How did communication develop in the evolutionary process?

[Henry (Henry Stoddard)]

It is true that God created everything and he has the ability to end this creation. As a linguist, I find that communication among various species is interesting. Human beings use body language and speech to communicate, animals make various noises to indicate how they feel. At what stage in the evolutionary process did God cause these means of contact to develop? Do microscopic creatures make such communication?

[Henry (Henry Stoddard)]

It is a shame that no one is interested in the science of linguistics? It is a very important of the sciences you know. We would not be able to say much without this great development. Are there any anthropologists or zoologists out there in computer land? Are there just biologists here? What a pity!

[Chris_Falter]

Hi @Henry! Good questions. I would approach the question of communication from the viewpoint of computer science–i.e., communication happens when a computational node passes a message to another node, and that node acts on the message. With computers, the communication might be something like: my computer/browser is about to pass a “Reply” message to the BioLogos web server, along with extra information (these words). The server will act on it by updating the text that gets displayed on this topic that you opened.

So the same thing happens between organisms: they pass messages to one another in a variety of forms. One such form is pheromones. More complex organisms have other communication channels, such as gestures and vocalizations.

According to Wikipedia, prokaryotic bacteria use pheromones

to determine the local population density of similar organisms and control behaviors that take more time to execute (e.g. pheromones are used in quorum sensing or to promote natural competence for transformation, i.e. sexual gene transfer).

IIRC, prokaryotes have been around for billions of years. So, ball park guess, communication by pheromone has probably been around for a billion or more years. A real biologist could probably give you a far more precise (and accurate) answer.

[Henry (Henry Stoddard)]

I believe your answer is brilliant, my friend. Oh, I have a question. Are you German born or German descent? God bless and I hope more will participate, even though I cannot see anyone coming out with such a great answer.