circulates in your blood and destroys viruses..
This despite the fact that many of these projects have produced astonishing results. I was especially fascinated by the work of Dr. Roger Fouts and his colleagues, who have tried to teach the American Sign Language to chimpanzees -- and succeeded. Not only did the chimps communicate with them over food and life in general, they also taught the sign language to their children. And more precise than you might imagine: Instructions like "Tickle me, then bring me one of those bananas. Oh, and I would like to watch some TV" are not at all uncommon;-)
Find more info at their Institute, I especially recommend the book "Next to Kin". I really wish such projects could be funded through micropayments. If every Slashdot reader donated a dollar to this research, they'd be much farther than they are now.
--
Re:Groundbreaking Research
by
Cyclopatra
·
· Score: 5
If every Slashdot reader donated a dollar to this research, they'd be much farther than they are now.
Well, you can make a donation online here. And the project's webpage is here for more info and pictures of cute dolphins:P
I gave 'em 25$. Anybody else find that they donate a lot more as a result of reading/. ? Maybe it's a second/. effect...your website gets hammered, but your donations skyrocket...
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
-- "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Re:Groundbreaking Research
by
OlympicSponsor
·
· Score: 3
"...teach the American Sign Language to chimpanzees -- and succeeded. Not only did the chimps communicate with them over food and life in general, they also taught the sign language to their children. And more precise than you might imagine: Instructions like "Tickle me, then bring me one of those bananas. Oh, and I would like to watch some TV" are not at all uncommon."
When did this research take place? I just finished (re-)reading "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker and he had a pretty scathing review of "ape language" research (although clearly he only covered stuff up to the publication date of the book). To pick an example at random, there was one team that was teaching sign language to chimps. The team members were supposed to write down every time the chimp made a sign. The only deaf, ASL-"native" team member wrote down FAR fewer signs. He eventually complained or quit or wrote a book or something. He said the other team members were recording that the chimp was signing "banana" when he pointed at a banana and signing "TV" when pointing at a TV. He also mentioned that the apes didn't direct the signs at people the way we do with language. That kind of indicates it wasn't so much directed communication as trained behavior.
As for the precise examples: I seriously doubt it. Even Koko (whose trainer, Penny Marshall verges on the religious [i.e. "willing to lie"] regarding her ape's abilities) only signs things like "water bird" and "glasses Koko".
As an aside, I see the title of the book is "Next of Kin". Presumably this is supposed to be evocative of some kind of reasoning like this: "Apes are the closest relatives of humans, therefore they can probably talk good, too". Fallacy alert! What if a disease had wiped out all the apes 1000 years ago, leaving, say, lemurs as our closest living relatives? Would lemurs then be expected to be able to talk? Or what if we discovered a group of Neanderthals living in the mountains (Yeti, Sasquatch, etc)? Could we then drop apes from our experiments because as more distant relatives they clearly won't be able to talk? "Closest living relative" has no biological implications--it's simply a historical accident. --
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
What will they find...
by
Daemosthenes
·
· Score: 5
I predict the first message will read something like this...
"My hesitation is that dolphins are primarily acoustic animals while humans are primarily visual animals. In humans, the most-used sense is vision; we use it to process data."
"For dolphins, the primary route to assimilate information is via sound.
Perhaps they could use blind people.
--
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Does no one here have respect for language?
by
OlympicSponsor
·
· Score: 5
I'm no Luddite, I'd love to be able to talk to dolphins and/or apes...but you can't teach language to apes and dolphins. Language isn't just a matter of brute processing power of the brain. It requires innate wiring created to handle it. Consider cases of otherwise intelligent people who because of stroke, disease, injury, genetic impairment, etc are unable to process language. Conversely, think of disorders where the subject is able to converse on quite a sophisticated level but has an IQ of around 50.
If apes or dolphins had anything approaching a human-level ability at language, we'd observe them spontaneously using it. Check out "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker for more info on this topic. --
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
The same technique was used to attempt to communicate with John Carmack of id Software
Johns remarks: Vertex programs aren't invariant with the fixed function geometry paths.
That means that you can't mix vertex program passes with normal
passes in a multipass algorithm. This is annoying, and shouldn't have
happened.
In light of these statements the efforts were seen as a failure, we may never know if anyone will ever understand Carmack.
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
by
raju1kabir
·
· Score: 3
If any animal has worth, then they all have worth. If we're squeamish about killing any one kind of animal (a "higher-order" "intelligent" animal), then we should be squeamish about killing all animals, since intelligence is just another characteristic and not a particularly important one at that.
I'd hope that once we get things worked out with the dolphins, they display more sophisticated reasoning ability than that. Why exactly aren't dolphins more important than other animals? Because they are more intelligent, and that's nothing special. Why isn't it special? Because it just isn't. I see.
High intelligence is far rarer than almost any other animal characteristic. It represents the fruits of more evolution, and in studying it we see the reflections of more complex processes and detailed natural history than in simpler traits.
From reading your post, I can't tell whether you're the sort who would cry for days upon rubbing your hands and inadvertently killing some bacteria, or the type who would gleefully kill monkeys for fun. Both possibilities flow from your argument. In either case, I'm not impressed.
-- "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Re:Your last comment is untrue
by
raju1kabir
·
· Score: 4
Try The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. (Great book; should be on everybody's reading list. However, I can't give you an exact page because my friend stole it.)
Pinker's critical evaluation of Koko begins in earnest on p. 337 (I've assiduously hunted down my copy whenever it's left my hands for too long).
To begin with, the apes did
not "learn American sign language." This preposterous claim is based on the myth that ASL is a crude system of pantomimes and gestures rather than a full language with comples phonology, morphology, and syntax. In fact the apes had not learned any true ASL signs. The one deaf signer on the Washoe team later made these candid remarks:
"Every time the chimp made a sign, we were supposed to write it down in the log... They were always complaining because my log didn't show enough signs. All the hearing people turned in logs with long lists of signs. They always saw more signs than I did... I watched really carefully. The chimp's hands were moving constantly. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. I just wasn't seeing any signs. The hearing people were logging every movement the chimp made as a sign. Every time the chimp put his finger in his mouth, they'd say 'Oh, he's making the sign for
drink,' and they'd give him some milk... When the chimp scratched itself, they'd record it as the sign for scratch... When [the chimps] want something, they'd reach. Sometimes [the trainers would] say, "Oh, amazing, look at that, it's exactly like the ASL sign for give!" It wasn't."
Now, it's also possible that this native signer was excessively picky about ASL; in high school language classes, for instance, students can understand each other saying stuff that no native speaker of the language in question would ever be able to puzzle out. But it seems more likely that what was reported is true; the apes were just being apes and the researchers were biased in favor of positive results.
-- "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animals?
by
Chuck+Flynn
·
· Score: 5
Why are humans so preoccupied with intelligence as a measure of species worth? Because we're narcissistic to think that we possess it as a defining characteristic and that therefore other animals are valuable in so far as they approximate our own species?
Intelligence isn't even an evolutionarily important characteristic: just look at how few species possess it -- if it were more valuable, then it would be selected for, and more species would have it. Which species do have it? Squids, spiders, and other predators. Intelligence has evolved at each stage in animal evolution (cephalopods, arachnids, mammalia, etc.) but only as a means of furthering predation. Where's the morality in that?
If any animal has worth, then they all have worth. If we're squeamish about killing any one kind of animal (a "higher-order" "intelligent" animal), then we should be squeamish about killing all animals, since intelligence is just another characteristic and not a particularly important one at that. This absurdity is well illustrated by the author's final point:
The ultimate goal of Marten's research is to illustrate to the world the high intelligence of dolphins and the need to protect the species.
"Dolphins are being killed by the millions so we can get our tuna. It's like what people used to say about the American buffalo -- 'Gee there used to be buffalo up on those hills.' The same will be true of the dolphins if we do not act," Marten said.
It's been said before, but it needs repeating: what about the tuna? Why worry about killing all those dolphins when we're so intent on killing the damn tuna? If you cut tuna, do they not bleed?
I can only think of one really good reason why we should be studying dolphin communication and that's so we can learn from their experience with other sea creatures. We've been to the moon and back, but there are parts of our own ocean that we've never explored, depths we've never plumbed. If we could communicate with dolphins and ask them what they've seen of our aquatic universe, then maybe we'd know a lot more about what goes on beneath the surfaces of our placid lagoons. Dolphins provide a perfect solution to the dangers and expenses of manned and unmanned submarine exploration -- let's not reinvent the wheel by reinventing the dolphin.
For years, both scientists and fiction writers have assumed that contact with an intelligent species would come from the stars. Perhaps they've been wrong all along.
Test given to dolphins indicate a high degree of both spatial and linguistic intelligence - a combination that was once thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings. Further, dolphins demonstrate highly structured social orders, and variations in culture between dolphins from different geographical regions.
A common language has the potential to finally force mankind to stop treating the earth as its own, and realize that we share it with many other creatures - some perhaps as advanced as we are.
- qpt
--
--
Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
by
american+goon
·
· Score: 3
It's been said before, but it needs repeating: what about the tuna? Why worry about killing all those dolphins when we're so intent on killing the damn tuna? If you cut tuna, do they not bleed?
As a matter of fact, if you cut a tuna, it will not bleed. This is because tuna do not have blood.
Dolphins, on the other hand, will bleed if cut. Dolphins evolved from land-based mammals, which needed blood to emulate the salt water of the fish from which they evolved.
In other words, fish are barely plants in terms of their evolutionary development, and if you need some deeper, "more essential" quality to babble over in your pot-soaked hippie philosophical non-discussions then try thinking about how likely some creature with so little sensory perception available to it and so little processing power to back it up could possibly have a consciousness connected to it.
If you want to whine about how killing dolphins might be no worse than killing tuna then you might argue that cutting the grass when you mow your lawn is a horrible atrocity. And, you could continue that cutting grass is like killing people. Grass doesn't bleed when you cut it, either.
Slashdot Mirror
However, other dolphin researchers have noted that dolphins are primarily visual in clear water and use sound most when visibility is impaired.
Dolphins are also tactile animals, using touch as a method of communication.
The idea of borrowing skills and ideas from people who are familiar with a non-visual world is great, IMHO. It only works, though, if that's the problem you're trying to solve.
IMHO, there are too many "dolphin experts", with too many contradictory ideas. Dolphin studies, right now, are not much more advanced than medieval alchemy. Without the benefit of being able to recognise either lead or gold.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Dolphins resemble humans in a couple aspects:
First they both talk incessentantly, far more than
is needed for survival. Second, they both have
sex far more than needed for procreation.
Perhaps they'd undersatnd each other's bawdy jokes.
For dolphins, the primary route to assimilate information is via sound.
;)
Perhaps they could use blind people.
Somehow I don't think the "Seeing Eye Dolphin" would really catch on. What? You ment...
Oh. Never Mind.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
This expression comes from the Uplift series, a couple of science fiction trilogies by David Brin. The central theme in the series is that no sentient species in the universe, except one fabled "progenitors", has ever attained sentience by itself. Instead, they all have been genetically engineered into sentience, a process known as "uplifting".
:-)
Humans, naturally, uplift dolphins and chimpanzees (and then proceed to dogs, what a waste!).
Mind you, I hated the first book, the second book is terribly annoying and it's story is continued (and finished) only in the fifth and sixth books. Third book is actually ok, but no dolphins there.
(8-DCS)
Interesting. Reading between the lines, I take it that you think that intelligence is the important characteristic when deciding if killing is wrong.
So what about the case when it's a human, but with very low intelligence and very low awareness? Say, less than the average chimp. Do you think it's worse to kill them than to kill a chimp? Just to make it easier, assume they do not have any [close] living relatives, so we're not talking about the amount the killing would upset other people.
I believe most people would say "intelligence is the [main] deciding factor when considering if it is acceptable to cause an animal to suffer". But I think most of them would also say "It's wrong to kill a human, no matter how low their intelligence is".
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Bassos-Hull agrees. "It won't be free-floating conversation," Bassos-Hull said. "We'll be able to ask questions and they will be able to answer in very simple terms."
I wonder how long it will take for someone to figure out how to ask the dolphins who all their base are belong to.
Maybe that's not such a good idea, though. They may decide to retaliate by moving 'Zig'.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
This despite the fact that many of these projects have produced astonishing results. I was especially fascinated by the work of Dr. Roger Fouts and his colleagues, who have tried to teach the American Sign Language to chimpanzees -- and succeeded. Not only did the chimps communicate with them over food and life in general, they also taught the sign language to their children. And more precise than you might imagine: Instructions like "Tickle me, then bring me one of those bananas. Oh, and I would like to watch some TV" are not at all uncommon ;-)
Find more info at their Institute, I especially recommend the book "Next to Kin". I really wish such projects could be funded through micropayments. If every Slashdot reader donated a dollar to this research, they'd be much farther than they are now.
--
I predict the first message will read something like this...
"So long, and thanks for all the fish."
Sorry, I just couldn't resist it.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
Perhaps they could use blind people.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I'm no Luddite, I'd love to be able to talk to dolphins and/or apes...but you can't teach language to apes and dolphins. Language isn't just a matter of brute processing power of the brain. It requires innate wiring created to handle it. Consider cases of otherwise intelligent people who because of stroke, disease, injury, genetic impairment, etc are unable to process language. Conversely, think of disorders where the subject is able to converse on quite a sophisticated level but has an IQ of around 50.
If apes or dolphins had anything approaching a human-level ability at language, we'd observe them spontaneously using it. Check out "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker for more info on this topic.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
The same technique was used to attempt to communicate with John Carmack of id Software
Johns remarks:
Vertex programs aren't invariant with the fixed function geometry paths. That means that you can't mix vertex program passes with normal passes in a multipass algorithm. This is annoying, and shouldn't have happened.
In light of these statements the efforts were seen as a failure, we may never know if anyone will ever understand Carmack.
dear god, don't these people read the onion?!
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
I'd hope that once we get things worked out with the dolphins, they display more sophisticated reasoning ability than that. Why exactly aren't dolphins more important than other animals? Because they are more intelligent, and that's nothing special. Why isn't it special? Because it just isn't. I see.
High intelligence is far rarer than almost any other animal characteristic. It represents the fruits of more evolution, and in studying it we see the reflections of more complex processes and detailed natural history than in simpler traits.
From reading your post, I can't tell whether you're the sort who would cry for days upon rubbing your hands and inadvertently killing some bacteria, or the type who would gleefully kill monkeys for fun. Both possibilities flow from your argument. In either case, I'm not impressed.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Pinker's critical evaluation of Koko begins in earnest on p. 337 (I've assiduously hunted down my copy whenever it's left my hands for too long).
Now, it's also possible that this native signer was excessively picky about ASL; in high school language classes, for instance, students can understand each other saying stuff that no native speaker of the language in question would ever be able to puzzle out. But it seems more likely that what was reported is true; the apes were just being apes and the researchers were biased in favor of positive results.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Intelligence isn't even an evolutionarily important characteristic: just look at how few species possess it -- if it were more valuable, then it would be selected for, and more species would have it. Which species do have it? Squids, spiders, and other predators. Intelligence has evolved at each stage in animal evolution (cephalopods, arachnids, mammalia, etc.) but only as a means of furthering predation. Where's the morality in that?
If any animal has worth, then they all have worth. If we're squeamish about killing any one kind of animal (a "higher-order" "intelligent" animal), then we should be squeamish about killing all animals, since intelligence is just another characteristic and not a particularly important one at that. This absurdity is well illustrated by the author's final point: It's been said before, but it needs repeating: what about the tuna? Why worry about killing all those dolphins when we're so intent on killing the damn tuna? If you cut tuna, do they not bleed?
I can only think of one really good reason why we should be studying dolphin communication and that's so we can learn from their experience with other sea creatures. We've been to the moon and back, but there are parts of our own ocean that we've never explored, depths we've never plumbed. If we could communicate with dolphins and ask them what they've seen of our aquatic universe, then maybe we'd know a lot more about what goes on beneath the surfaces of our placid lagoons. Dolphins provide a perfect solution to the dangers and expenses of manned and unmanned submarine exploration -- let's not reinvent the wheel by reinventing the dolphin.
Read the rest of this comment...
the navy and dolphins issue is also very interesting, a good summary can be found here.
For years, both scientists and fiction writers have assumed that contact with an intelligent species would come from the stars. Perhaps they've been wrong all along.
Test given to dolphins indicate a high degree of both spatial and linguistic intelligence - a combination that was once thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings. Further, dolphins demonstrate highly structured social orders, and variations in culture between dolphins from different geographical regions.
A common language has the potential to finally force mankind to stop treating the earth as its own, and realize that we share it with many other creatures - some perhaps as advanced as we are.
- qpt
--
Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
Dolphins, on the other hand, will bleed if cut. Dolphins evolved from land-based mammals, which needed blood to emulate the salt water of the fish from which they evolved.
In other words, fish are barely plants in terms of their evolutionary development, and if you need some deeper, "more essential" quality to babble over in your pot-soaked hippie philosophical non-discussions then try thinking about how likely some creature with so little sensory perception available to it and so little processing power to back it up could possibly have a consciousness connected to it.
If you want to whine about how killing dolphins might be no worse than killing tuna then you might argue that cutting the grass when you mow your lawn is a horrible atrocity. And, you could continue that cutting grass is like killing people. Grass doesn't bleed when you cut it, either.