At Grammatical Faculty of Language, Flies Outsmart Men

Using a symbolic dynamics and a surrogate data approach, we show that the language exhibited by common fruit flies Drosophila ( ‘D.’ ) during courtship is as grammatically complex as the most complex human-spoken modern languages. This finding emerges from the study of fifty high-speed courtship videos (generally of several minutes duration) that were visually frame-by-frame dissected into 37 fundamental behavioral elements. From the symbolic dynamics of these elements, the courtship-generating language was determined with extreme confidence (significance level > 0.95). The languages categorization in terms of position in Chomsky’s hierarchical language classification allows to compare Drosophila ’s body language not only with computer’s compiler languages, but also with human-spoken languages. Drosophila ’s body language emerges to be at least as powerful as the languages spoken by humans.