The evolution of "Communication Across Species"

The idea of cross-species communication follows a strange arc across these sources: Bateson (1966) approached dolphins not to decode their language but to study what an "unfamiliar kind" of communication system could reveal about the gaps in our own theory — specifically, the relationship between analogic (iconic, bodily) and digital (symbolic, verbal) coding. He noticed something crucial: verbal language didn't replace the older mammalian kinesic systems; both flourished side by side, serving utterly different functions. The boy says "I love you" in words, but the girl, if she has any sense, listens to his body. Decades later, Oberhaus documents Herzing's CHAT device and Sagan's dry observation that no human has learned dolphinese, and arrives at a sharper formulation of Bateson's implicit point: once a mind acquires symbolic communication, it cannot revert to presymbolic modes — we are trapped on our side of the divide, "indoctrinating dolphins into the symbolic regime" rather than crossing into theirs. Rifkin tries to bridge this with mirror neurons and empathy, arguing that pre-linguistic emotional communion is the real substrate of communication, but Chomsky and Berwick pull the other way, insisting human syntax is hierarchical in a way no animal system approaches, making the gap not gradual but categorical. The unresolved tension is this: Bateson's kinesic channel — the one that carries trust, mood, relationship — is precisely what we share with other mammals, and precisely what we cannot encode into any message we'd beam at the stars.