Animals make lots of noise; book argues they may be trying to tell us something

From Suzanne Simard to Ed Yong, science journalists and researchers have probed the myriad ways plants and animals communicate: chemical signals amid old-growth redwoods, interplay between insects and their gut bacteria. But intra-species speech remains a discipline still unsure of itself. Are dolphin whistles a form of verbal exchange? Do hyrax “notes” constitute a vocabulary?

Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at Girton College, University of Cambridge, poses these issues in his breezy, provocative “Why Animals Talk,” lending sonic analysis and a musician’s ear to the study of animal communication.

In his opening, Kershenbaum asserts that “animals make a lot of noise, and that means they invest an awful lot of time and energy into being noisy. Evolution is economical — a behavior that wastes energy is something that should put you at a disadvantage in the long term.” Those screeches, hisses and yelps must confer Darwinian benefits, Kershenbaum argues. He focuses on six mammalian species — wolves, dolphins, hyraxes, gibbons, chimpanzees and homo sapiens — and one bird, parrots.

A wolf pack’s howls; intricate parrot squawks; chimpanzee “dictionaries” — each chapter is chock-full of tantalizing data. He applies Zipf’s law, a mathematical algorithm that captures the ratio of complexity and simplicity across all languages, to gibbons, with surprising results. He sorts through textured songs of hyraxes, which may comprise a rudimentary grammar. And he scrutinizes the century-long history of alleged human communication with chimps, our nearest primate relatives, with wry wit: “Early experiments were cute, if ethically questionable.”

Kershenbaum’s infectious zeal for the wonders of the biosphere set him apart as a 21st century Dr. Dolittle. We meet Alex, an African grey parrot who resided in a lab during the 1990s and 2000s. As Kershenbaum observes, Alex “not only learned to speak human words, but he also appeared to develop a subtle and language-like understanding of how words are used, how they are combined, and what the different combinations mean . . . the one individual animal that came closest to holding a direct conversation with a human was not a chimpanzee or a dolphin but a bird.”

“Why Animals Talk” fleshes out the author’s arguments with charts and graphs; fortunately, they don’t divert the book’s flow. Kershenbaum’s single misstep is his tone: he eschews an academic voice for a more conversational one, yielding the academic lectern for a kind of grade-school circle time.

He’s targeting a popular audience but unwittingly patronizing readers: “What pieces of a puzzle needed to be fitted together to make humans so special?” And yet his concluding chapter on homo sapiens — our outsized self-importance, our languages a mere evolutionary adaptation, similar to a butterfly’s colors — rings with the clarity of a bell. He draws on figures such as Noam Chomsky as he drills down into why speech is a recent, possibly fleeting, phenomenon.

Despite our vaunted intelligence, we may be just another blip on this third rock from the sun. Kershenbaum seeks profundity among simple questions; and more often than not he’s able to find connection to a cosmos far beyond the scope of our brains. His book’s a trove of riches for animal lovers who sift through it with a proper grace and humility.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

By: Arik Kershenbaum.

Publisher: Penguin Press, 288 pages, $30.