All you need to make it unsurprising you need to find an alternative hypothesis, that can explain observed facts.

How about this one. Humans got the ability to abstract deeper than others. While some animals could deal with concepts closely associated with real phenomena, and therefore they can use words to name things or maybe even actions, they cannot go further and use abstractions over abstractions. As the result they cannot deal with a recursive grammar.

Or another hypothesis. Humans got an ability to reflect on themselves, so they came to concepts like "motive (of action)", it made it possible for them to talk about actions, inventing words-categories, that categorize actions by supposed motive of action. But it is not just that, people started to feel that simple words do not describe the reality good enough, because a) actions have more than one motive, b) they started to see actions everywhere (the stone is lying flat? it is the action of the stone, that strictly speaking cannot act.). All this led them to invent complex grammars to describe the world where they live. Animals from other hand can't get it, because their world is much simplier. They don't see the stone "lying": it is a stone, it cannot do anything.

These hypotheses don't seem explaining everything, but I have just invented them. I didn't really tried to explain everything. But thinking about it, I'm in favor of the second one: all people are schizophrenics if you compare them with animals. They believe in things that are not exist, they see inanimate objects as animate, they are talking with themselves (inner dialog). It just happens that the particular kind of schizophrenia most people are struggling with is a condition that allows them to not tear apart all the connections with the Reality. It is more like borderline schizophrenia.

I prefer to think that animals simply haven’t been lucky enough to invent a suitable naming system that could serve as the foundation of their civilization. If they were fortunate, they might bootstrap their own form of civilization through recursive or iterative divisive naming-—naming the act of naming itself. Naming is the foundation, and everything else naturally follows from there.

As Laozi said over 2,500 years ago in the Dao De Jing:

  “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
   The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
   The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
   The named is the mother of all things.”

P.S. By the way, the entire Dao De Jing advocates thinking beyond symbols, transcending naming—not being constrained by it—and thus connect the reality and following the Tao, which embodies the will of love, frugality, and humility. Yet, few truly understand it fairly, as Laozi emphasized in his book. Perhaps we humans can transcend naming altogether eventually, with advancements like Musk’s brain-communication chip, we might soon discover how human wills are encoded and potentially move beyond the limitations of naming.

--— After looking up “Universal Grammar,” here are my thoughts: --—

Until we identify these features and prove that other species lack them, the concept of Universal Grammar remains uncertain. Only if we pinpoint what’s unique to humans and fail to help other species develop it can we confidently claim Universal Grammar is correct.

Personally, I think these innate features might not be entirely unique to humans. Even humans need sufficient social interaction and language exposure to truly behave like 'humans'. Feral children(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child), for example, behave much like animals. I also imagine early humans had only a few words and symbols and acted similarly. However, if feral children or ancient humans were exposed to today’s social environment, they could likely learn our complex language quite quickly, because those words, symbols, and pronunciations are well-suited to humans for expressing our wills.

Perhaps, we humans are just lucky to have found effective ways to express ourselves —- symbols and words as we know them now -— and to pass them down through generations. This has allowed language and cognition to grow exponentially, giving us an edge over other species.

P.S. Our failure so far to teach animals structured language is exactly why I admire projects like Google’s Dolphin Gemma. To succeed, we need to tailor teaching methods to their species-specific traits—starting by understanding how they express their intentions/wills, and then hopefully helping enrich their naming systems and overall communication. We might even adapt this to help them learn from human contexts, much like large language models do.

The thing that makes humans nearly unique in the animal kingdom is structured language. I don't need separate words for "leopard in the bush", "snake in the bush", "leopard in the tree", and "snake in the tree", because we have grammar rules that allow me to combine the words for "leopard" and "tree" with a distinction of how the leopard relates to the tree.

I say nearly unique, because there is some evidence that whale songs are structured.

But what is “structured language”? I would argue it’s just another layer of naming—naming applied to already named names.

If animals have the ability to map leopard, snake, bush, tree in reality to names in their naming system, then why can’t they apply that ability again—create a new name like ‘leopard-bush’ or ‘snake-leopard’, simply by combining the existing solid names in their system? (Similarly, words like “in” could also be added.)

You might say they can’t—because they lack grammar rules. And I’d argue the issue runs even deeper: they don’t have a valid naming system to begin with, nor the ecological fitness or incentive needed to develop further naming.

If they can name ‘leopard’ within a valid system, that name should be reusable. They should be able to work on those names—as objects themselves. The process is the same. It requires the same abstraction: treat a thing as a nameable unit, then name it again. And that already starts to look like compositionality—or grammar.

The real difference is that humans ended up with a robust naming system. We got lucky—we gradually invented stable symbols that let us name on top of previous names. We could write them down, save them, pass them on—and then build new names on top of that naming recursively, iteratively, and divisively.

And that’s likely where the fitness gain came from. It’s a lucky, genuine self-bootstrap story.

The main difference seems to be in having sentences structured into verbs and their associated nouns (which may encode various roles, e.g. patients, agents, instruments, beneficiaries, subjects of intransitive or copulative verbs, nominal predicates, results etc.).

As far as we could determine until now, the language of most animals consists only of a set of nouns, which typically have an associated implicit action.

For example:

"Lion!" (meaning "Climb up the tree!");

"Eagle!" (meaning "Take cover under branches!");

"Children!" (meaning "Come here, to mother!");

"Bananas!" (meaning "Come here to eat good food!");

and so on.

Some apes have been trained to compose very simple sentences, as complex as agent-verb-patient, but it is not known whether a similar form of communication exists between wild apes.

Do we have hardware for playing Super Mario or dancing to pop music? Animals can't do that either.

If you read the criticism about the Koko project, it's that Patterson prompted her to make certain signs. I watched some clips of the signs, and it's very obvious that that is exactly what she did.

Animals can only communicate in a limited fashion. They do not have some "hidden" intelligence that you are trying to find.

I really doubt both their methods and your conclusion. The project tried to teach animals to adapt to the human naming system, and more importantly, it wasn’t a true social-level experiment with animals.

(That said, in my opinion, Koko was smart. Critics of Patterson’s claims have acknowledged that Koko learned a number of signs and used them to communicate her wants and needs.)

Imagine an alien taking an one- or two-year-old human baby and trying to teach him to communicate with alien using vocal signals that humans have difficulty producing or perceiving—and, most importantly, where naming is not a social-level communication that boosts ecological fitness. That’s basically what they did with Koko. It’s like training an LLM model on text corpora where the loss function (fitness measure) is inconsistent or even meaningless—would that produce a useful model?

We first need to understand how animals naturally name things, and then enrich that naming system in a way that fits their minds—not force them to learn human naming. Most importantly, this naming should improve their ecological fitness in a consistent way, so that they can ‘feel’ the fitness of certain naming and evolve their minds toward it.

That’s why Google DolphinGemma is so remarkable. If they succeed, they might mimic dolphin-like communication in a way other dolphins truly understand—gradually introducing naming and concepts that improve evolutionary fitness: finding food, recognizing others, being happy, and identifying suitable mates. If recursive naming develops, I believe it could even lead to real cognitive evolution.

This is just a rough idea, but I truly believe in it-—based on self-meta-cognition about how my own mind evolved and works, as well as other observations. Unfortunately, I don’t have the power or energy to explore it deeply, but I hope someone working on animal cognition research will take a closer look at using large language models like DolphinGemma and dive deeper.

I don't care that it might be better, and I shall hold you personally responsible should this come to pass.