Before I continue, I have to emphasize that anyone who responds to this must, must, must
, read the whole thing, or the argument will be incomplete.
Language isn't defined by vocal equipment, though; hence the whole sign language example.
To that end, I quote from this interview
with Steven Pinker:
A friend of mine lived and worked with a chimpanzee for several years, and tells the story of how the chimp loved to imitate things that she did. For example, after she washed the dishes the chimp would wash the dishes, but the chimp's idea of washing the dishes was very different from ours. It went through the same muscle movements; it would pick up the sponge, let the warm water roll over his hands, would rub the sponge on the plate, but didn't get the idea that the point of washing the dishes was to get the dishes clean.
It just liked the feel of rubbing a sponge over the plate. It could wash the same dish over and over again, it could rub some of the dirt off and not get all of it off, because what it was imitating was the particular physical sequence. What it didn't think about was what was the goal of the human performing the action. And the ability to guess what other people's goals are is a key part of human intelligence, and it makes us very different from our primate cousins.
That's a huge part of what makes us unique. It's that ability to process those extended sequences of cause/effect relationships far beyond the initial physical act, and no other animal has demonstrated that kind of ability. Chimps just don't "get it"; they can only imitate. There is no evidence that any of these so-called "made up" words were anything more than random motions.
Actually, dolphins and whales communicate on a very complex manner. The frequency range and oscillations they use surpass by far our vocal capabilities..
In other words, the informational potential of their communication is far greater then ours. What they are saying to eachtoher is a mystey though...
B.t.w. - di you know that dolphins acutally have accents?
1) Humans possess the ability to close off one portion of our throats, allowing us to produce sounds while exhaling without choking. This ability is unique to us
, and it allows us to produce sounds that no other animal can.
2) Dolphins are physically unable build things, which right away removes much of the necessity
for language and makes their coevolution of abilities fundamentally different from ours. In The Descent of Man
, Darwin, much ahead of his time, described language as "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art". In other words, a child is not born knowing how to make or use tools, but is
born with what Chomsky, and Pinker later on, would conclude is an instinctive desire to acquire the necessary information-- in other words, language. Dolphins have no instinctive need to learn these things because they are physically unable to do them in the first place.
3) Noam Chomsky demonstrated that a language cannot be simply a system of responses; it must have the ability to form an infinite number of sentences out of a finite number of words. All dolphins have demonstrated is the ability to communicate basic statements to one another in a code-- "We are in danger", or "I like you, let's have sex." Their system of communication is not infinitely flexible the way all human languages are. Thus, it can never be equal in complexity.