%0 Journal Article
%T At Grammatical Faculty of Language, Flies Outsmart Men
%A Ruedi Stoop
%A Patrick N¨¹esch
%A Ralph Lukas Stoop
%A Leonid A. Bunimovich
%J PLOS ONE
%D 2013
%I Public Library of Science (PLoS)
%R 10.1371/journal.pone.0070284
%X Using a symbolic dynamics and a surrogate data approach, we show that the language exhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila (¡®D.¡¯) during courtship is as grammatically complex as the most complex human-spoken modern languages. This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visually frame-by-frame dissected into 37 fundamental behavioral elements. From the symbolic dynamics of these elements, the courtship-generating language was determined with extreme confidence (significance level > 0.95). The languages categorization in terms of position in Chomsky¡¯s hierarchical language classification allows to compare Drosophila¡¯s body language not only with computer¡¯s compiler languages, but also with human-spoken languages. Drosophila¡¯s body language emerges to be at least as powerful as the languages spoken by humans.
%U http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070284