Whales, Humans Follow the Same 'Law'

Researchers have discovered that humpback whales and humans have something fundamental in common: Their songs, like our language, follow the same statistical pattern, reports the Smithsonian Magazine. Details:

• The law: All human languages adhere to a principle known as Zipf's law. Meaning, "the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on," per Phys.org.
• The whales: Researchers broke down eight years' worth of whale recordings into segments seen as the equivalent of words: "otherworldly grunts, shrieks and moans," per Scientific American. They translated these into alphanumeric codes—"one year they might do grunt grunt squeak, and so we'll have AAB, and then another year they might have moan squeak grunt, and so that would be CBA," researcher Jenny Allen of Australia's Griffith University tells New Scientist.

• The pattern: To their surprise, the researchers discovered that whale song adheres to Zipf's law. "I'll never forget the moment that graph appeared, looking just like the one we know so well from human language," says Simon Kirby of the University of Edinburgh. "This made us realize that we'd uncovered a deep commonality between these two species, separated by tens of millions of years of evolution."
• Like human babies: In their study in Science, the researchers theorize that the pattern helps make the songs easier to learn and pass along. Just as human babies learn to decipher patterns and sound combinations in the wall of chatter enveloping them, young humpbacks likely do the same. "It strengthens the view that we should be thinking about human language not as a completely different phenomenon from other communication systems but instead think about what it shares with them," says study co-author Inbal Arnon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

(More whales stories.)