
Dolphins as a model for alien intelligence - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-aliens
======
btown
I find it hard to believe that Zipf's law is at all meaningful for non-human
species. We have evolved in a very specific way, such that we are limited in
the bandwidth of our transmitted communications, as well as in our ability to
memorize large vocabularies. There is no reason that this is true for other
species, including dolphins; they may be able to distinguish and produce
significantly more nuanced "words" (if that concept even exists); they may be
born with, or be able to quickly learn and commit to memory, the "distance
graph" between a huge number of distinct signals that represent nuanced
concepts. Consider an organism that can quantize a dense signal, treat it as a
hash table lookup, and reference a specific concept in their memory; these
transmissions would look like pure noise to us, and any error correction might
be written off as periodicity. We'd never know.

~~~
greeneggs
A few people speculate that sperm whales might be transmitting sonar "images"
in their communications [1]. At first it seems like a crazy idea, and maybe it
is---but it isn't impossible since the whales perceive their environment via
sonar. If we could directly and efficiently communicate synthetic images to
each other, then "words" might never arise.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/16/opinion/sunday...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/16/opinion/sunday/conversation-
with-whales.html)

~~~
netcan
Very interesting thought, whether in turns out to be true or not. Seems
plausible, at least. If not whales, maybe some other species.

The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us
about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our
brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication
tasks that are important to us.

For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We
have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or
somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent
communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on
smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to
strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed
scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to
one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!"
kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the
way we do in words, sort of.

We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating
using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special
design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in
our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible
to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing.
There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.

~~~
kaybe
To be fair, most people massively underuse their sense of smell. Feynman
described being able to distinguish who touched long untouched books by smell
- sounds a bit farfetched until you try, it's not that hard for most. Then
again, it's also not very useful in today's society.

~~~
praveenperera
Sense of smell is very important when it comes to becoming a good cook.

------
IkmoIkmo
I'm reminded by an idea from deGrasse Tyson, not sure if it's his... on worms,
who share 70% of their DNA with us. Yet they're completely oblivious even to
our presence as we walk by, forget being able to communicate with us, or grasp
the intricacies of human civilisation and its history.

What are the odds then, that there may be a species not even insanely
different from ourselves, which we simply cannot even observe or be cognisant
of. If true, it'd make all our efforts to seek out, let alone communicate,
with aliens, naively cute.

It's a fascinating idea, although I've never explored whether it has any
merit. It may just be one of those ideas that sounds amazing but falls apart
if more closely inspected.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Not only that, but without careful study, we really have no idea what is going
on in the worms' heads, and we can't even easily tell them apart. Even with
lots of study, we still don't understand the worm's perspective.

If aliens visited us, we probably would not even recognize that they arrived,
or we might see their arrival as some natural phenomena.

We best start with dogs, who at least, we can bond with.

~~~
im3w1l
We have a very good idea of what is going on in the heads of at least one worm
species: _C. Elegans._ It has 302 neurons and we have mapped how they are
connected.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans#Researc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans#Research_use)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-
connecto...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connectome/)

~~~
kylebgorman
Yet we have no clue what it's going to do next. Which is a serious indictment
of the whole obsession with "brain mapping" and localization in neuroscience,
IMO.

~~~
adrianN
That seems mostly to be because we don't know the current state of a live worm
very well.

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RevRal
I've always gotta throw in a plug for my favorite sci fi novel Blindsight
(available to read free on the internet:
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm))
when I see threads like this.

~~~
ViolentCheese
Convince me to read it please.

~~~
gbhn
Blindsight is a very compelling exploration of the idea that there may be
different roles of consciousness in advanced intelligence. We know that a
conscious decision on say the visual processing loop ends up costing 120ms or
so. Why is this a good thing? What if you can have advanced intelligence
without consciousness? Some work in AI (and some worries people have about AI)
suggests this may be a real possibility as well.

The end result for me ends up being a much more intense feeling of the kinds
of varieties of intelligence that may exist in the galaxy, or that we may end
up creating ourselves.

------
macawfish
The closest thing to "alien" in my worldview is late industrial technology.

Including this very thing I have sitting in my lap, which consumes energy like
a living creature and responds dynamically to its environment in a way that
keeps it around (it's my trusty laptop). I have opted to keep it around rather
than throwing it in the trash (evolutionary selection).

~~~
RevRal
I see that you're getting downvotes but I wish to cast my support for your
comment. I suggest those interested in the thought process please check out
the book What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. The book basically says that
technological growth is almost independent of human input.

~~~
seanp2k2
Interesting thought, and I've been there before, but I've also come to think
of technology as an extension of humans. As computers are not currently
capable of independent thought, they must [generally] be instructed by humans
on what to do. We've also laid out their CPUs and GPUs and busses and power
circuitry. Their physical evolution is based on the business roadmaps at
places like IBM, Intel, AMD, NVidia, Micron, Dell, etc driven by tasks which
they can perform to further the economies of humans. Contrast this to animals,
where there is a drive for survival and furthering the species. Computers
don't have this sense because they don't have life. Technology is impressive,
but in terms of _what a computer wants_ , I don't see it as much different
from a shovel; it's a tool created and used by humans for the benefit of
humans.

~~~
meric
Inheritance of genes separates life from chemistry.

Inheritance of knowledge separates animals from plants and microorganisms. [1]

Inheritance of capital separates humans from animals. [2]

In the same way DNA is an integral part of life, and in the same way the
knowledge to live in a particular environment is an integral part of an
animal, technology is an integral part of being human.

Raise a human in the wild among goats without human culture, without human
technology. As long as that human is separated from culture and technology,
would an alien be able to differentiate the human from animal? [3]

[1] Animal born in captivity can't be released to the wild because they didn't
have the opportunity to learn from their wild parents.

[2] Hammer, houses, watches, factories, passed down from generation to
generation.

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child)

------
stared
Dolphins are mammals, and they are hardly "alien". I would rather look at
cephalopods, who had a different evolutionary path (including reinvention of
eye).

~~~
awinter-py
cuttlefish are the coolest!

Their mimicry skills stay sharp across generations because during breeding
season, while the strong males are competing physically for access to females,
the smaller males with better mimicry skills are _mimicking females_ (!) and
sneaking past the boxing ring for a quickie.

The female cuttlefish can also store lots of sperm and decide later whose to
use. Gross.

~~~
vixen99
As with the cuttlefish, so with the humans.

[http://www.londonwomensclinic.com/london/looking_for_donor_s...](http://www.londonwomensclinic.com/london/looking_for_donor_sperm)

"The London Sperm Bank is the largest sperm bank in the UK with donors
recruited from a variety of cultures, religions and sections of the community"

------
macawfish
"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

[http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html](http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html)

------
partycoder
Dolphins (and whales, or cetaceans in general) are still mammals. Which means
they have a mammalian neocortex that is very similar to that of a human.

I think crow intelligence is more interesting. They are very smart and capable
of using tools. And they evolved brain structures independently from mammals
that enable them to do those things.

~~~
r0muald
Yes, at the same time dolphins have been evolving separately from humans for
~100 million years. That's a lot of time.

~~~
partycoder
If you look at cortical columns in a microscope it's hard to distinguish which
is which.

------
tlb
I hope we value the lives of intelligent aliens more than we value the lives
of dolphins and cephalopods. Judging from current efforts in avoiding
fisheries by-catch, it's more than zero but less than $1/lb.

------
seekingnames
This is interesting...but Zipf's law was discovered (according to the article)
in 1930's and the paper on the dolphin gradient (or language pattern) being
similar to humans was written in 2009. So...6 years later any updates?

Seems to me they just found a fact that was interesting and decided to wrap an
article around it.

------
bawana
It has been demonstrated that echo patterns captured from dolphins are a 2d
planar projection of the 3d objects in the environment facing them. Thus,
dolphins use a form of hieroglyphics where the 'words' are really pictograms.
The real question is how humans went from this kind of pictogram/sign language
(that our ancestors used) to the abstract mapping of sound<->writing<->picture
that we use today. We attribute intelligence as the catalyst for this change.
Yet intelligence , per se, evolved to facilitate survival in the face of
increasingly efficient predators. Aliens with intelligence would certainly be
using a similar abstract mapping. I shudder to think of their predators tho.

------
sunstone
How about octopuses?

~~~
smegel
I agree. Far more fits the "Alien" bill than a flipping (no pun intended)
mammal.

~~~
ViolentCheese
I think the point of the article was that mammals are the closest thing to us
that are still (almost) completely foreign.

If we can't talk to dolphins then how would we communicate with octopi? If not
even octopi then how aliens?

I think that was more the point rather than trying to find the most alien
intelligent animal to attempt to communicate with.

------
ajuc
I wouldn't take this law too seriously, for example from my short experiments
with

    
    
        cat textfile.txt | tr '\ ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
    

it doesn't seem to work for Polish (there's no articles in Polish, "of" is
expressed as changed ending of noun, and in most texts I tried "is", "to",
"from", "in" etc. are the most common with very similar frequencies).

I would think dolphins and aliens may be more alien than Slavs.

~~~
kylebgorman
I don't know how big "textfile.txt" is, but try it with a much larger body of
text? Also you'll almost surely want a much better tokenization algorithm than
that. Zipf's Law can only hold "at the limit" of an infinite stream of text,
so as a consequence you get a better approximation with a larger sample.

------
jaybosamiya
Obligatory reference to Douglas Adam's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy)

The existence of the Babel Fish would make such questions much much simpler.

------
DrNuke
I think intelligence is overrated in the grand scheme of life, so "alien life"
would probably baffle us. Survival of the fittest on Earth is worth nothing if
the fittest die as well. Evolution would be slower without intelligence but
who cares, is there a race out there?

~~~
simonh
Alien life would still have to be based on the same chemical and physical laws
as terrestrial life, so while I'm sure it would be challenging to understand
it shouldn't be an intractable problem. In the end, it's all just chemical
reactions.

If the fittest die as well everything's dead, so no more life.

Not sure what you mean by evolution being slower without intelligence. I'd
expect the opposite. Intelligence means you can adapt to your environment
behaviourally and technologically, instead of biologically so natural
selection becomes less of a factor.

~~~
macawfish
Why would it _have_ to be based on the same chemical and physical laws? That's
a huge assumption!

~~~
bsder
First, as far as we know, physics doesn't change depending upon universe
position. So, we assume that life has to obey our standard rules of physics.

Second, the chemistry of life balances on a particular set of characteristics:

1) Water is an _extremely_ unusual molecule. It has much more varied reactions
than just about any other solvent. This puts life in a particular temperature
band.

2) Carbon chemistry is very energetically favorable relative to the other
options. Binding energies are close enough that swapping around carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms doesn't take excessive amounts of energy.

3) Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen are all relatively close to one
another in size as well. While carbon chemistry does borrow from higher in the
periodic table, that tends to be the exception.

While _intelligent life_ will likely be completely different from us, it's
very likely that the underlying _chemistry_ is going to be very similar.

The interesting question will be whether we have exactly the same basis DNA
pairs. There has been recent successful work to synthesize new "unnatural"
base pairs which can then be replicated in organisms.

~~~
VLM
Embrace and extend:

4) "Room temps" are really comfy for using enzymes to perform energetically
infeasible reactions. Too cold and life is too slow to survive and much hotter
and you get thermal decomposition faster than life can grow. Its chemically
universal... we have the technology to do o-chem and biochem under much
weirder conditions than where it actually works best.

5) Trace elements. Despite huge evolutionary pressure and no small amount of
experimenting with blood chemistry we're still stuck with red iron based
blood. Imagine if you could make blood out of pure protein or even just
carbohydrates... But no, every red blooded animal on the planet is stuck
refining bioavailable iron, no matter how much of a PITA that is. Would not be
surprised if space aliens bleed red like us.

6) Water is awesome for buffer chemistry and this feeds back into your point
#1 and my point #4 but homeostasis in the blood or innards in general would be
nearly impossible under any other chemistry.

I would not be surprised at all if space aliens were quite familiar with
hemoglobin, chlorophyll, some of the cycles like the Krebs cycle. Krebs is
very complicated and PITA but most earth life depends on it because it works,
if something better were possible, it would have gone extinct half a billion
years ago... It would be a fun race, seeing if human and space alien
physicists or biochemists start communicating first. My money is on the
biochemists, more shared background.

~~~
robbiep
Your points are good, but despite their entropic advantages they remain
limited by the anthropic principle. Other forms are likely possible, just
unlikely under our set of circumstances.

I would still hazard a guess and say that I would expect carbon based life to
be there basis of the lions share of life in the universe though.

Regarding the Krebs cycle and other biological feedback cycles, I strongly
disagree.

It came to dominate at a point where it propagated through all the extant
branches of life, but it is by no means the only way life could have decided
to do the process of energy production. Once evolution evolves something, it
is stuck with that system - no complex biochemical system will evolve into a
Krebs replacement whilst Krebs occupies that niche, and evolution isn't going
to spit it out of the way!

------
jp555
I always thought the closest thing to aliens to us would be plants. I imagine
taking to an alien species would be closer to taking to trees than dolphins.

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puppetmaster3
Yes, based on all the aliens, this checks out.

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guard-of-terra
Dolphins don't make tools. Cephalopods too. It's kind of hard for us to talk
to somebody who doesn't make tools and thus has to rely on subsistence.

~~~
beeboop
If subsistence is effortless and never a problem, is it really a problem that
they never make tools? If humans had a matrix-like virtual reality, you could
do whatever you wanted, and never to work a day in your life, I would imagine
many people would never work or make tools.

~~~
guard-of-terra
'If humans had a matrix-like virtual reality, you could do whatever you
wanted, and never to work a day in your life'

I imagine I won't have many common points in discussion with them.

~~~
meric
Unless they played 40k the whole day. ;)

------
ommunist
Looking at humans "mind" they decided not to communicate for greater good. So
long, and thanks for all the fish.

