What would be the reason that birds did not develop language? There are birds that have an amazing range of vocalizations, such as the Lyre Birds, and there are examples of birds that have shown the ability to associate human speech with abstract concepts. So, why did some bird specie develop a language and a culture heritage. The developed in parallel with mammals. Birds too spend some considerable effort in feeding there offspring, just like mammals. There are enough examples of young birds with almost the size of there parents still following their parents around to beg for food.
How would the worlds have looked if some birds would have developed language and being able to transmit knowledge to sibling and children? Or was it the fact that we have hands that we evolved further? It is sometimes argued that language developed as part of mate selection. Bird vocalizations definitely play that role with birds.
Evolution is a stochastic process operating almost entirely in the shadowy past, so the scientifically-responsible answer to this “why?” question is “we don’t know for sure”, I think we can all agree.
Moving past that to speculate though, I think Chomsky would point to two (surely somewhat syncretic) forces:
1. Evolution is not an exhaustive breadth-first search; even if an adaption would be advantageous, genetic affordances can make it unlikely on a finite timeline. Theres lots of speculation on why humans in particular were well-prepared to evolve language for internal deliberation and/or external communication, but it’s somewhat beside the point here.
2. Evolution works most quickly in reaction to environmental stressors. There’s something of a consensus forming around the importance of changing climates for our genus (i.e. why aren't there other apes in cold regions?), whereas birds were inherently afforded a much simpler answer to that stressor: migration.
All of that said, I think it’s important to highlight an under-appreciated fact: the only things we have ever observed using language are a) humans, b) possibly other Homo species like Homo Naledi, c) LLMs, and—as of the past ~week (!!!)—D) possibly Bonobos.
Lots of animals communicate using words/signs, and a majority (?) of plant & animal species signal to each other and others using scents, colors, shapes, body language, etc. But only the above four can intuitively synthesize those signs on the fly into contextual phrases — or, as Chomsky would say, “generate an infinite range of output from a finite range of inputs”.
It’s worth caveating that this is absolutely a subjective stance based on how you want to use “language”, and that a sizeable camp of linguists would disagree on that basis. But I think the underlying unique quality is important, so Chomsky is correct to single it out as “language” — otherwise, how would you even phrase the above question? Birds clearly have complex verbal and visual communication already, and “better communication” is vague and unsatisfying, IMHO.
What I think lends strength to Chomsky's theory is that is virtually, informally a corollary of computational complexity theory (grammars, P = NP, and related ideas) which was a direct consequence of Alan Turing.
So for the camp of linguists that disagree I do wonder what alternative theoretical foundation do they have.
Some bird species are capable of communicating in proto-language that is only a few steps removed from full language capability in the human sense, so I think the most likely answer is "accident of evolution". If the primates didn't take over the Earth, maybe evolved parrots would have, given a few more million years.
Most birds act like they only know a few calls. You get the "come mate with me" and the "this is my territory stay out". Once in a while a "come help me fight off this predator", but there isn't enough detectable variation in either behavior or the song to suggest they are doing anything deeper.
Which makes it so strange that some birds seem to have very sophisticated vocalizations. Why? How does it serve them, and why did they diverge so much?
Take ravens for example. There's one that hangs out in trees directly outside of my house now and then. It makes new sounds I haven't heard before quite often. I don't hear other ravens, so I'm not even sure it's trying to communicate. Does it have a social purpose? Is it bored? Do the variations express anything at all?
Yet being in a forest with them around, you hear all kinds of noises too, and they do it all together. They interact a lot. Though my experience is that they use fewer variations when they're together compared to the weird one outside of my house.
They seem very intelligent regardless. They're such cool birds.
Meanwhile most of the other birds around my house, as far as my ears can tell, just make the same sounds over and over. What does any of it mean?
There was no gain for them for advanced coordination. Unless they start to hunt, farm, or build technology, complex grammar has little evolutionary benefit.
Birds do learn from observation. Even from other birds and animals.
Language in humans is a VERY strange behavior. I think the stoned ape theory may have some credence, as mushrooms do seem to excite linguistic capabilities.
How would the worlds have looked if some birds would have developed language and being able to transmit knowledge to sibling and children? Or was it the fact that we have hands that we evolved further? It is sometimes argued that language developed as part of mate selection. Bird vocalizations definitely play that role with birds.