The Importance of Language in Animals

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Pardcast guest, malcolm mc iver, who studies the transition from life in the water to life on land. And he thinks that that was actually the first transition that started animals on the road to imagining the future long before there was language. We're making a claim about the intelligence of dolphins and octopuses and so forth. They can have, in some sense, very high intelligence, but they don't talk in complicated ways without this sort of infinite possibility space that language gives us. So what i want to ask you is a, again, to be very, very specific, because you just made the claim that only human beings have this ability to generate a infinite number of

If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won’t be that different at all; they’ll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won’t be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won’t be utterly different from us after all.

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Arik Kershenbaum received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Haifa. He is currently College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves.

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