Different communication between human and animals - Essay Example

Prof’s Is Animal Communication to Human Capabilities a Possibility? Animals do communicate of this there can be absolutely no question. They call to each other to mate, they signal warnings of danger, they express whether they are happy or sad, and so forth. In some ways, their communication could even be called more “complex” than human – some animals communicate through scents, for instance, something humans do not really do, or can communicate more through their physical posture than humans do.

But humans are truly in a league of their own because of symbolic language – the idea that we can connect the idea of something to a symbol of it, a word, and then combine those words into sentences that have discreet meanings from the words. This degree of communication is unlikely to occur in other animals for a variety of reasons. Humans are unlikely to see other animals with as complex communication because of the lack of usefulness of such communication, and the strange happenstance that brought it about.

The fact is, human communication, though giving us a huge advantage in our present society over other animals, does not actually construe much advantage in and of itself. This advantage relies on complex technologies that are able to be developed and passed down through language; this process, however, has taken hundreds of thousands of years. Most animals have enough communication to suite their survival needs – signaling willingness to mate, for instance, or that danger is present in the vicinity.

We hold more complex language to be incredibly valuable, but the fact is form a survival standpoint it might not actually confer that much of an advantage over other forms of communication that other animals already possesses. The other main reason that animals will never develop communication as complex as humanities is that the series of events that leads to it, evolutionarily speaking, are very complex and unlikely. To have communication in the way that humans do so many different things have to line up properly – you have to have an animal that lives in a society and has something to talk about.

They have to develop a brain that is far, far larger than any other brains in the animal kingdom, which takes huge amounts of energy. They have to develop a method of making complex communication (for instance, a highly detailed voice box that can differentiate many different sounds, as humans have). And finally, you’d have to have an animal that was able to use this language to a way that could help them stay alive. If you line all of those things up, only one group of animals, primates, seems to have those requirements.

It is possible that perhaps another will evolve to have human language abilities, but not likely. There is certainly a chance of meeting another animal with human-level communication. But it is not necessarily the most easy thing to imagine – the fact that such language is so hard and unlikely to evolve and simultaneously not usually particularly useful precludes it.