LING 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Waggle Dance, Superintelligence, Sound Symbolism
18 Jan 2017
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No other species have ever been observed doing the dance. Even species with very complex social organization and high intelligence (humans) don"t do it (for example; ants or humans don"t do the dance). Every bee learns the dance effortlessly and correctly. Some humans are able to observe the bee dance and go directly to the food source - so they can interpret it - but even these super-intelligent humans don"t do it themselves. I once saw a human trying to do the waggle dance to show to another human how it works. It was totally pathetic (the dance is unique to bees) In contrast, every bee learns the waggle dance correctly and effortlessly. Humans and chimps learning sign language - form of communication. More generally, things about language that are not systematic and must be memorized. Combines sounds into larger units like words (study of sound)
