The generic unit of information is still the "bit", and the word "word" -- which is not a unit of information, depending on entropy of the encoding -- is still standard terminology in communication theory.
This is a great point - communication is a vast array of information channels. “Motion” is communication whether or not it evolved to be, and so is every other aspect of occupying space in a biome.
And given that the organism under scrutiny is fungi - which contains many sprouting heads of the same underlying organism - one would have to have to have no familiarity with life at all to be surprised by intra-organism communication.
Would an alien encountering human language say "whatever it is not fundamentally different from the fact they shed skin cells in each other's space"?
> The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages.
I'll be the one to admit I am surprised by this (if true), even with the understanding that any motion or byproduct whatsoever might be communicative.
The thought that an organism is totally isolated from its environment, itself and other organisms is absurd, sure - but no one said that!
>Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. "It's a simple mechanism," Nemenman says. "If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf's law will kick in."
Okay, while it's really interesting that there are these detectable electrical "signals" this headline really needs "scientist who eats a mushroom discovers that mushrooms can talk." kind of vibe. (the champignon pun in the article not withstanding).
That said, given that multicellular life is just a mashup of single cell life with various bits kept because they were useful, it might be useful to investigate if these fungal structures were adapted as neurons.
Fungi and animals have a common ancestor, but that ancestor was an unicellular protozoan, without any resemblance to a fungus, but which resembled somewhat a human sperm cell, by having a single posterior flagellum used for swimming. Fungi and animals and their close unicellular relatives are called opisthokonts (Opisthokonta), which is a name describing their posterior flagellum (opistho- means back, while konta was the name for the rods that were used for pushing boats in areas with shallow water).
The branch that has evolved towards animals has developed multi-cellularity while retaining their ancestral lifestyle of eating other living beings, which is a lifestyle that requires mobility.
The branch that has evolved towards fungi has adapted to a terrestrial life, unlike the branch that has evolved towards animals in the oceans.
To avoid desiccation on land, the fungi have developed a chitinous cell wall. This has solved the desiccation problem, but this wall has made the fungal cells immobile. So they had to change their lifestyle from the ancestral lifestyle of the eukaryotes to a lifestyle similar to that of the heterotrophic bacteria, i.e. fungi do not eat food by engulfing it, like animals, but they grow into food, by secreting enzymes that break the food into small molecules, which can be then absorbed by the fungal cells.
While there exists only a single group of living beings like the animals, which are both multicellular and mobile, there are several groups like the fungi, besides the true fungi. All such fungous organisms have immobile cells with cell walls, so if they are multicellular they must grow into food in the form of a branched network, in order to maximize the surface of contact between them and food.
The other groups of living beings that look like fungi, but which are not true fungi, are not closely related to animals. The most important of those groups is related to the brown algae, but there is even a group of bacteria that look like fungi, the actinomycetes. Besides the other living beings that feed like fungi, so they look like mycelia (branched networks), there are even more groups of living beings that do not feed like fungi, so most of the time they do not look like fungi, but which are terrestrial like fungi, so they must use the same method of spore dispersion by wind, so they grow mushroom-like bodies for the launch of spores, e.g. the slime molds.
This feels like the "we share 50% of our genes with bananas" factoid.
Considering humans have 3.1 billion base pairs and the most fungi have 30-300 million, I'm not sure how this could be true without some major caveats. Admittedly, a lot of our DNA is considered "junk" - though whether it all is or not is a question.
(the banana one is that they're talking specifically about protein coding genes which makes up about 2% of our DNA)
That's not inconsistent with GP's comment - animalia and fungi are opisthokonts, but siblings or cousins in a family tree sense, neither is ancestor to the other, but there is common ancestry.
Article is three years old, and the fungi are not talking to us! I imagine the communication being a bit slow like the scene in the kids animated movie, Zootopia, where sloths work at the DMV..."P....L....E....A....S....E-------" don't tread on me! However, if like German 1 word can cover a whole concept, then 50 words may be sufficient to communicate in a reasonable time scale ;)
I wish that I had the deep biology knowledge to make a joke (not joke?) Large Mushroom Model based on actual signal data.
This also makes me wonder about the idea of attempting to expand on this research by artificially stimulating a fungal colony with the various “words” and seeing if different effects can be produced.
Fun fact, "wood wide web" is a term used to describe the underground fungal network plants use to talk to each other. It's science communication but it's a term I've seen frequently used in published papers
The idea of mushrooms being the only species that communicates is absurd.
Growers of organic food, rather than the dominant chemical farmers you buy your food from, are very aware of the complex nature of communication of the biology beneath our feet.
I love how arrogant humans get when you hit at their “that’s supposed to be a human thing!” nerve. Sign language is language, dance is language, writing is language, speaking is language, semaphores in a sail boat is language, Morse code is language, two’s complement is language, a mushroom communicating with other mushrooms with a small vocabulary of tokens is language, to think otherwise is incredibly small minded.
You don’t need consciousness or phenomena or quailia to have language. Heck, every computer understands some sort of language. ChatGPT is capable of conversing in English better than anyone in this room, and it doesn’t need consciousness or any of that stuff to do it. Language is neither unique nor special.
We have formal definitions, it’s anything that can have a grammar, these definitions are incredibly broad, big endian two’s compliment integer encoding has a grammar consisting of two tokens, 0 and 1. All you need is something that can form a sentence and something that can parse it and the thing going on between them is language. Languages vary in complexity but the floor for that is way lower than you are thinking. Simple languages consisting of one or two tokens are still languages.
There are multiple definitions of language, not one. As another commenter pointed out, if you make the definition broad enough it loses usefulness.
> it’s anything that can have a grammar,
"Can" have a grammar is not restricting. "Does" is the correct verb, and that hasn't been proved.
> All you need is something that can form a sentence and something that can parse it and the thing going on between them is language.
OK, you've actually drawn out an important point. CAN the fungi form a sentence?
I can encode the 2nd sentence in "War and Peace" into polypeptides, but the polypeptides are still just an encoding of the language I picked (English? Russian?), and it doesn't make exchange of polypeptides by any other organism (even grad students!) a linguistic exercise.
Only things for which you have parsing rules and a parser and a thing that can form sentences. This is literally the CS definition. It just doesn’t require consciousness.
Truly random tappings on a tree are not language, but if a type of bird signals that predators are nearby by striking a tree with their beak with consistent rules that are understood by other birds or creatures, then you have language. But you would have us not study these things because you think they are beneath us. I would instead say we are nothing special, and thus everything is special, or at least historically we always miss out on scientific insight when we arrogantly assume humans have X but other life forms do not.
Show me two rocks where one forms a sentence and another one parses it and sure.
Now if your definition of language is something arrogant like “a system of communication where combinations of tokens are given semantic meaning that correspond with conscious states and phenomena” then I would say that is incredibly limiting and ignores the preponderance of language all around you both in nature and technology. If someone builds a computer that can parse x86 assembly, it doesn’t cease to be parsing language if I stipulate that humans never existed and this computer just happens to exist. The tree still falls in the forest even if there is no human consciousness there to perceive it and the same goes for language. If it is encoded by something and decoded by something else fairly consistently (fuzzy is fine if the communication is still generally effective) then you have language.
More importantly the existence of unconscious systems that can generate and parse sentences in arbitrary languages means consciousness isn’t very relevant or necessary when analyzing language and perhaps focusing on it too much actually gets in the way of meaningful research and discovery.
Right, and I would say even communication is a strong word here. We are talking about automatic biological reflexes. Those are great, and mushroom signal exchange is genuinely amazing. But describing it this way continues in a concerning tradition of equivocating on terms with already strongly anchored colloquial meanings, to imply something beyond actual capabilities of plants and fungi.
I think it mistakenly puts forward an impression of intention, awareness, interpretation, conscious comprehension, agency, which are not there. And worse, I think some science communicators deliberately fan the flames of those associations. It might be that it's fair to call this communication and draw the line at language, but even communication here means something like blind signal transmission capable of prompting an automatic biological reflex somewhere else.
The mushrooms are speaking, but not in words, rather in ripples of being. The currents beneath your feet are alive. They hum of moisture, hunger, damage, alliance. It's not a conversation in alphabetic language, but a resonance—a conversation in electricity and time. If you could tune in, you might hear the forest breathing, think in fungal pulses, dream in mycelial code.
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