Welcome to this latest episode of the Communication & Culture podcast. In this episode, I thought I wanted to begin at the beginning with communication and I use my background as a biologist to delve deeply into communication in general and how it developed.

When we think of communication, we mostly think about human communication. Because this is what most of us are interested in. 

A lot of us are amazed at how apparently complex our communication is, how clever, intelligent or whatever adjective you want to come up with, we are. I might offend some of you here, but this is narrow sighted. Because all living organisms communicate. 

So, when did it all began? Well, it probably began as soon as life began. To stay alive, the first organisms needed to be able to sense messages from their environment, food, potential danger, temperature and so on. This was the first type of communication to evolve because many reactions and processes in a cell need receptors and thus the blueprint was there for evolution to stumble on chemo and olfactory receptors. Visual communication was probably not very far behind. 

Chemocommunication is still with us, coming from our most ancient ancestors. 

Then, as organisms got bigger, evolution had more opportunities to come up with different ways of communicating and making sense of the world. This is how all the different ways of communicating arose.

Species come and go and while they are around, they do so because the ways of communication they have fulfil the kind of messages they need to send. And of course, every species make full use of what evolution has given them. It just happens that a random mutation has made our larynx move further up into our throat and allowed us to make more sounds than many of our ancestors.

It has nothing to do with being superior to other species. We are just one of the results of the always ongoing process of evolution. The more we look at it, the more we will learn and understand about how other species communicate and discover how intricate it is.