What's here? Good boy, very good. When parrots speak English
and gorillas use sign language, we're naturally moved to reply,
engage in a conversation. But do animals really have language? How many green blocks?
-Four. Most wild animals
communicate amongst themselves. Breaking their code is not easy. Even with the right dictionary,
would we still know what they really mean? Perhaps theirs is nothing more
than a language of the senses. Simple but effective means
of expressing fear, excitement, anger, and of course, danger. Early warning systems
are vital tools of survival in the wild, and there are many ways
of communicating danger, not all of them audible. In the rainforests of Australia,
web spinners live in labyrinths of silk spun from their feet. They work endlessly to repair
and extend their fortress and rarely venture out. Predators scratch around for a way in. Green ants, experts at trench warfare,
are particularly unwelcome. A web spinner detects a breach of security
and trips the alarm by beating a retreat. In the panic to escape, it sends vibrations
throughout the network of silk. As the shock waves travel
along this primitive information highway, the others evacuate the main nest. Communication is a lifeline,
whatever form it takes. But here the messenger
was not consciously warning the others, merely trying to get out of a tight spot. The bearer of bad news
must pay the ultimate price. Dr. Marc Hauser, professor of psychology
at Harvard University, is an expert in animal communication. I would define communication
as the exchange of information between two individuals or more, where the communicator
is in some sense trying to manipulate the behavior of the receiver. Few places on Earth resonate with the diverse
communication skills of animals more than Africa. In the arid scrub of northern Kenya, one animal is a master
of the art of manipulation. Meet the indicator bird,
aptly nicknamed the Honey Guide. It feeds mostly off insects, and is especially partial
to bees' eggs and larvae. But it needs a helping hand
to get at them. The bird looks out
for members of the Boran tribe and chatters to attract their attention. The tribesmen know the honey guide
will lead them to the pot. The bird stops from time to time
to let the men catch up. In turn, they must let the bird know
they're still on its tail. Once the hive is located, the bird waits patiently
at a safe distance while the men get on with the job
of confronting a colony of angry bees. True to their side of the bargain,
the men leave their guide a generous tip. If the indicator bird
has learned to sing for its supper, conscious communication
between humans and animals can get far more sophisticated. A language of sorts
turns man's best friend into man's best worker. Johnny Wilson is a shepherd
on the Scottish borders, responsible for the care
and protection of 700 sheep. He couldn't do this
without the help of his working dogs. Johnny has eight Border Collies. Intelligent, obedient and tireless,
the dogs make ideal drill sergeants to marshal flocks of unruly sheep
scattered about the Scottish hills. One good dog is worth a dozen men, as long as Johnny
can make himself understood. He uses six basic voice commands. Look back. "Look back" tells the collie
to round up stray sheep. That'll do. "That'll do,"
and the collie must return to his master. Come away to me, move from right to left. Come by, from left to right. There, steady on. Steady on, move more slowly. Lie down. And lie down. When the dogs are almost out of earshot,
Johnny whistles his commands. The crafty collies seem to be bilingual. I start with voice commands. Once I have the dog on commands
and they know "come to me and come by". All I do is say: "Come to me, Rob", and then I'll whistle, just as he's going. And I can guarantee you a Border Collie,
it'll just maybe take two days at the most to put them on that whistle. For some unknown reason,
they go into whistles easy as they go into voice commands. The shepherd keeps in constant
touch with his dogs one way or the other. It's a working partnership
between man and dog born out of sound communication. What about actual language? We all talk to our pets
and we often think they understand. Johnny Wilson can tell his dogs
where to go and what to do, but he can't tell them
what he had for dinner or whether it was tasty. Dr. Hauser says language
transcends simple communication. Language comes in, and in some sense,
it's a form of communication, but it also refers
to the kinds of internal computations that the mind has available to it, to both refer to things in the world
and to take discrete elements like words and combine them
into larger, meaningful chunks. Language has the power
to reach far back into the past. It uses words and symbols
to evoke the present and points to the future. It describes thoughts and emotions, as well as more basic things. The word snake refers to a legless reptile and fig, a specific fruit. Baboon defines a species of monkey. Simple names
combined into phrases and sentences through grammar and syntax
evoke the wonders of life itself. The baboon shakes the tree
to dislodge the snake and eat the figs. So is a baboon
capable of this kind of language? Or are the sounds animals make
little more than instinctive reactions to fear and pleasure? Language takes on many guises. Not just noise or spoken words,
but abstract and symbolic forms too. Like music, mime and of course, dance. For centuries, beekeepers
have marveled at worker bees dancing on their honeycombs. Scientists believed
they were using a symbolic language to tell their coworkers
where to find food. If a bee finds food close by, it returns to the hive
and performs a pirouette. If the food is further off,
the waggle dance is called for, a slow figure of eight
with a bit of a shimmy in the middle. According to popular theory, the angle of the waggle to the sun
indicates the direction of the food. The bees leave the hive
and follow their compass bearing until they find what they're looking for. Instead of words, this sun dance
conveys both distance and direction. But could this really be true? Modern textbooks still support the theory, though scientists now interpret
the choreography in a dramatic new light. Dr. Adrian Wenner
of the University of California, Santa Barbara,
comes from a family of beekeepers. He started out believing
in the symbolic language of bees. My whole doctoral dissertation
was based on the fact of bee language because no one
had any reason to question it. I didn't realize
that this was a hypothesis generated and that had never
really been tested properly. Dr. Wenner does not deny that bees dance, but his experiments put
an entirely new spin on their performance. He believes that the dance
has more to do with transferring odor than communicating
through any kind of abstract language. Place an odorless but sweet solution
near the hives and few bees take to it. Use the same solution,
this time with a cotton bud dipped in clove oil
and the bees pick up the scent. The first bees returned to the hive
carrying minute traces of clove. Within minutes,
others hone in on the dish. Half an hour later and the bees swarm. Now, if you watch the bees
that are paying attention to dancing bee, they're sideways to it. This, of course,
means that as the bee waggles along, it can be knocking odor molecules
onto the antennae of the receiving bee. The scientific world is now
coming round to Dr. Wenner's view that the bees' dance
may not be any kind of language at all. It's something called Occam's Razor,
or oftentimes known as Morgan's Cannon, where when you have
two possible explanations for a behavior, that you should take the simplest one. Bees have brains the size of a grass seed. It was not meant for thinking. You wouldn't tar
a monkey with the same brush. Vervet monkeys are social animals
and with their bigger brains, it would seem natural
for them to develop linguistic skills, at least to protect each other. Vervet live in tight family units. About the size of a small dog, they're coveted
by any number of predators. Most animals use an all purpose danger
call to warn against immediate threats. But anything is vague as help or run
would be disastrous for the vervets. Because they are attacked
by different predators, they need to know
what the threat is in order to escape it. When they say a snake,
the vervet sound the alarm and keep a watchful eye
out for the intruder. Now listen to this. The leopard signal triggers
a frantic dash for the thinnest branches in the canopy,
where the leopard has no chance. That's the vervet alarm call for eagle. This time the monkeys
seek thick protective vegetation to stay hidden
until the coast is clear once again. By having three different alarm calls,
the vervet self-preservation system is much more efficient. So are these monkey words
for snake, leopard and eagle? In the late 1970s,
a group of scientists decided they were. It was a bombshell that changed
the way we think about animals. Though some scientists like Dr. Hauser
took it all with a pinch of salt. That was the first indication that animals may have something
that's kind of like a word. But if you really look
in detail at the system, it looks to be very different
from the human system of words. If the animal system were truly
like the human system, there's no reason why
they would stop describing a small number of things
in their environment. It should be explosive. Once you have the notion of reference,
you can refer to things with an arbitrary relationship
between sound and meaning, you're done. Vervet monkeys remain largely tongue-tied
compared to humans, though their voices
are vital for survival. The second fundamental difference
is that when animals communicate, they seem to be communicating
about the here and now. I see a leopard,
I give a leopard alarm call. The next step to develop real speech
would be a giant leap for the animal kingdom
and a giant leap of faith for scientists. In the 1950s, Keith and Katherine Hayes
started a language experiment with a chimpanzee called Vicky. Vicky grew up with the Hayes own children,
and the speaking program began. Progress was slow. After four years, all Vicky could manage
was Mama, Papa, cup and up. The experiment disappointed
those who had hoped for a breakthrough, and it coincided
with another major discovery. Apes may look and act like us, but because of the position
of their larynx, they're physically incapable
of real speech. Who am I? You say what this is? Apes and humans are poles apart. Dr. Hauser is fascinated
by the different evolutionary paths animals and humans have taken. To me, the extraordinary thing about thinking
about the evolution of the mind is that animals
were kind of humming along, thinking rich thoughts,
but couldn't talk about them. The evolutionary fault line
between man and ape is speech. I can have a relationship with somebody and go to someone who's never seen
or heard anything about it and tell them absolutely the tale
of what I've just done. That is an incredible capacity. Now, it doesn't mean that other animals
are not interesting. It just means
that that's something that we do and other animals
don't seem to be able to do. If speech is unique to humans, does that mean
we also have a monopoly on language? Dr. Penny Patterson has spent years
trying to prove animals do have linguistic skills, even though they don't have
the vocal apparatus to speak. Her experiment with Koko began in 1972. She knew Koko would never talk,
so she used American sign language. Over the years, Koko grew,
and so did her vocabulary. She now knows 1000 signs
and understands 2000 spoken words. Koko became a star. Penny's relationship
with Koko grew so close that she dropped
any pretense at scientific objectivity. Her work is controversial
and many scientists and linguists believe she gives Koko
far too much credit. Who wouldn't? Koko takes her education very seriously. Problem is, because primates look like us,
can we really expect them to be like us? A nice move I like to make is to say take any given behavior
you've seen an animal that looks like us and just substitute something
that doesn't look like us, like a slug or a chicken or a bat. Now imagine running the same kind
of explanation on that particular species. If you find
you can do it as readily, fine. But I think the cautionary note is that it's too easy to fall into
an interpretation of an animal's behavior just because it looks like us. So is the ape language camp
deluding itself? You were brave and you were really brave. Dr. Sally Boysen runs
a kind of school for primates at the Ohio State University
Chimpanzee Centre. She's taken chimps a step further and teaches them
a wide range of cognitive skills. Her team talks to the chimps in English, and they understand a lot more
than Scottish Border Collies. The latest exercise is word recognition. You looking? Find orange. Orange.
-Good boy, good job. Bobby is tested on nine different foods. The researcher, Stephanie,
asks him to match an item with a word onscreen. The words appear randomly,
so Bobby must make the correct choice. Bobby deserves more than congratulations. Pop. Pop, where's pop? Oh, Bobby, where's Pop? We're still in the early stages
of looking at the chimp's ability to associate English words with foods and the names of other chimpanzees, etc. We're working
with whole word recognition right now, but we will return
to the individual alphabetic characters so the animals construct the word also. Banana, where's banana? Banana. Bobby scores consistently high marks,
which is just as well, since his appetite for M&Ms is insatiable. He really seems to be thinking
about a problem, not just guessing. Good job, Bobby. Good boy. The chimpanzee center teaches
more than just reading, writing and arithmetic. Emma, look. Dr. Boysen team
wants to find out how well chimpanzees communicate
vocally with each other. How much information
do they really exchange? We are currently interested in
natural chimpanzee vocalizations as well, so we've been exploring
just one category of vocalizations, and those are food barks. In the wild as well as in captivity,
chimps produce sounds when they see food. Are these food barks real words
or just emotional responses? At the chimpanzee center, the chimps
react to their likes and dislikes. Their food barks are recorded. Good girl. Sheba, can you sit down,
not on your chair. Stay right there. Good girl. Back in the classroom,
another chimp listens to the recordings before identifying the barks. Good, Sheba, peanuts. Good job, Sheeb. We played a very simple game
with the chimps. We played the recorded vocalization. Say vocalization that was collected
when they saw lettuce. Not a big favorite. Then four pictures appeared
and they were to pick the picture that was possibly being referred
to by the vocalization. We were quite surprised
when they actually were able to specify that as not
only could they pick good foods, they could pick the specific good food. To the human ear,
food barks sound pretty much the same. Dr. Boysen's next challenge
is to crack the chimps' code. So now what we're going to try to do
over the next several years is try to tease apart
what part of that call really contributed to the decision making. That is, how did they make a decision
between M&Ms and grapes when many of the the acoustic features
were very similar. High frequency, rapid periodicity,
rapid temporal features, and very different from not so good foods
where the frequencies are lower and the time course is very different, as opposed to, which are very different. This is exciting new scientific territory. Sorry. You're ready to pay attention? It could lead to understanding far more
about the evolutionary divide between apes and humans. Good girl. So we think it's a really interesting,
new direction to explore, to see what kinds
of possible vocal behaviors might exist in the chimpanzee that could have been shared
by a common ancestor. And when the two species diverged,
the chimpanzee line and the human line, from this common ancestor, what parts
of that neurological organization did they maintain,
but the outcome was very different? That is, we went on to speech. They went on
to their more finite call structure. It helps that chimps
are noisy, talkative creatures with at least a semblance of speech. Other highly social animals
seem to communicate in absolute silence. Elephants wander all day
in search of food and water. They can consume 250 kilos of food
and 160 liters of water every day. Herds need to keep
a distance from one another, so there's enough to go around. So how do they coordinate
their movements over such vast areas, especially when resources are scarce
at the end of the dry season? Dr. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell,
a biologist from Stanford University, has found a way in
to the mysterious sensory world of elephants. Elephants inhabit
an acoustic environment of their own. Where dogs and whales
are attuned to high frequencies, elephants find themselves
at the bottom of the scale. They pick up low frequency
or infrasonic sounds well beyond human range. Infrasound in elephants
was really discovered in the mid-eighties by Katy Payne. She was in a zoo
and there were some Asian elephants and she kind of felt this fluttering and realized that
they were actually vocalizing and they got some low frequency equipment
and recorded these infrasonic calls. Elephants may rely on
more than their trademark ears for information around them,
especially over long distances. Low frequency sounds travel
at best ten kilometers through the air. The same sounds
or vibrations travel much further through the surface layer of the ground. So are these elephant boots
made for talking as well as walking? Elephant feet take quite a pounding
and are extremely sensitive. These are more like deep ruts than scars. It takes zookeepers
more than just a bit of spit and polish to keep elephant feet healthy. A shoeshine boy's nightmare. At the Oakland Zoo near San Francisco, Dr. O'Connell-Rodwell and her team
prepare to test an elephant called Donna to see how receptive
her feet are to sound. They're going to simulate
seismic activity through the ground. It's pretty good.
-That's ten. So the idea here with Donna
is that she's going to be standing on a force platform
that we're delivering vibrations of five hertz, 10, 15, 20 hertz. Then lowering the amplitude of that signal
every time to try and understand what is the minimum amount
of vibration she can detect. Donna is a female African elephant. At first she's a bit overenthusiastic,
but she soon settles in. Every time she feels
a vibration through her feet, she must touch the red disc. The reason we're doing these studies
in the Oakland Zoo is to understand exactly how sensitive elephants
are to vibrations of any kind. And we're also planning, once we get this down
in this captive environment, to do it in a somewhat
semi captive environment in either Africa or Asia, where the elephants are more accustomed
to paying attention to the environment with not so much noise. She just did that on her own, didn't she? She's done several on her own.
-That's great. If elephants sense vibrations
through the ground, especially those of faraway herds, what chance is there that
they have their very own language? In thinking of animal language
and elephant communication, it's a very beautiful thing
to see elephants up close communicating. They're very tactile animals
and very visual animals. The very way their eyes light up
and shake their head at each other. So there's a lot
going on in close quarters that is most certainly
a language for them. If only animals
could speak our own language. Parrots do, often with amusing results. So up here,
I'll give you some real treats. Good boy. But parroting
is the dubious art of imitation without understanding what's being said. Empty words. You're right.
-Well, I know I'm right. Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a professor of psychology
at Brandeis University outside Boston, has spent much of her career
teaching an African gray parrot called Alex
to really understand what he says. Alex was a bird I bought at a pet store. I tell people not to do that, but I needed a bird
who was not special in any way. I had to show that I could take
a so-called off-the-shelf bird and do all these experiments
and show what they could do. Come on, what's different? What's different? Color.
-Color, good birdie. Good birdie indeed. But is Alex the pet store parrot
just paying beak service to intelligence or does his bird brain
do more than just repeat exercises? We'll change shapes. All right, what shape? Here, a new recruit
called Griffin learns the relationship between sound and meaning
by observing another human student. You're so close. What shape? Six corner.
-Six corner. I got six corner wood. I want a nut.
-There you go. I got a nut. Yummy. Six-corner wood. Yeah, come on, Griffin. Now it's Griffin's turn. What shape, sweetie? What shape? Corner.
-Right. How many corners? You're right, say the whole thing,
how many corners? That's right. Six.
-Corner. Good boy. You're so good. Griffin is still a beginner. But smart Alex is an old hand. He's been doing this for 26 years. How many corners? Say the whole thing. What shape?
-Corner. Yes, Alex, you're right. Alex, you're a good birdie, yes. Alex can name about 100 objects
and answer questions on size, shape, color, and matter. But that's kids play. How many green blocks? How many green blocks? Come on, how many green blocks? No, green blocks. How many green blocks? Come on, how many green blocks? Four.
-That's right. Four green blocks, very good. It's a struggle,
but Alex gets there in the end, processing
a pretty large bite of information. We can finish this task. How many green blocks? What our birds do is not pure counting. I call it recognition of numbers. What he does is not a simple, what's called
subertizing a perceptual recognition. That's like when you see dice or dominoes
and you know there's 12 things, but you don't count them. We give them complicated tasks
where we throw colors, red and blue balls and blocks on a train. We ask him how many blue blocks. And he couldn't do that
by a perceptual mechanism because there's a big melange of stuff. We gave this task
to a four-year-old child. The four-year-old child
had trouble with it. So he's got some sense of number and we have to work at it
to see if it's true counting. He's just trying to sabotage.
-Okay, let's do one more. Alex is not just a pretty boy. Can you tell me
how many orange walls we have? How many orange walls? How many orange walls?
-Three. Good boy, good bird.
-That's right. Okay, here you go.
-What color bigger? Orange.
-That's right. Orange is bigger, that's right.
-Good boy. Alex's flair with words
and numbers is impressive. Yet something tells Dr. Hauser that he might just be pulling
the wool over our eyes. The work that Irene Pepperberg
has done with Alex shows that Alex
can learn symbols for numbers. In Alex's case,
and unlike the chimpanzees, actually words, so Alex knows the words
for one, two, three, four, five and six. Just like the work on the chimpanzees,
however, Alex goes no further than that. Never understands that this is a list, that the list can be built
by a successor function that you just keep adding one. For each step, it took Alex as long
to learn what one means, two and so forth. So Alex's capacities
are very much like the chimpanzees. The homework now covers
the basic phonetic units of words like R, E and G. What sound gray?
-Four. That's right. Alex left the pet shop
to embark on a long, fascinating journey. But is he any closer
to the holy grail of real language? What Alex has and the brother birds have
is a complex form of communication. We've trained them to use
certain sounds of English speech. It's not language the way
you and I would speak language. As we train them, we learn
that it's more and more complicated. Then still, no matter how far we go, Alex will not be able
to give a lecture for me. So there is going to be elements
of human language that they can master. At some point, you can come into the lab
and you have a conversation with Alex, but it's not the same conversation
you have with me. It's a conversation you may have
with a three-year-old child. It's all a matter of degree. At Marineland in the south of France, killer whales must learn the ground rules
of grammar before they can perform. Seven meters long
and weighing about five tons, training them requires gentle persuasion. They're rewarded for their achievements
with food and affection. Trainers use a complex system
of sign language to communicate with the whales. They understand dozens of signs. Killer whales have exceptional vision
and are highly intelligent. They respond to the subtlest command. Jon Kershaw,
general curator at Marineland, knows these whales intimately. There are as many signs possible
as a trainer has imagination. Really, these guys can take on board
everything we can throw at them. They take it all in,
there seems to be no end to their memory. We teach a language to these animals. We teach them signs. These signs correspond
with different behaviors that we require. We can even push things
a little bit further in putting together these different signs to form what you could call a phrase,
if you wanted to, but in actual fact, for the animal,
it's just a list of requests which he can understand as one behavior. He can perform all these things at once, bringing out all the different things
that we've asked for, which is pretty difficult to understand. Their ability to understand
multiple commands, like swim over there
on your back, spitting, puts killer whales
at the top of the animal language class. Most animals, including chimpanzees, have difficulty executing
more than one command at a time. Whales respond to a basic sign language
of complex phrases. What about syntax? Is this too much of a leap
for the killer whale? In English, David loves Jane
does not always mean Jane loves David. The words are the same, but not the order. Woe betide the suitor
who conveys the wrong meaning. To test virtual syntax on a killer whale, the trainers first use
two familiar commands. Go and spit. The commands are unexpectedly reversed. Spit and go. It's a hesitant performance,
but the penny seems to have dropped. The novelty of syntax,
meaning through word order, enters the whale's mighty faculties
for the very first time. We tried here to change the word order in one of the phrases
we use very regularly and see if it influenced
the animal's behavior. And simply by not reinforcing
what he was doing, we were able to push him
to guess his way into what we wanted. It took about an hour
for us to teach the animal that there was a difference
between go over there and spit, and spit and go over there. The animal finished tentatively
by understanding what we meant. It was a little spit
and then a go over there with a look towards us going,
"Is that really what you wanted?" "It's not what I normally do." But it can be done very easily. We can change world order
and it can have an effect on the animals. So phrases and word order,
which are so important to human language, are easily taken on board
by killer whales. Surprisingly difficult too,
for animals, is pointing. Even young children struggle with this. Most animals,
if you put your arm out like that with your finger extended,
they'll look at the end of your finger and wonder what
they're supposed to do with it. Whereas a killer whale will understand
that that movement means over there. So over there exists
in killer whale language. We have to teach it,
but it's not that difficult to teach. We can teach them by the use of a target
and by the use of a second person who intervenes at that moment, that it is interesting
the moment that I do that they go over and see
what's going on over there. Killer whales
seem to take everything in their stride, but even these megastars
at times forget their lines. When that happens, they all lose the plot. Is one whale deliberately
confusing the others? We're working with two animals
at the same time. Both animals in front of one trainer. One trainer will ask
the animals to do something and they'll both go off and do it wrong. Or they're both go off and do it right. What happens is a little bit
like walking down the street. Two people walk down a street and you come
to a fork in the street like that. One person will go, "Come on, down here"
and they'll go down one side or the other. The other person will very happily follow. Be it right or be it wrong,
he will happily follow. It's no more complicated than that. The killer whales of Marineland
seem ready to follow their trainers to ever greater heights. If they ultimately fall short
of learning a full language, it may not be for lack of ability. I'm sure they are totally capable
of understanding a language. They are capable of taking on board
the information necessary to be able to use a language, probably,
but we would have to teach them, because for them to have
a very complex language, they'd have to have
a need for complex language. In fact,
their sense of observation is sufficient. They don't need a language. So if you ask me does a killer whale
in the wild have a language, I would say not particularly
a developed language, no. Mastering complex sign language
in captivity is a far cry from the whales' natural vocalizations
in the wild. So how well do they communicate
with man in their own environment? Jim Nollman is a musician
who's been coming to Vancouver Island for the past 20 years to perform. With a population of just four people, Telegraph Cove
on the east side of the island is hardly a choice venue for his concerts. But a few miles out to sea,
Jim has a larger audience waiting. Looks like they're coming
right towards the boat, Bob. It's time to rig up the stage. Take my trusty green cord. Plug in the underwater speaker. Underwater speaker
walks off the end of the dock. This is a hydrophone,
it's basically an underwater microphone. Here it goes. Everything is now set
for an underwater jam session. The other members of the band
shadow the boat. By jamming with killer whales in the wild, Jim hopes to unravel
something of their language. So now they're onto us. You can hear the echo locating
very focused on the boat. Now they're starting to vocalize,
but they're not in pitch yet. An Orca's signature whistle
is kind of like a little guitar riff. It's a riff. It's a little hook, a musical hook. When they establish that sound,
I like to bring it up a half a tone, if I can lock on to it
and to see if they'll come with me, because if they come… Now they're really in my ears. Okay, I'm going to play. The underwater symphony drowns Jim out. The next day,
Jim heads for Johnson Strait. It's a popular spot with whale watchers. So this song is called
"The Boat Noise Blues". I don't know what else to name it,
there's so much boat noise in this area. So the trick is to play
when they're not vocalizing. Then stop before they vocalize and not play anything
when they're vocalizing, because then you get
the sense of a dialogue going. I believe that music is a language, and I believe that
coming out here and doing that is running a language experiment. It's not science, but I think
that you don't need to be a scientist to do language. One of the things I see missing
in a lot of the language studies, and the difference
between maybe an artist and a scientist is that I'm not trying to solve mystery. I'm there to celebrate it. In a way, it's rather than trying to figure out
if whales have language, I already know they have a language
and I'm there to enhance that and kind of bring that
to our human culture and to figure out some
very tricky kinds of media to do that. Jim's approach
to language is not scientific, but Dr. Hauser agrees that even scientists
don't have all the answers. I am very open to the possibility
that we've just missed the boat on the interpretation. I think at some level
we're stupid as scientists. We don't have a good way in
to understand what these calls mean. We've had extremely primitive methods. So the jury's out about
whether there might be other systems that have the power
of language for expression. But it seems to me
that after 100 years of work now, I think the reasonable conclusion is that many animals
have a much richer conceptual life than they have the capacity
to talk about that inner life. That poses a really tremendous paradox. That animals are thinking rich thoughts but don't have
the vehicles to express them. Theirs is a world
that remains largely closed to us. Whatever linguistic abilities
animals do possess, nobody has found
an animal language as rich as ours. How many green blocks? How many green blocks? Where's orange? Orange?
-Green. Oh, there it is. How many green blocks? I'm not helping you. You're cheating. How many green blocks? Green blocks? No, all right, let's do something else
for a little bit, okay? Find orange. Orange.
-Good job, very good.
