There’s a lot in a name, as psychologists, sociologists and philosophers will attest. How do you know, for example, that it is “you” being addressed when someone calls out the appellation attached to a being? There may be thousands of Rameshs in any Indian city, but the Ramesh being called out to in a crowd often knows it. What makes a name an enduring identity through time? After all, the baby that is “given” a name on a birth certificate is barely a person, and certainly one vastly different from the corpse at the end of things — but the words on the death certificate are the same. The complexity of naming, then, is tied up with other malleable notions — the self, identity, consciousness and even ethics — all of which were thought of as intrinsically, exclusively human. Until now.
A study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows how elephants — their rich social and emotional lives, as well as complex communication capacity has long been known — call each other by specific names. Using a combination of machine learning and field experiments, researchers are able to conclude that, while other animals such as dolphins and parrots mimic sounds of their fellows that can act as names, elephants are the first non-human species to use names that do not involve imitation — in essence, proper nouns.
Much has been made about so-called “alien life” in fiction and popular culture. Yet, there is mounting evidence to show that human beings need not look to the heavens for emotional, intelligent, sensitive beings capable of communication and empathy. The act of naming — in addition to traits like grief, memory and social ties — strongly indicates that elephants are people too. Perhaps it’s time they were treated as such. But then, it’s not like humans treat their own kind all that well.