At grammatical faculty of language, flies outsmart men.
Using a symbolic dynamics and a surrogate data approach, we show that the language exhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila ('D.') during courtship is as grammatically complex as the most complex human-spoken modern languages. This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visually frame-by-frame dissected into 37 fundamental behavioral elements. From the symbolic dynamics of these elements, the courtship-generating language was determined with extreme confidence (significance level > 0.95). The languages categorization in terms of position in Chomsky's hierarchical language classification allows to compare Drosophila's body language not only with computer's compiler languages, but also with human-spoken languages. Drosophila's body language emerges to be at least as powerful as the languages spoken by humans.
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University and ETH of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Ruedi
R
Stoop
Patrick
P
Nüesch
Ralph Lukas
RL
Stoop
Leonid A
LA
Bunimovich
D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D003380:Courtship; D004330:Drosophila / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male