Abstract

A fundamental goal of the life sciences is to identify universal biological principles – the basic rules of organisation that underpin diverse natural phenomena. In this talk, I will argue that one way to identify such principles is to explore the universality outside our own species of the common statistical patterns of human language known as linguistic laws. I will firstly describe two linguistic laws, Zipf’s law of brevity and Menzerath’s law, and explain the tests we have carried out to see if they hold in non-human primate vocal communication. I will then describe the common mathematical principle that we have demonstrated to lie behind these two laws, and explain why we feel this may be a universal principle underpinning not only primate vocal communication, including human language, but also biological information systems much more broadly.