• Question: Will we ever know everything there is to know about the language of life?

    Asked by to Wendy, Suzanne, Nadine, Ioannis, Freya, Daniel, Carolyn, Alyssa on 8 Jan 2018. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nadine Lavan

      Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      How we use language and communicate is constantly evolving and changing: just think about emojis, hashtags and memes – they weren’t really around around 50 years ago but are now used everywhere. So, with new things popping up all the time, it’s a big job to keep up – all this, while we are still trying to make sure we got the right idea about some of the basics of communication (in science, there are usually a few opinions around on how things work and often we don’t know which one is more right)! So, no, I don’t think will ever stop finding out things about the language of life that we didn’t know before, which is an exciting prospect!

    • Photo: Freya Wilson

      Freya Wilson answered on 9 Jan 2018:

      I don’t think so, we don’t even know about all of life yet! And it is constantly changing and evolving so there will always be new stuff to discover, even if you think you’ve found everything.

    • Photo: Alyssa Alcorn

      Alyssa Alcorn answered on 10 Jan 2018:

      Like any part of science, the more we think we know… the more questions there are, or the more we realise that our current explanations aren’t sufficient.
      Not exactly about communication, but…. One of my favourite scientific papers that helps to illustrate this point is two very prominent authors dissecting all the things we still don’t know about the functioning of the primary visual cortex, by picking holes and finding inconsistencies in in all the things the field currently “knows”. As they state themselves, their reason for doing so is to try to move on past current explanations to new theories and studies of this brain area. It was a real eye-opener when I read it as a masters student– 46 pages of “oops, we don’t understand that thing either!” but delivered with a surprising amount of optimism. It was a good reminder that the scientific process is as much (or more) about uncertainty and doubt than it is about agreed knowledge. See Olshausen & Field, 2005.

    • Photo: Wendy M. Grossman

      Wendy M. Grossman answered on 12 Jan 2018:

      Not sure what you mean by “the language of life” (genetics? personal communications?), but odds are that no. For one thing, we are constantly developing new tools that let us look at things we couldn’t examine before. For another, humans (and all other biological creatures) are constantly changing and adapting, so there are always new things to look at it. And finally, because as a race we tend to forget the past – and scholarship then has to rediscover it.

      wg

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