Even if everything about different groups of animals is identical down to the level of their genes and physical surroundings, they can develop unique ways to communicate, according to an experiment done with robots that use flashing lights to "talk."

The Swiss researchers used the robots to get handle on why there is such diversity in communication systems within and between species, something that is difficult to do in living animals. 

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The answer, they found, "is contingencies in evolutionary history, i.e. stochasticity (randomness) in the occurrence order of new ... traits," Steffen Wischmann, a researcher in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne, told me in an email.

He and his colleagues started with 20 populations of identical two-wheeled robots each equipped with a camera, a food detection sensor, a simple information processing program, and a ring that could emit a blue or green light.

These robots, grouped in populations of 20 individuals, were placed in an arena containing a food source. The team ranked each robot according to how long they spent at the food source. 

They then used a "standard roulette-wheel selection algorithm" to select 100 robots' programs, or genes, for reproduction, according the paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Because the 'genes' — which encoded specifications of the robots neural controllers, responsible for processing sensory information and producing motor actions — were initially set to random values, the robots behaved unpredictably at first," the journal explains in a news advisory.

"But after 1,000 generations, all 20 populations emitted light to indicate food location. In approximately half the populations, the robots emitted a signal only in the presence of food, while the other populations also emitted a different color light in areas without food."

It turned out that the one-signal robots were the most efficient communicators — they found the food faster — but they were also the weakest competitors when pitted against other groups of robots who communicated with two flashing lights.

In other words, there's a tradeoff between communication efficiency and competitive robustness, the researchers note. And, randomness in evolutionary history can affect the outcome of competition between populations.

"Since the two-signal populations use both signals they can also utilize the signals of other populations independent of which signal this other population uses to signal the presence of food," Wischmann explained to me.

Further analysis of the data gleaned from the robots shows that the signaling differences occurred early in the robots' evolution. 

This randomness in the occurrence of mutations can drive the evolution of language and "might also be involved in speciation processes," the team concludes.

More on language evolution:

• Robots invent their own spoken language
• Grow a new language in your head
• A baby's babble leads to language
• Mice given 'human' version of speech gene

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

The collective wisdom of the crowd is being called upon to help scientists decipher the language of pilot and killer whales in a project that could help us operate our machines in harmony with the ocean giants.

To participate, log on to Whale.fm, a project sponsored by Zooniverse and Scientific American, and try to match up similar sounding whale calls. 

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The researchers behind the project hope that the wisdom of the crowd will more accurately match the calls than one user can alone.

That is, what I think are two similar sounding calls might not be what you think. If hundreds or thousands of people group the same sounds together, though, they're more likely a match.

Whale.fm is particularly important for basic pilot whale research, since scientists know so little about them. What they do know suggests they communicate in similar ways to killer whales, which are known to live in family groups and communicate among themselves in unique dialects.

Scientists collected the whale calls over the years with underwater microphones suctioned onto whales, dragged behind ships and attached to buoys. Each sound and a corresponding spectrogram — a visual representation of the whale sound snippet — are presented for users to find a match.

The site also plots on a world map where the call was recorded and even offers users an option to track specific whales. 

If all goes well and lots of people participate, researchers should get answers to questions such as the size of the pilot whale call repertoire, any differences between the repertoires of long and short finned pilot whales, and how, if at all, the calls change amid noise such as sonar.

The project will also let researchers know how well volunteers agree with each other and, thus, how good we are at collectively categorizing the calls of vocal species such as whales.

This type of crowdsourcing — tapping the wisdom of the crowd to form a collective intelligence — has been used for other research projects in the past, including Zooniverse's Planet Hunters, which is harnessing crowds to find new planets.

If the crowd turns out to be wise enough to help researchers decipher whale songs, what else can we do?

More on crowdsourcing projects:

• This is the first crowdsourced military vehicle
• Abort or give birth? Couple asks Internet to vote
• Software taps human brains
• Charities start to harness the power of the many
• Amazon pushes user-driven research service

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

If you think about, there's no escape, really. Music holds humanity in a vise grip. Every culture you can think of has it, hears it and taps their feet to it. So how did music first take hold? A new analysis proposes that music hijacked our ancestors' ability to hear and interpret the movements of fellow human beings.

That claim is at the heart of “Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man,” a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi analyzed the rises and falls in the rhythm and intonation of more than 10,000 samples of folk music from Finland and found that they bear a stamp — an auditory fossil of sorts — that can be traced back to the rises and falls and rhythms associated with the movement of people. 

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It’s the latest in a series of theories that have drawn upon evolutionary biology, developmental biology, psychology and neuroscience to explain how human beings came to cultivate music as a complex, expressive craft. Music has persisted in society, but it doesn't seem to come with any obvious survival benefit. If it wasn't essential to survival, why did it stick around? 

“Music really is the story about a person moving or doing something around you,” Changizi told me. “It’s just like listening to a story. We’re having an auditory story about people moving our midst.” 

The appreciation for music grew and developed from this primal urge, monopolizing a natural faculty meant for human survival. Music essentially “harnessed” this urge, Changizi says, which also explains the title of the book.

“A lot of thinking is remote from the physical act of making music,” William Benson, a jazz musician and author of the book "Beethoven’s Anvil," told me. “And [Changizi] gets right to the physical aspect of making music.”

For one thing, it explains music's emotional appeal. In his book, Changizi described a study that looked at the foot patterns of people in different emotional states. When they were happy, sad or angry, their gaits betrayed their feelings.

“Music may not be marching orders from our commander, but it can sometimes cue our emotional system so precisely that we feel almost compelled to march in lockstep with music’s fictional mover,” Changizi writes. “And this is true whether we are adults or toddlers. When music is effective at getting us to mimic the movement it mimics, we call it dance music, be it a Strauss waltz or a Grateful Dead flail.”

The relationship between movement and music may come as a surprise for some, but not so much for others. In some African cultures, the word for "music" and "dance" are one and the same. In contrast, concert pianists or cellists sit still when they perform. 

Why this difference? Blame the Gregorian chant, says Benson. Monasteries were the intellectual centers of Europe in the Middle Ages. Monks chanted tonal, arrhythmic verses daily, developed the Western musical notation, and set the pattern for the understanding and performance of Western music during the centuries that followed. “And if you think of that as the basis for music, then you’re not going to get the kind of music you get in Africa and India,” Benson told me.

Essentially, the Gregorian chant decoupled the ideas of movement and rhythm from music in the Western world. But Changizi's theory brings the ideas together once again, backed by a statistical approach that looks more deeply into the correlation between dance and movement and music. 

Take a deeper look into the brain, and you may have an even more convincing case for music being an intrinsic characteristic of the human experience, says Edward Large, who studies how the brain processes sound and rhythm. While Changizi's musical analysis sounds reasonable, there may be an even deeper universality. "The paydirt is where you find the same patters in the brain that you find in the music," he told me.

So, the human brain was harnessed. A faculty that came into being for survival — recognizing the behavioral patterns in the movements of others — was tweaked, and music hitched a ride into the lives of modern humans.

We see such behavior all the time, Changizi explains. Just look at cats: “Although tuna is not what cat ancestors ate, tuna is sufficiently meat-ish in odor and taste that it fits right into a cat’s finicky diet disposition.” And music, it seems, is tuna for our finicky brains.

More about the science of music: 

• Making music from weather data
• Music of spheres and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys
• Music for cavemen
• The sounds of science

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Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology for everyone. Find her on Twitter and Google+ and join our conversation on Facebook. 

"Project Nim," a documentary by Oscar-winning director James Marsh, is a heartwarming and heartbreaking story about a home-bred, pot-smoking, cookie-chomping chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky. Nim was the star player in a controversial language experiment that failed ... but nevertheless laid the foundations for research into primate communication. 

In the early 1970s, Herb Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, adopted a 2-week-old chimpanzee. Nim Chimpsky (named after linguist Noam Chomsky) was to be the star of an experiment to see if non-human animals could be taught the elements of language. At the time, linguists and psychologists were locked in a shouting match about the true nature of our chatty brains and the origins of human language. Terrace hoped Nim would end the raging debate about how and why human language evolved. 

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The behaviorists led one camp, and said that language could be taught and learned by other intelligent, non-human species. The opposing camp, led by Chomsky, insisted that language was a human product and there were parts of it that non-human species could never ape. 

Terrace, who still does research on primate intelligence at Columbia, had heard stories about another precocious chimpanzee named Washoe, who lived with her scientist "parents" at the University of Nevada in Reno and had been taught to communicate through American Sign Language. 

But Terrace wasn’t satisfied with the way Washoe’s feats had been documented. Terrace wanted to raise young Nim among people, just as Washoe had been brought up, but scrupulously log his progress and learning abilities. If chimpanzees could in fact master elements of human language, he wanted to be sure how they did it, and how well they picked it up. "I wanted to have a total record of how Nim signed," Terrace told me.

It wasn't speech that Terrace was after: The vocal cords of chimpanzees weren't designed to replicate human speech. But if the behaviorists were correct, chimps, our nearest genetic relatives, should be able to learn and communicate using the grammatical rules and expressive elements that American Sign Language and spoken languages shared if they were brought up among people. 

So, at the age of 2 weeks, Nim Chimpsky was put in the foster care of Terrace's student, Stephanie LaFarge, who lived with her family in Manhattan. LaFarge, who even breast-fed Nim, would be the first of a string of chimp-sitters who tried to teach him American Sign Language. Laura-Ann Petitto, then an undergraduate at Columbia, would be next. She raised Nim from the time he was 3 months old until he was 4 years old. 

At first, the results were astonishing. Nim learned quickly, and his caretakers — Terrace's small army of students — carefully recorded reams of video and pages of notes describing Nim's signs and behavior. In all, Nim learned 120 words, and used them to communicate with thousands and thousands of phrases.

"[Other researchers used to say], this is like getting an SOS from out of space. And I felt the same way," Terrace told me. "How amazing would it be to ask a chimp how he felt about something?

The experimental data made it look as if Nim the "A" student had settled the matter: Human brains weren't that special when it came to language abilities. For a time, it seemed as though the behaviorists had a resounding victory on their hands.

Terrace was writing up his findings for the journal Science when one day, as he watched a well-worn tape of Nim signing with his teacher, he began to notice that something was off. “Then I realized the teachers were prompting him,” Terrace told me. “They weren’t even aware of this. But Nim was.” 

In a “quarter of a second,” years of observations came crashing down, Terrace told me. "My understanding of Nim signing the grammatical rule was wrong," he said. "Eventually I concluded that our minds are fundamentally different from a chimp's."

It had to do with our understanding of ourselves as individuals. "We’re aware of our mind," Terrace said. "With a chimpanzee, I don’t think there’s any awareness of one’s own mind and another mind out there. That means you can’t have any concept in a chimpanzee of a self and other." 

Nim used the concepts of “I” and “Nim” interchangeably. When he wanted cookies, Nim's second caretaker Petitto told me, the chimp would take Petitto’s hand and lead her to the kitchen, to the locked cabinet in which the cookies were stored. While his message was clear, Petitto said, Nim could never take himself out of the picture. “He took me through the motions. It was physical. He couldn’t say, 'On Monday could you buy the cookies,'" she explained. 

And the ability to take ourselves out of the situations we describe through language is one of the things that make humans unique as communicators. “Language frees us up from the here and now, [to] let you and I talk about Mars without leaving Earth,” Petitto says. 

Terrace eventually concluded that chimpanzees lacked the "social intelligence" that made humans able to talk to each other, and Project Nim was closed. Nim, now a full-grown hulk of a chimp, was shipped off to a center in Norman, Okla., to rub shoulders with other chimpanzees his own size. 

With that, Nim’s participation in science ended — unless you count his stint as a medical test subject. His Oklahoma caretakers covertly sold him to a cancer research facility, but the sale was exposed by the media. A legal challenge resulted in Nim's return to the sanctuary in Norman, an adventure that "Project Nim" describes in detail. 

Though scientists concluded that Nim did not use language to communicate independently, they also saw that this was no dumb animal. "[The Nim project] opened people up to the possibility of incredible intelligence that they hadn't suspected before," said Frans de Waal, a primate researcher at Emory University who studies the emotional bonds that chimpanzees have with each other. 

Bringing a chimpanzee home to teach it human language was all the rage once upon a time, but that’s old hat now, he said. Communication studies on chimp behavior now look at the many and varied ways in which chimps and other primates interact naturally. The Nim project was pivotal in giving scientists an early glimpse of those rich possibilities. “We feel like the language studies have opened up an enormous amount of knowledge about cognition, but not about linguistics,” de Waal said. 

De Waal is particularly interested in chimp communication through body language and gestures. It’s complex, involved and surprisingly similar to human gestural communication. “If you put young human children with chimpanzees, they make wonderful playmates,” de Waal told me. “They understand each other perfectly because their body language is the same — there’s an enormous similarity.” 

Chimps have also shown a deep capacity for empathy. When one family of chimps experiences a death, "other chimpanzees come over and comfort them," de Waal said. 

Laura-Ann Petitto, who was Nim's longest caregiver, still speaks gushingly about her emotional bond with Nim. “It’s unlike anything you’ve experienced," she told me. "It’s not like being with a child, it's not like being with a dog — [Nim] was his own category. So he pulled out of me emotions and thoughts that were unique to me, and very powerful, because he was unlike any category that we have." 

Petitto said her experience with Nim deeply motivated and influenced her work on the human brain. "I know how the brain tissue changes over time. I can look inside a baby's brain at a couple of days old and I can understand if that baby is at risk for language disorders later in its life," she told me. "All of these gifts that I can give to our species have been fundamentally informed by my work through Nim. So there’s been a wonderful closed circle."

More recent research reveals that chimps may be more attuned to understand human speech than previously thought, even if they can’t communicate themselves. A study published last month in Current Biology reported that a chimp raised by humans, as Nim was, could understand distorted human speech sounds. Such findings highlight "the importance of early experience in shaping speech perception," the study’s lead author told BBC News. 

Though he does not work on language studies any more, Terrace continues to explore the intelligence and memory capacity of monkeys, studying how quickly and extensively they remember combinations and sequences of images and numbers. “I’ve been studying how good their memory is, and I found it’s fantastic,” Terrace says. “And, I can sort of relate that to the work I did with the chimp in that. These monkeys are much smarter than anybody thought. But that kind of smarts does not give you language.” 

More about animal communication:

• How to speak 'Avatar'
• Grow a new language in your head
• Humans wired for language at birth

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Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

To learn more about 'Project Nim,' check out the film's website. The film was based on the book, 'Project Nim: The Chimp Who Would Be Human,' by Elizabeth Hess. 

"Blueberry!" I tell my 15-month-old son as I hand him one, hoping that he makes the connection between the piece of fruit and its name as I daydream about the glorious day when he says, "Please, Dad, can I have another blueberry?" 

For now, he points at the bowl full of tasty morsels and babbles something incomprehensible. His pediatrician, family and friends all assure me that he's on the right track. Before I know it, he'll be rattling off the request for another blueberry and much, much more. 

This pointing and babbling is all a part of the language learning process, they say, even though the process itself remains largely a mystery. One prominent, though controversial, hypothesis is that some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains.

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"There's some knowledge that the learner has that actually makes this process easier," Jennifer Culbertson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester, explained to me today.

This hypothesis was originally proposed 50 years ago by philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Culbertson recently confirmed it with an experiment featuring a virtual green blob for a teacher named Glermi who speaks a nonsensical language called Verblog. 

Teacher Glermi
In the study, Glermi taught participants – all of them English-speaking adults – his language via a video game interface.

In one experiment, Glermi displayed an unusual looking blue alien object called a "slergena" on the screen and instructed the participants to say "geej slergena," which in Verblog means "blue slergena." Then participants saw three of those objects on the screen and were instructed to say "slergena glawb," which means "slergena three."

For English speakers, the word order of "blue slergena" is normal but "slergena three" is out of whack. Many of the world's languages use both word orders – that is, in many languages adjectives precede nouns and many nouns are followed by numerals. However, rarely are both of these rules used together in the same language.

"We created a language that actually substantiates that (rare) pattern," Culbertson explained. "What we want to know is do learners actually have a problem learning that pattern or is the fact that it is rare across the world's languages just a coincidence. Is it something fundamental or not?"

She and colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University, where the experiments were performed while Culbertson was a doctoral student, found that adults had difficulty learning to speak proper Verblog. Versions of "bad Verblog" that have word orders common to the world's languages were easy to learn.

The finding, Culbertson notes, supports the hypothesis that certain properties of human grammar – such as where adjectives, nouns and numerals should occur – are hardwired into the human brain from birth.

The finding in adult test subjects, she adds, shows that these fundamental rules stay with us as we grow older. The adults could have had, for example, trouble learning all versions of Verblog, or used a more sophisticated, acquired language learning ability to learn all versions of Verblog. 

"The fact of the matter is they didn't learn the one that is also rare typologically. So that suggests that there are at least some things that stay constant as we grow up," she said.

Replicating with kids
This summer, Culberston plans to run the experiment with kids. She anticipates replication of the results, but also expects to see some differences. Children are widely thought to be able to learn language more quickly and easily than adults, she noted.

And my son, she assured me, is on the right track. As her results indicate, the fundamentals of grammar are already in place. "That's what makes his job easier," she told me. Soon, he'll be asking for his blueberries in a language I can comprehend. 

And so, with patience, I count out "one, two, three blueberries" and put them on his tray. He looks at me, smiles, and picks them up with one fell swoop and stuffs them in his mouth. 

More stories on learning languages: 

• What bilingual babies reveal about the brain 
• Fluent in another language? The CIA wants you 
• Unraveling how kids become bilingual so easily 
• A baby's babble leads to language 

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A study on the findings are under review for publication in the journal Cognition.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook pageor following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).