What can singing mice say about human speech?

(phys.org)

19 points | by gmays 3 days ago ago

5 comments

  • dsign 16 hours ago ago

    > Speech is a crowning achievement of human evolution, the skill that separates us from every other animal. So, it would stand to reason that evolving this capability required some enormous leap in brain complexity.

    I have this theory that researchers and science journalists' internal bias is a gradation between the huge shadow projected by millennia of religious culture and the huge shadow projected by the things we have learned recently. The quote above, particularly the term "leap", evokes intelligent design.

    > Instead, evolution roughly tripled the number of neurons that connect the brain's mouth-movement control center with just two target regions.

    This, on the other hand, outright sounds like scaling the size of the model, which is on the opposite direction of the bias axis. FWIW, my own bias also tends in this direction.

    • b3ing 11 hours ago ago

      Prairie dogs have a language but it’s not as robust as ours as far as we know. But they have nouns verbs and adjectives

  • jimnotgym 18 hours ago ago

    And if you read the article there is no link to audio of them singing. Google has lots of very similar articles, with no singing. YouTube has videos of them with no singing. Wikipedia has a tiny excerpt of them singing a bit.

    Infuriating! First they tell you this mouse sings, then don't let you hear it???

    Finally:

    https://youtu.be/eNc1PI4PkG0?si=LWCLU7AlXxqhM5pX

    I didn't find a duet like the article suggested