Quantcast
Channel: Sentence first » biology
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 11 View Live

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Terrence Deacon on language evolution

Was it William Burroughs who first described language as a virus from outer space? I’ve always liked the analogy, though it may be more useful to think of language as a symbiont from inner space. In...

View Article



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The normality of conversation on Twitter

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, recently said that it may be unhealthy to spend too much time using the service. He has a point, albeit a trivial one: it may also be unhealthy to spend too much time...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Most animals bark a little

In The Hidden Life of Dogs, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas reports what she has learned about dog behaviour and psychology from watching different breeds in diverse environments and social...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Living with Herds: a vocalisation dictionary

This short observational film (9 min.) by Natasha Fijn, research fellow at the Australian National University, will appeal to anyone interested in animal behaviour, interspecies communication, or...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Book spine poem: a language evolution special

Someone once told me it was harder to make a book spine poem, aka bookmash, from non-fiction titles. I don’t know; I hadn’t really thought about it before, and I’m never conscious of it when...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Outbreaks of contagious laughter (and mewing)

Robert Provine’s book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation has a very interesting chapter on contagious laughter. This curious phenomenon has long been exploited in such items as laugh boxes and...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Chimpanzee pant-hooting, termiting, and gesture

Here are a few items of linguistic interest from In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall’s account of her pioneering study of chimpanzee behaviour in Tanzania in the 1960s. I featured In the Shadow of Man...

View Article
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 11 View Live




Latest Images