The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  “I didn’t realize you had an interest in birds,” I say, when the stench of rotten eggs has faded.

  “Oh . . . ” She laughs politely, switching the umbrella stem to her other, gloveless hand. “Not really, but Professor Baum’s—”

  “Here.” I take it from her and she thanks me, stuffing her hands into her coat pockets.

  “She’s a legend,” Natasha continues, as I tip the canopy down against the wind. “A bunch of my friends are going.”

  The wind slackens, and I raise the umbrella, revealing a crowd funneling into the science building. As we move closer I pick out the president of the College, accompanied by a herd of students, Dean Barker, and Brian Russo, the custodian with whom Prue plays chess once a month.

  “You guys are at 22 Grove Street, right?” Natasha says.

  She must have heard about our party afterward. Given its sponsor—the Biology Department—invitations had probably gone out to senior majors.

  “That’s us.” I hand her the umbrella, already dreading the avalanche of soiled cutlery I will have to wash tomorrow.

  We merge into the throng, and Natasha drifts away from me. Most of the faces are unfamiliar, but I recognize a few colleagues, including Edson and Adaora. The lecture hall—one of the oldest at the College, its oak walls crammed with portraits of former presidents—is packed.

  As I edge into the vestibule someone touches my forearm. “Ivan, is that you?”

  I turn to find Morton Chowdhury, Prue’s dissertation advisor— now retired—who must have driven down from Boston.

  “I didn’t realize you were coming,” I say. “Prue will be thrilled.”

  They have been out of touch lately, though they had been close during her graduate years. It was through an obituary that she learned, two years ago, that his eldest daughter had died in a skiing accident. For a long time, when Prue spoke about him, I would recognize in her face that particular dread with which my teachers addressed me after my father died. It was the same with my schoolmates. While a few of them wrote me cards, they stopped inviting me to play, as though exposure to great loss had made me radioactive.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Morton says. His face is a lattice of wrinkles. They deepen as he smiles, adding, “She’s the next big fish in our little pond.”

  He chuckles wistfully. The sound seems to designate an entire world they share, whose contours I will never know.

  “I hope we manage to see it after all.” I gesture at the bottleneck. “Maybe we should try the side—”

  “It’s him!” a small voice shrieks. I turn to find May hurtling in from the cold, her yellow backpack jouncing. As she slams against me, I almost collide with Morton.

  “You promised to stop growing!” I say.

  She beams up at me, showing off the serrated edge of her incoming front tooth. A beleaguered Walt—on crutches, thanks to a sprained ankle—is still picking his way toward us.

  “Where’s Grandpa?” she says.

  “Here, somewhere. Can you spot him?”

  “Walt claps my back. “Sorry, bro. Lucinda was supposed to watch her till dinner, but she bailed.”

  His ex-wife, he means. May, on tiptoe now, is squinting through her glasses, clouded by the sudden warmth. I unwind my scarf and wipe the lenses.

  “Did you bring your notepad?” I ask her. “It might get a little boring, but you should be able to do some investigating.”

  Ever since Prue showed her the film version of Harriet the Spy, May has been fixated on joining the CIA. The ambition devastates Frank, who considers the agency a terrorist group.

  “Duh I brought it!” She hops from foot to foot. “Where is he?”

  “Here, somewhere. Let’s find him.”

  We enter the hall, moving slowly to accommodate Walt. Although there are easily two hundred people in attendance, it is quieter here than in the vestibule, the chatter muted by the emerald carpet.

  “How long’s this supposed to go for?” Walt says, blowing his overgrown fringe out of his face.

  He talks like his father—indignantly, a little sadly, without premeditation. While his parenting grates on me, I find him endearing, in part because his hopes for his life—monetary, mostly—have outlasted his failure to achieve them. He makes a reasonable living now, as the general manager of a small insurance company in Providence, though he introduces himself as a “trader.” Other than one improbable return shorting penny stocks, however, his attempts to play the market have backfired.

  “An hour at most, including the Q and A,” I say.

  I hoist May’s backpack onto my shoulder, guiding her toward a row with some empty seats in the middle. The lectern, illuminated by a spotlight, stands before us like a monolith. Prue must be outside still, or late, because the two chairs beside it are empty.

  “Hey,” Walt shouts after us. “Look who I found!”

  Frank is lurking near the fire hydrant, freshly shaven, his eyes darting from face to face. He looks so out of place here, in his old olive suit and tie, that I feel a pang of sympathy. As May drops my hand and charges toward him, dodging bodies on her way, I have the sudden impulse to sweep him out of here.

  “Nice bag!” says a young man, indicating May’s backpack.

  “Not mine, unfortunately,” I mutter, and am starting to follow her when laughter erupts from a clot of students near the podium. They are clustered around Prue, looking radiant—if overdressed—in the long blue skirt she wore to Walt’s wedding. She has done her hair up in some kind of braid, which threatens to collapse as she gesticulates.

  “P,” I call out, after making my way down to her. She flares her eyes in greeting, and then murmurs something to one of the students, who giggles. At her throat is a pearl necklace she has never worn before.

  “Did you take my phone by accident?” she says. She should be nervous, but she seems positively buzzed. As the students part, scrutinizing me, she adds, “I couldn’t find it anywhere this morning.”

  Typical. She has a habit of losing things, or leaving them behind. To prove my innocence I hold up my phone, just as a young woman ducks in front of me, squealing, “Hi.”

  “You made it!” Prue exclaims.

  It usually charms me, how students flock to her, though now I feel a prick of envy. The contrast between our reviews on the students’ underground website is a long-standing joke between us. While hers are glowing, for the most part, mine are painfully average, besting only that of Rupert Foss, professor of jurisprudence and the College’s resident creep. I have always savored my low profile, taking it as proof that I have never bowed to grade inflation, or fomented a personality cult, or allowed mentorship to slacken into therapy.

  Whatever the student says next is drowned out by the tinny crescendo of the activated microphone. Noboru Hayashi, the chair of Biology, has appeared behind the lectern.

  “See you after,” I call out, as Prue hastens toward the podium. At the same moment, Quinn sweeps her into an embrace, and I can’t tell if my voice has reached her.

  I slide into one of the few remaining seats and turn to scan the faces behind me, relieved to find that Walt, May, and Frank have settled a few rows back.

  “ . . . my privilege,” Noboru is saying, “to welcome you out of the snow to a lecture my colleagues and I have long anticipated.” He pauses until the only sound is Quinn rustling up the aisle.

  “When I received her job application five years ago,” he continues, “I knew the scientist you are about to see had extraordinary promise. I did not, however, go so far as to predict that she would design an experiment whose results have attracted global attention.”

  Quinn pauses at my elbow. “May I?” she mouths, pointing to the seat beside me. The smell of jasmine hangs around her.

  “No problem,” I whisper, standing up. She brushes past me, her bangles clinking.

  The lights
have dimmed. A rectangle of brightness wobbles several rows down, then disappears, as applause sweeps the room like a downpour. It persists, even after Prue has taken her post at the lectern.

  “Thank you so much, Noboru, and thank you all for coming,” she says. “It’s an honor to be here.”

  She squares her papers. She is so beautiful. My wife, I think, as I sometimes do, as she lifts her eyes to the crowd and begins.

  Five

  Over the past few years, two very different experiments were conducted on the same species of animal, the vole—a cuddlier version of the mouse—and published in leading scientific journals. The first experiment investigated how male and female voles communicate with one another. Using ultrasound detectors to render their voices audible to human ears, researchers arranged a series of ten-minute encounters between female and male voles in small, acoustically sealed glass chambers. The animals were surprisingly loquacious. In their paper, published three years ago in Behavior, the researchers offer quantitative descriptions of the voles’ many vocalizations, charting their number, duration, and frequency. The potential meaning of these sounds remains unknown.

  The second experiment, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, investigated whether voles, like humans, experience heartbreak. First the researchers played Cupid, pairing females with males and giving them enough time to mate and bond with one another. Five days later, they separated the couples. Each male vole was then subjected to three situations that, under ordinary circumstances, cause voles observable distress. First, he was dropped into a beaker of tap water and forced to remain there for several minutes. Second, he was suspended by the tail in pitch darkness. Third, he was placed in a maze with no exit.

  The results were striking. Compared with the control group, the voles that had been separated from their partners showed little concern for their own survival. Dangled upside down in darkness, they did not thrash like their counterparts, but simply hung there. While their counterparts paddled like mad to keep their heads above water, they floated listlessly.

  What do these two experiments teach us? In one sense, the answer is straightforward. The second experiment, reminiscent of Harry Harlow’s studies on maternal deprivation in monkeys, suggests that voles may serve as effective human proxies in pharmacological research on love. It is an example of what scientists call “applied,” rather than “basic” research, performed in the service of understanding—and eventually treating—human brains.

  The first experiment, on the other hand, represents that second dimension of science—basic research—conducted for the sole purpose of furthering knowledge about the animal in question. It demonstrates that voles, like humans, have voices, and that the apparent silence between them is actually seething with sound.

  Taken together, the experiments teach us a third, less obvious, and more important lesson. That lesson will be my subject today. It is not about voles, but about the Life Sciences, and it may have already occurred to you. How, you might be wondering, can the same field of inquiry interpret the same animal as both a communicative being and, simultaneously, a proxy for human flesh? Why, moreover, does its status as a human proxy not prevent us from torturing it?

  The answer, I wager, is that the Life Sciences are pathological. Year after year, in paper after paper, we biologists interpret other animals as two contradictory phenomena: subjects of their own worlds and objects to mutilate.

  This paradox has a long history. At the time of Harry Harlow’s research, for example, Jane Goodall was penning her first field notes. Thirty years later, as biomedical experiments on great apes flourished, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was launching her pioneering work into human-language learning in chimpanzees. Today, neuroscientists at Columbia are removing the eyes of baboons in order to study the etiology of strokes, even as their contemporaries publish field studies on baboon culture. What is going on here? It would be one thing if we agreed that other animals were automatons with flickering, negligible inner lives. However implausible, that position would at least make sense to an impartial observer. Yet that observer would find no such clarity in our literature. Instead, she would find a community prepared to regard the same being as both a meat machine and a creature with a voice.

  Ornithologists may consider themselves immune to this critique. Even though many of us engage in biomedical research, we tend to think of ourselves as falling into the Goodall rather than the Harlow camp. We are fustier, nerdier, and considerably less rich than our colleagues in neurobiology. Yet much of our basic research, while it may not harm our subjects, still evinces a pathology of its own: narcissism. To read our studies is to confront—repeatedly—the stubborn and scientifically fatal confusion that birds are lesser versions of ourselves.

  To see this fallacy in action, consider the study that helped earn me an assistant professorship at this very institution. In that experiment, my colleagues and I set out to study spatial intelligence in crows. To do this, we designed an experimental drama so familiar it has become cliché: an animal faces an obstacle to an objective and must overcome that obstacle in order to qualify as intelligent. In this case, our crows had to make a detour around a glass panel in order to reach a mound of peanuts on the other side. They passed the test with flying colors, and so did we. A reputable journal published our results, which earned us yet another grant.

  But what exactly did our study achieve? Did it reveal new information about how crows think? Or did it demonstrate their ability to mimic a specifically human form of reasoning? For years, I assumed the former was true. Lately, though, I have come to suspect that what we discovered in our laboratory, with the help of our props, was fairly banal: strong evidence in favor of the crows’ capacity for instrumental reason, the least sophisticated line of thinking known to man. While we had set out to investigate another animal’s point of view, we instead planted a question in its mind. That question, not unfamiliar in late capitalism, was: How do I consume, faster?

  Each year, practitioners of basic behavioral research spend hundreds of thousands of dollars sowing that question in the minds of millions of birds, apes, mice, and other laboratory animals. Throughout the United States and elsewhere, these beings endure Kafkaesque experimental dramas like the one our crows put up with, all in the name of intellectual inquiry. It is as though, in order to learn about other animals, we feel compelled to remake them in our image. That image is not very attractive, it turns out. The typical laboratory animal is a diminished creature, prone to the same compulsive behaviors that zoo animals often exhibit. It walks in circles, plucks out its hair, and sometimes ingests its own vomit—behaviors that almost never occur in the wild. The question should trouble us, I think: Why does the controlled study of animals so often double, by virtue of its rigor, as the practice of driving them mad?

  Field research, which favors detached observation to experimental intervention, spares its subjects from this hell. And yet, like our study on crows, it demonstrates its own selection bias. The data we look for—the data that resonates with the public—tends to share the following upshot: Look! They do what we do. Like us, other animals have been observed to make tools; to mourn their dead; to recognize themselves in mirrors; to paint; to apply geometrical and arithmetical rules; to deceive; to commit to one partner; and even to commit suicide. Headlines like these pop up every other week. When you read them, perhaps you feel—as I once did—a frisson of delight.

  Take the research suggesting that ravens have what scientists call “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others. That data astonished me when it was published back in 2006. I sent it to all my friends. Yet something prevented me from trusting my own wonder. The feeling seemed to expose some failure in me: a lack, that is, of the very imaginative capacity—to wit, theory of mind—I was so shocked to discover in the bird.

  I claim, Darwinian that I am, to know I am an animal, another twig on the tree of life. But if I knew
this, really accepted it, I wouldn’t be surprised that other animals can think beyond themselves. I would be surprised, rather, that an ape who spent over two million years in the middle of the food chain somehow managed to conquer the earth.

  Our triumph is unprecedented. No other animal, over the course of the 3.8 billion years since life began, has consolidated power as we have. Even if our dominion represents just one chapter in a longer ecological story, it is a victory of staggering proportions. After tens of thousands of years as an ordinary hominid, we managed to abolish our competitors, transform our habitat, and spread it across every continent. Now we not only control the earth, but we have also developed the nuclear capacity to destroy it many times over. How did we do this? One leading hypothesis is our ability to engage in a particular activity, the same one I am engaging in right now. I refer of course to language: the activity of speech.

  What exactly defines this activity has divided philosophers for centuries. Whatever the answer, it distinguishes the sounds coming out of my mouth right now from laughter, or music, or sobs. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines language as “a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.” According to most linguists, two necessary conditions of that system are the features known as “displacement” and “syntax.” By “displacement,” linguists mean the capacity to refer to entities outside a speaker’s immediate environment. This capacity is what allows me to talk, for example, about the fall of Rome, the snow outside, and the year 2050. It is also what enables me to make sense of abstractions—such as language itself—and of entities that don’t exist.

  “Syntax,” on the other hand, refers to the rules that govern vocal symbols. This feature of language is what enables the sounds coming out of my mouth to combine in such a way that they form a new signification—namely, a thought—that transcends their individual meanings. This very sentence is one such example. Syntax explains why a given verbalization can amount to more than the sum of its parts.