Professor Mark Elgar, 'Do animals have language?; 2019

The extraordinary dance of honeybees, which communicates to nestmates the nature and location of food resources, was originally described as a language. While the dance certainly provides observing bees with impressively detailed information about where to go on their next foraging trip, it bears little resemblance to the language of humans. Like humans, animals convey and receive information from others of their species, but these communications differ from human language in some critical ways. Animals communicate with signals, which might be odours, colours, sounds, or behaviours, and these signals have very similar meanings each time they are used. In mammals, vocal signals are involuntary and are typically linked to an emotional state. A great deal of communication in humans is voluntary and not linked to an emotional state. Importantly, humans use language to construct complex messages, or sentences, that allow us to communicate ideas and concepts about the past, the present and the future. All species are unique, but humans are distinguished from all other species by a single characteristic: the ability to communicate with language.

PROFESSOR MARK ELGAR is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne. He received a BSc from Griffith University, PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held Fellowships at the University of Oxford and University of New South Wales. He investigates the evolutionary significance of social and reproductive behaviour of animals, conducting field work in Australia, Europe, North America, Pacific Islands, and Papua New Guinea. He is especially interested in how chemical communication mediates animal behaviour, and especially the selection pressures favouring diverse insect antennae. He contributes to public debate through opinion pieces, and commentary on radio and TV.

As part of the 'Language: Interdisciplinary Public Forum' on Saturday 19 October 2019.
Co-presented by the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Centre of Visual Arts (COVA), University of Melbourne and generously supported by Peter Jopling AM QC, Andy Zhang and Calvin Huang.