Prairie Dogs

I've always thought of human beings as resembling super-colonies or super-organisms (ants, bees, schools of fish, naked mole rat, prairie dogs) more than anything else. We find that super-organisms often have highly developed communication systems - not just for sexual seduction or territorial reasons. The super-organism must be regulated from within so that it can survive as a system.

The AP ran a story of Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor from Northern Arizona University who studies the language of prairie dogs. Slobodchikoff has documented a language of about 100 words the prairie dogs use to signal predators. Through his experimentation, Slobodchikoff has discovered they have words for height and colors - say, if a short man were to approach the colony wearing a red shirt. Like songbirds and humans, too, prairie dogs have regional dialects.

We normally think of complex linguistic ability as the last sole province and essence of humanity - even beyond tool-making. We are of course wrong.

Jane Goodall: " “Every time some new discovery appears, there is an instant hostile reaction, not necessarily from the scientists but also from religious people in some cases. There is a real strong need in the minds of many people to keep that line sharp between humans on the one hand and the rest of the animal kingdom on the other. I think the chimp, more than anything else, has helped to blur that line. The first paper I wrote for “Nature,” the scientific periodical, they actually crossed out where I put “he and she and who,” and put “it” which, I thought, this is crazy. So we have come a long way since then."



"Shhhhhhh, don't give away our secret code."