At Grammatical Faculty of Language, Flies Outsmart Men.docVIP

AtGrammaticalFacultyofLanguage,FliesOutsmartMen RuediStoop1*,PatrickNu¨esch1,RalphLukasStoop1,LeonidA.Bunimovich2 1Institute of Neuroinformatics, University and ETH of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United StatesofAmerica Abstract Using asymbolic dynamics andasurrogate data approach, we showthat the languageexhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila(‘D.’)duringcourtshipisasgrammaticallycomplexasthemostcomplexhuman-spokenmodernlanguages.This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visuallyframe-by-framedissectedinto37fundamentalbehavioralelements.Fromthesymbolicdynamicsoftheseelements, the courtship-generating language was determined with extreme confidence (significance level . 0.95). The languages categorizationintermsofpositioninChomsky’shierarchicallanguageclassificationallowstocompareDrosophila ’sbody language not only with computer’s compiler languages, but also with human-spoken languages. Drosophila’s body languageemergestobeatleastaspowerfulasthelanguagesspokenbyhumans. Citation:StoopR,Nu¨eschP,StoopRL,BunimovichLA(2013)AtGrammaticalFacultyofLanguage,FliesOutsmartMen.PLoSONE8(8):e70284.doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0070284 Editor:MatjazPerc,UniversityofMaribor,Slovenia ReceivedJune13,2013;AcceptedJune18,2013;PublishedAugust23,2013 Copyright: ? 2013 Stoop etal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricteduse,distribution,andreproductioninanymedium,providedtheoriginalauthorandsourcearecredited. Funding:Nocurrentexternalfundingsourcesforthisstudy. CompetingInterests:Theauthorshavedeclaredthatnocompetinginterestsexist. *E-mail:ruedi@ini.phys.ethz.ch Introduction hierarchyt-2[9,10]).Notethatourgeneralapproachcouldalsobe appliedtoothertaxonometriesoflanguagecharacterization. In the animal world, courtship ranges from simple rituals to