Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [101]
When that other animal is an insect, the comparison seems particularly troubling. Eileen Crist, in an analysis of the bee language controversy, says, "This almost-serious idea of an insect with language has had an unsettling effect in behavioral science." She notes that the waggle dance satisfies the criteria of having a set of rules, with a necessary order and complexity of the symbols that are used. Psychologists Mark Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch declare that human language is qualitatively different from other forms of animal communication, whether birdsong or bee dances, at least if one distinguishes between what they call the faculty of language in the broad sense and the narrow sense; it isn't clear whether bees get to join at least one of those circles. Other language scholars struggle with the distinction, sometimes mentioning the auditory sensitivity that enables the nearly endless discrimination among different sounds. The idea that Washoe the chimp or Alex the African grey parrot could be taught elements of our own language makes us reexamine our uniqueness yet again.
Just as an aside, amid all the hand-wringing and contention about whether what the bees do is really "language," no one seems to question whether it's really "dance." Maybe the dance scholars are just more easygoing than the linguists, or maybe we are already comfortable sharing that capacity with other species, though one could argue that the struts and tail shimmies of a peacock are hardly analogous to a waltz. But this points to the futility of the discussion; if we always narrow our definition of language, sooner or later we will end up with a capacity only we can possess. The breathtaking displays of a bird of paradise, or the comical movements of a lizard extending its dewlap, do not detract from the achievements of a ballerina.
It seems to me that the bees are not much like Alex or Washoe, because we can't teach them to say "cup," or to comment on the day's activities, or ask for another piece of fruit. Bees only talk about what they need to, mainly involving food or a place to live, and I think we have gotten way too interested in the accident of their using representational movements in communicating those objectives. Bee language didn't arise from a common ancestor with humans, which means we can't see it as a primitive version of our own language. This forces us to be less anthropomorphic than we are with the primates. And the less anthropomorphic we are, the more incredible the bees' accomplishment becomes, because they evolved this system of communication with entirely different selection pressures than the ones that led to human language. How did evolution take such different paths to get to superficially similar outcomes?
If it's true that bees needed a way to hide their communication from rivals, and that the ants' method of hauling colony members off to the new nest was unworkable for a flying insect, two other questions remain that in my mind are much more interesting than endless fussing over who does and doesn't qualify to enter the human club. The first is why all other social flying insects did not evolve some version of dance language. The second is why, when we are much more like the ants than the air-bound bees, we humans evolved language ourselves, rather than just dragging each other around when we wanted to convey a decision. Maybe human language isn't unique. But it beats at least one of the obvious alternatives.
Bee language, and the complicated decisions that accompany it, exemplifies why we keep coming back to insects, why, despite their encroachment on our kitchens and sometimes our health, we can't shake our simultaneous sense of connection and distance. We all want to be able to talk to animals. With bees, as with other insects, we can be