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Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds (phys.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/science@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Zipf's Law is far more universal than human language, It is almost appears naturally if we start with a few simple conditions - consider a finite total group, and a initial distribution, where different elements have different wights and growth rates of elements is proportional to weights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Still kind of interesting that those conditions are satisfied here, and (according to the article) it does indeed suggest that the song is learned rather than genetic. I wonder if there are studies for other animals, e.g. ones for which we know that their communications are passed down genetically.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I think that in general Cetaceans and Delphinoids are the most intelligent beings after (many) human beings. But also that many animals are much smarter than we thought before. Language is also much more widespread among animals, for example Prairie Dogs and Mercats have a differentiated language, in their alarm calls the type of the danger and even the color of the animal. They literaly spezify eg an black snake with grey stripes.

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