Communication is not what sets humans apart
This is a passage from Ray Nayler’s book The Mountain in the Sea. I keep coming across this idea that language enables us to talk about what is not immediately present, and that we are the only species capable of doing so.
Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols-letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language.
Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture-these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.
This feature of language, I later learned, has a name: displacement
the capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present (spatially or temporally); i.e., things that are either not here or are not here now.
And that, honeybees, ants, and ravens can also do this, albeit in a more limited way.
