Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language

(freepressjournal.in)

53 points by yyyk3 days ago

5 comments

ileonichwiesz3 hours ago
Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:Coller foundation press release: <a href="https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/scientists-win-us100-000-in-2026-coller-dolittle-prize" rel="nofollow">https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...</a>The actual publication in Science: <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482</a>
- HarHarVeryFunny15 minutes ago
 Here's a non-paywalled version of the research.<a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....</a>
- MathMonkeyMan2 hours ago
 It does have the title going for it.
 - technothrasher1 hour ago
 The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
 - t-writescode1 hour ago
 I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).<pre><code> All humans are human. Babies can feel pain. Plants feel. Animals think. </code></pre> Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
 - adjejmxbdjdn1 hour ago
 I don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking.Other than that you’re right.
 why_at47 minutes ago
 Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
- kiproping3 hours ago
 Thank you, I was also looking for a better source and a link to the paper. I thought the paper was this older one <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9</a> from 2018.
bluechair39 minutes ago
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.<pre><code> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106 </code></pre> Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.Left this comment as another computer science connection.
ChuckMcM11 minutes ago
No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.
AndrewKemendo45 minutes ago
Another win for machine learning:>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.