Apes reveal language origins, and being dyslexic in science
This month we hear what orangutans can tell us about the origins of human speech, we ask if science making life even harder for dyslexics, where do the scientists we train end up and do they stay in science, and new insights into the songs whales sing underwater...
In this episode
00:32 - Ape origins of human language
Ape origins of human language
Adriano Lameira, University of Warwick
“On my way out of the door, because it looked like rain, I grabbed my umbrella.” That sentence contains one phrase nestled inside the other. Linguists talk about this being like Russian Dolls, with one fitting inside the other, and it’s a characteristic feature of how humans speak. All languages, we believe, appear to do it, which suggests it’s a feature of the way our brains have evolved to produce and handle language. Previously, we thought it was uniquely human. But now, as he explains to Chris Smith, comprehensive analysis of vocalisations recorded from orangutans has revealed to Warwick University’s Adriano Lameira, a similar pattern of “speaking”. So is this pointing towards the evolutionary origins of how humans learned to talk?
Adriano - I study great apes both in the wild and in captivity, to really try to understand and decipher their vocal communication. Because a lot of times we know that our species is unique in terms of our language capacity. And oftentimes we quickly assume that we are categorically different from our closest living ancestors, the great apes, when in fact we draw these conclusions without actually putting in the necessary effort to prove that those capacities are indeed absent in our closest living relatives. And so I kind of use and study great ape communication, cognition, cultures as a time machine to go back to our own ancestors and try to understand what they were capable of and why did that steer our lineage towards what was to become one day fully fledged language.
Chris - Because people often say that some dramatic jump or mutation or shift happened that endowed humans with a range of things, including language. Whereas if what you are saying is true, then it's a more gentle slide in evolutionary terms where various building blocks are assembled and then slowly come together in us to give us those abilities. So they should therefore be vestiges of those building blocks out there in the natural world. We just need to find them?
Adriano - Correct. Exactly. So actually the principles of evolution by natural selection tells us that we should expect those gradations, we should expect a continuum within phylogenetic families.
Chris -
How did you put this to the test?
Adriano - So actually the behaviour came to us. We were following wild orangutans daily and recording every vocal behavior that they did because we want to catalog their repertoire before they go extinct. And when we started to try to really quantify the characteristics of these loud calls produced by males, we started to see hints of different layers of signals.
Chris - When you say layers, tell us a bit more about what you mean by that and why that's special.
Adriano - Right. So as layers, I mean different levels of organisation. So this characteristic of putting a signal or a pattern within itself or within a similar signal or pattern. An example would be Russian dolls where you have one doll that fits within itself. This is important because this is how we tend to organise our own stream of words and sentences. I can be saying a phrase and then insert another phrase in there to further explain my point, and then I step out again of that little clause and I continue my original sentence. So this is something that languages do all the time. It's claimed to be universal and therefore claimed to be one of those things that really makes human language distinct from every other animal vocal system is that only we can insert a sequence of sounds within another sequence of sounds. And so when we started to see hints of layers in wild orangutan loud calls, we thought maybe this is the type of evidence that has been missing.
Chris - You've sent me some examples of what you recorded. Can you talk us through what we're going to hear here, and signpost us towards each of the examples? So which one would you like to start with and just tell us what we're gonna hear before we play it.
Adriano - So I brought two recordings along. The first one are the pulsar, which are kind of the climax of the wild orangutan loud call. These are the kind of extended notes to be heard and broadcasted across large distances of the forest. So these we can think of as the larger Russian doll. Exactly. So these, these are the extended notes that carry over the course so that other orangutans, both females and males hear the calling male.
Chris - And those punctuated loud noises, those are the big outer Russian doll. So those are the sounds that you are saying if I was speaking to you and I wanted to include a phrase inside something I'm already saying, those would be the outer capsule as it were. And now we're going to think about what's going in the middle?
Adriano - Correct. We are gonna hear grumbles, which we can think of as the smaller layer of our sound Russian doll. So we can still see here the pace of the larger notes. Right? We can hear <sounds imitation> so we still have the tempo of the larger pulses, which kind of the carrier bray, so to speak, the larger doll. And now we have smaller nodes, staccato notes with their own little tempo inside the main beat <sound imitation> regular, notes inside regular notes, which kind of effectively is an example of a pattern nested within itself.
Chris - You are arguing that because they can do this, that is the foundation for what we do when we are actually nesting phrases and doing recursive speech patterns.
Adriano - Exactly. So one of our most important tasks here was to try to disentangle are these not just the result of a bodily resonance, for example. And so what we found is when characterising the two tempos and seeing their relationship, their ratio, the quicker, smaller tempo was not related to the larger one. And so what this led us to conclude and be able to exclude the possibility that the smaller tempo is indeed not an artifact of the larger one or vice versa,
Chris - Given that orangs are more distantly related to us than say chimps and bonobos are, if they've got this and this is part of the origin of us being endowed with a similar ability, does this mean it should be in other great apes? And is it therefore a question of going, looking for this now in bonobo and chimpanzee vocalisations, for example, which would give confidence to what you are saying is, is right?
Adriano - Absolutely. That's an excellent question. And yes, that would be the assumption. If orangutans being the earliest diverging lineage of great apes, one would assume that closer related lineages to us, such as chimps and vulnerables and gorillas, they would also have. However, I think right now the understanding is that all the great apes really need to be treated as a family because different lineages have gone to do different adaptations. So for example, we know that our last common ancestor with great apes was not as terrestrial as chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas. And so in terms of lifestyle, actually orangutans, although genetically relatively further, they still live a lifestyle and an environment that is actually closer to what our ancestor lived with. And so I, I think in this sense, we should definitely go and search in the African apes. The clues may be there and they may have been hidden in plain sight just like they have in the case for the orangutan long calls.
09:29 - Dyslexia among scientists
Dyslexia among scientists
Sara Rankin, Imperial College
About 10% of the population are said to have dyslexia. This, according to Sir Jim Rose, who authored the Rose report into the condition in 2009, is “a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.” Importantly, the definition also emphasises that dyslexia occurs across the full range of intellectual abilities. So, is the way we teach, examine and practice science causing us to lose out on the potential contributions of a whole slice of society? Speaking with Chris Smith, Sara Rankin, herself dyslexic and an academic at Imperial College, London, has written a very compelling account of why she thinks this is the case, pointing out, along the way, that until we invented reading and writing, we wouldn’t have even known that dyslexia exists…
Sara - As academics, if you want to be a scientist working in a university, doing research in your lab, and obviously all that research is very practical. You're doing experiments, very exciting, your testing hypotheses, you then have to communicate them. And the way that we communicate is a very formal process, which requires writing a scientific paper. And it has to be written in a very prescriptive way. And one of the things that we're saying in this paper is that if you are somebody that is dyslexic, this may be a challenge for you. And it certainly is for me because we do not do well in terms of text being our sort of mode of communication. We would much prefer to talk or to use much more sort of visual way of communicating. When somebody says to me, "right, just write that down," that's a big problem for me. And if you go back into school, you did science, you understood science, you got excited about science, but then you got into an exam situation where you weren't doing a practical, you were actually having to write an essay on such and such. And writing an essay in terms of assessing somebody's ability to be a scientist, I think is completely missing the point of what being a scientist is about.
Chris - To what extent though, Sara is the horses for courses? I completely get the point you are making. And I completely agree with you. If you're talking about something that you can expound upon in an essay, but maths isn't assessed that way. Physics often isn't assessed that way...
Sara - Okay, so you think it's not being assessed that way. But you look at a GCSE and it is being assessed with a literacy, because what they have decided to do is, to make it more interesting, they create a whole story. Now you have to read a long text. And for us that are dyslexic, we don't want to read all that. We don't care about that. We just wanna get onto the maths or the biology.
Chris - But you've been incredibly articulate in explaining the problem to me and making me completely understand where you are coming from. And, and your command of, of expressive English is extremely powerful. So why not get some software that means you could speak into a Dictaphone and convey your thoughts that way and then have the computer do the actual writing? Because, clearly, if there is a gap for you, it's not in being extremely articulate.
Sara - Yeah. So it's a stylistic thing. I'm used to talking to lots of different audiences. I've spent my whole career being engaged in outreach activities, working with schools, et cetera. So I'm, I'm used to talking at multiple levels, but scientific paper has a very prescriptive way that they want you to write. And every journal is slightly different. It's a psychological thing. I think that we basically have this from school from being told that we're stupid and lazy. 'cause We, we have all these ideas. I can, you know, ideas come out of us just ridiculously, but it's putting things in a two dimensional, linear way. That's my problem.
Chris - Is that the same for everyone with dyslexia? Or is everyone's fishbowl of information swimming around gonna be a bit different? And therefore if we tried to say, okay, we'll do this in a way that suits dyslexics, in fact there is no simple, straightforward, one way that suits dyslexics, it would have a bit different for everybody. Do we just need more flexibility in terms of the way that we allow people to convey their science? Is that what you are arguing for?
Sara - Yes. I'm arguing for more flexibility. So a specific example, I run Masters levels science courses at Imperial and I don't do exams. <Laugh> Students don't have exams! And we offer lots of different types of assessment. Sometimes students will have to write 2000 words, but other times they would have to create an infographic. Other times we would say, "right, make this complicated bit of science, how are you going to engage patients or primary school kids with this to, to get them some understanding of this complicated bit of science." And what we really want to assess is not knowledge recall. We want to assess the ability to utilise knowledge, to innovate with knowledge.
Chris - How much talent are we losing out on exploiting through the rigid way we're operating at the moment, then, do you think?
Sara - Well, what we can see, if we just look at GCSE level, these are the exams you do when you are 16. At that point, 10% of the students will have something like dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism. Some of them might not have an official diagnosis. And we know there's a huge attainment gap at that point. And nowadays, if you get a B, you are not allowed to go on to do A level in many schools. So if you're not allowed to go and do the science A level because you get a B, you are losing those people. And we know that only 3% of students at A level have a specific learning difference. And that is compared with the, the numbers in the general population, which is between 15 and 20%.
Chris - So there's potentially a, a huge dropout, attrition driven by the system you're arguing. Yes. Where do the people who leave go then, what do they end up doing? These potentially gifted people who could make a valid contribution to science, technology, engineering, maths? Where do they go instead?
Sara - Well, for example, the Royal College of Art, which is around the corner from Imperial, 49% of their students have specific learning differences. There's a huge concentration within the arts. And that's because within the arts you can get into art college with a portfolio, you can do a foundation course, you can get a portfolio of work. So a lot of these students end up in creative industries, likewise in architecture. And that's thought to be because people that are dyslexic are very good at this sort of 3D understanding of the world.
17:30 - Tasting ancient therapeutic plants
Tasting ancient therapeutic plants
Marco Leonti, University of Cagliari
In ancient Greece and Rome, the expected effects of botanical drugs - which dominated the formulary and continue to play a massive role in medicine today - were explained by their taste. But what did these agents taste like, and how informative was this rationale? Speaking with Chris Smith, step forward Marco Leonti, from the University of Cagliari. He set up a project to track down, grow or harvest and then taste - with the help of a panel of 11 tasters - many of the agents documented in the classical literature and relate them to the indications for which they were originally prescribed…
Marco - I worked before with indigenous people in southern Mexico. There I learned that people use taste and smell for selecting their medicinal plants and botanical drugs. And I always had this question about the humoral system of ancient European, Greek, Roman medicine. Human therapy was in vogue until the 18th century, and I always wondered, why was this so persistent through time ? Then I found out by reading literature that taste was involved. And then I connected the taste with the experience in southern Mexico and the literature about indigenous people. And then I thought, wow, let's make an exploratory study about that.
Chris - What was your reference text then? What did you go to to work out what people were taking. So in other words, what, what drugs or plants they were exploiting for what indications and why they thought those were the right things for the job?
Marco - Our reference text was De Materia Medica, by Dioscorides. It's the foremost pharmaceutical textbook from antiquity that came down to us and was repeatedly translated, and used across the centuries and millennia.
Chris - So talk us through what you did, what the book said, and then how you put it to the test, what you did.
Marco - We went through chapter by chapter trying first of all to identify the botanical drug. We could identify about 70% of all botanical species that are described in the Book.
Chris - How many is that?
Marco - We identified 421, I think there are.
Chris - Once you had that list, what did you then do with it?
Marco - Well, we extracted all therapeutic information that was written down in that book and we categorised that therapeutic information into therapeutic use groups with 4,433 entries. But from that list we had to get the drugs. So we collected first of all the drugs. Some of these drugs I cultivated in my garden, or some I picked from my garden because I have quince here and the flowers of quince you need to be there ready to pick the flowers of quince when they, when the flowers are blooming. Others we bought, and most of them we collected in field doing field work across Europe.
Chris - Did you all alert the drug squad before you started growing these things in your garden?! <Laugh> Some of them on that list are presumably banned substances, aren't they?
Marco - Some of them are, yeah. Some of them are, are toxic substances. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are toxic. But for the tasting panel, we of course dispense that amount of drug necessary to perceive taste, but without the probability that that's the panelists can intoxicate themselves.
Chris - Got you. So you actually having grown these things, you make extracts, which would be analogous to what the people would've done back in antiquity. Then you actually ate them!?
Marco - We had 11 volunteers. So we had this, this collection of botanical drugs, which then we dispensed to 11 panelists in a double blind clinical trial.
Chris - And what did you ask them when you, when you gave them the agents? What was the question or the sort of guidance around appraisal, the instructions that you gave to those panelists?
Marco - Well, we made a session before that to be clear about the taste descriptors that we used to qualify the taste perception about 22 different tastes. And we did that first in a pre-session. And then finally panelists, without knowing what they were tasting, they were instructed to chew on the botanical stuff, perceive taste, then spit out, wash their mouth and write down the intensity of perception and the quality of perception.
Chris - And did you see the sort of relationship that you were expecting?
Marco - My interpretation of the results are that at that time when, let's say in in ancient Greek medicine, that's where people started to philosophise about nature and medicine and they tried to make sense of what they were doing and they were thinking about tastes, the colours, about the whole world, how it's connected together. And they took these patterns for granted. But what we see now is thanks to the pharmacological data that we are able to, to read now, you can explain this through the different physiological effects that specific tastes can elicit in humans. There are taste receptors in our body throughout, not only in our mouth, but also along the gastrointestinal system, the gut and the liver. So, through this data, now we can really see that this makes sense or where it makes sense. Sometimes it may make sense and of course people in former times did not know that, but what they got at the time was a consensus that came down to them for millennia of years. This was the drugs that were used in ancient Greek and sold on the markets, right. And Dioscorides the author of that book, our study is based on, he just described the most common drugs that were used in the Eastern Mediterranean at that time. And our study kind shows how taste perception has moulded that therapeutic knowledge and that mate America. And that's why the gangs in Greek thing came to the idea that taste is involved in this whole system of medicine they had.
24:04 - Do scientists stay scientists?
Do scientists stay scientists?
Rachel Coulthard-Graf, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
To scientific careers now, and the question of whether the scientists we’ve been training stay in science, or exit to work in other sectors? Speaking with Chris Smith, Rachel Coulthard-Graf, from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL, wondered this, which was why she’s tracked down and probed the careers of the vast majority of the trainees that have passed through her institution since the late 1990s…
Rachel - EMBL trains a lot of scientists, they stay with us typically around four years and then they move on to other positions and we really wanted to understand what they go on to do so that we can adapt our training to reflect that.
Chris - You've got a nice big cohort. You've looked at, this must be nearly a quarter of a centuries worth of scientists you've got here?
Rachel - Yes. So we looked at scientists who left over a 24 year period, so going all the way back to 1997. Up to to 2020.
Chris - And how did you follow them up? Have you stayed in touch with all of them to then see where they went?
Rachel - Many of them are members of our alumni association. We also tried to really find everyone, so we, we made a list of every scientist that we trained over this period and went Googling for them. And we've got a lot of information also from places like LinkedIn to really look at everything they've done since!
Chris - Do you have a second career as a private investigator!? It sounds like it! What was your pickup rate? Did you get to most people?
Rachel - Yes. So we could identify where around 85% of of people were working. And for many of those also really we could trace back their entire career since they left Bel.
Chris - So what happened? What did everyone do?
Rachel - We found a really wide range of positions. Not surprisingly, over 95% were in some kind of role linked to science. Half of those within academic research or teaching. We also found 15% doing research in industry, so many people, for example, working in the pharma industry and then 15% in other types of role linked to science. For example, secondary school science teachers, journal editors, intellectual property. So lots of different areas of, of science related careers.
Chris - You must regard this then as something of a win because you've invested in training scientists and you've got people who are active in the scientific realm?
Rachel - What we hope is that people who, who train as scientists really use the skills that they are developing during their scientific training. And as you said, what we see is they seem to be, so we were really happy to see this. Of course, it's an observational study, so I think what would be really nice is to be able to do more detailed surveys to find out which of those skills people are using most. But yeah, from the data we have from the study, it seems like they really are using their, their scientific training.
Chris - Did anything stand out in the data that might help us when we're training the next generation of scientists to spot the stars early to help to fast track them, to get people really into the careers they need to be in rather than for them to, to spend a bit of a more meandering course getting there over a longer time period. Is there anything we can do to help people be more efficient with their training? Effectively?
Rachel - For me, doing this study was actually part of this. I think just being transparent about what career opportunities there are and helping scientists engage with thinking about what their skills are and which of those careers they would like to apply those skills in is really what this is about.
Chris - But in terms of, say if one looks at people who became principal investigators, running groups, carrying out lab-based research, were there any predictions early on about who were people destined to fall into those positions? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> versus the people who were going to go into teaching or go into industry for example. What
Rachel - We definitely did see is a, a strong correlation between publication record at EMBL and whether they remained in academic research and established their own research groups. So people who publish two papers were six times more likely than someone who didn't publish as a, as a first author. So the main author of a study.
Chris - And what about the, the gender ratio? We often talk on this program about different outcomes for men and women in science, especially at different stages of science. Was any of that apparent or has anything changed there?
Rachel - Yes, we did observe female scientists were less likely to go into these research group leader positions and more likely to go into non-research positions. But there wasn't any clear trends with time there.
28:60 - Fin Whale Sounds
Fin Whale Sounds
Miriam Romagosa, University of the Azores
Whales are well known to sing underwater; but some species, including fin whales, are relatively poorly studied. And this is where Miriam Romagosa, from the University of the Azores, comes in with her paper looking at how these animals can change their tunes, altering the intervals between the notes, and assimilating new songs from outside the group. There’s still a lot to learn, but, as she explains to Chris Smith, it’s a big step forward…
Miriam - Fin whales produce a very low frequency songs; so low frequency that we cannot hear them. And these songs are believed to act as a mating displays to attract females or to compete with other males. What we found is that these songs have a greater plasticity in their songs than we previously thought, and they can change their songs very quickly. We found that one of the parameters of the song, the interval between sounds, it changed very quickly. And during the transition period of this change, there were some songs that were hybrid that included both these intervals. So the change and the presence of hybrid songs during this transition period may mean that things are learning from each other and they're synchronising their song to all using the same rhythm.
Chris - How do you know who was singing what though? Can you recognise individuals from a population and therefore see how they're changing? Or are you just considering a whole population? And the mixture of the cacophony, as it were of sounds that that come along, that are produced by the whole assemblage of whales?
Miriam - Our study used recordings from autonomous recorders at the bottom of the sea. So we didn't track the whales, we just analysed the songs as a whole population.
Chris - So do you know what motivated them to have different songs in the first place? Is this just one group that have sung a certain way for a long time and they happen to have some kind of territorial or breeding overlap with another group that sing a slightly different way and they both adopt each other's sound? Or was something else the reason why you think they ended up with a different song?
Miriam - What happens with humpback whales, for example, is that some migrants arrive to a, a new population with a different song. And then the rest of the humpback whales of these this other population adopt this new song. This is what is called cultural revolutions in humpback whales. We don't know if this happens with fin wheels because we don't know the origin of the new song. So we cannot say the fin whales may also have cultural revolutions. But because this happened in a very large area of the North Atlantic with different ecological characteristics, this was not caused by something that happened in the environment. So we believe that perhaps fin whales coming from another region we don't know, started singing the new song. And slowly all the fin whales in the Mid-Atlantic change their songs.
Chris - Do you know why one song is considered superior to another? Why should they adopt an incoming song? Is it just novelty that the animals like that because it stands out, it's different, and so you are more likely to get noticed so you beat the competition for a while? Or might there be some other reason why you get this cultural revolution of song?
Miriam - We don't know <laugh>, actually, scienctists studying humpback songs don't even know. But one hypothesis is the novelty. Females may prefer novelty, but what it seems that is really important for fin whales is the synchronisation in rhythms. We don't know why, but this is something that happens everywhere in all oceans. And they also synchronise during the season, so they have seasonal variations in their rhythms and they also synchronise seasonally. So desynchronisation might mean something to them. Perhaps it facilitates localisation, but we don't know.
Chris - Apart from understanding more about their biology, are there any immediate implications of this? We learned this week researchers publishing a paper in the journal Nature actually why some groups of whales make the sounds they do. And anatomically how, which was a mystery before amazingly, I'm surprised that we didn't understand that. But this tells us more about the constraints on the sorts of songs those groups of whale can make, and that tells us a bit about how better to conserve them and not to make noises that might disturb them. What does the discovery of these new song patterns in the fin whales that you've come across mean in those terms?
Miriam - Yeah. Well, the studies like, like this one, help understanding the limits of song variation in fin whales, for example. This frequency decrease cannot go on forever and the study in Nature now confirms it because the structures that produce sounds in these species limits the range of frequency. These animals can produce sounds. So if they had to avoid atrogenic noise, like for example, from shipping, so they are able to communicate with each other. They may not be able to avoid these noise by increasing or decreasing their frequencies because they are limited, they're anatomically limited. And these studies help to understand the limits of, of these song variations.
Chris - And what will you go back and do now? Is it possible to go a step further and try to pursue individual animals and see how their song evolves or how static it is over time and see what the effect of one of these incoming rhythm changes is on individuals? So rather than just look at the population level, you've got the chance to see how individuals respond, adapt, and update their song patterns like this.
Miriam - Yeah, I would actually like to do tracking and especially put acoustic recording tags to the animals and study how they change their songs individually and how they interact with each other. But it's challenging because these animals are very pelagic; when they sing is during the winter and normally here in the Northern Atlantic in offshore areas. But it's, it is a project that you know, that I, I have in mind for the future.
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