Arik Kershenbaum, Why animals talk… – and how much, actually?

October 26 2024, 17:00 BST/ 12:00 ET/ 09:00 PT (5pm BST/ 12pm ET/ 9am PT)

Why animals talk… – and how much, actually?

All animals communicate, but some have more to say than others. That difference is driven by evolutionary pressures – complex communication is going to arise in those species where complex social interactions mean that there is an adaptive advantage to communicating larger amounts of information. Rather than attempting to view animal communication as a parallel of human language, it is important to start by understanding the adaptive needs of different species and from there to investigate just how much they do or don’t have to say.

In this talk, Dr. Arik will explore some of the questions about information content and information encoding in animals, and propose that the concept of "meaning", as we understand it from our own experience, cannot be directly applied to animals, who likely perceive meaning in a very different way to a linguistic species such as ourselves. Arik Kershenbaum will illustrate this by looking at the possible significance (or lack of it) of concepts such as Zipf’s Law, and “functional reference”, as well as consider how our understanding of meaning can be applied in cases where communicative signals are fundamentally graded, such as in dolphins and wolves.

About the speaker

Dr Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist who specializes in animal vocal communication. He works in the field with wolves and their relatives, gibbons, dolphins, hyraxes, and many other species. His research is focused both on understanding the information content of animal calls and on applying this knowledge to conservation challenges. He has written two popular science books, “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and recently, “Why Animals Talk”.