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I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.

Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century

and a half after Charles Darwin.

Join us as we meet the passionate researchers and communicators who are expanding our knowledge

and fighting to keep good science in our schools and politics.

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Music We know that whales and other cetaceans like dolphins are very smart.

We've observed their playful behavior, their reasoning and problem-solving skills and their keen memories.

But perhaps our greatest area of interest concerns their ability to communicate.

We're trying to decode whale communication to find out not only what they're talking about in terms of semantics, but also how complex it is,

trying to determine how much rule structure is involved in whale communication.

And so what kinds of messages can they actually produce and how complex can they be?

And now, in what's been described as a breakthrough, a team of researchers claim they have had an extended conversation

with a humpback whale. They'll describe their experience, what they said to the whale, and the

evidence that the creature understood them, as we consider what their findings mean not only

for our communication with non-human animals, but with intelligent alien species off earth.

...