The New York Times ran an obituary the other day to remark the passing of an extraordinary individual who died suddenly and too young. He was a genius whose groundbreaking contributions to the sciences of neurology and linguistics will still be remembered a century from now. And he happened to be a bird.

Alex, a 31-year-old African Grey parrot, was an international star, at least among fans of PBS science programs. I first heard of him when he made an appearance in linguist Christine Kenneally's wonderful new book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language.

Chosen at random in 1977 from a Chicago pet shop by Dr. Irene Pepperberg (a newly-minted Harvard chemistry PhD, who had decided to switch from test-tubes to parrots), Alex would turn out to be a kind of avian Jackie Robinson, breaking through the species intelligence barrier, proving, with his remarkable abilities, that some kinds of birds are as smart as primates and dolphins.

Using colorful blocks, bright plastic letters, paper cut-outs and food rewards, Dr. Pepperberg designed ingenious experiments to see if Alex's natural ability to imitate human speech could be turned into something more - the rudiments of language. Alex's prowess at learning words and concepts, and his ability to communicate, exploded the long-held notion that

birds were, well, bird-brains, and paved the way for a new model of avian intelligence.

Alex was a genius as African Greys go. He could, for example, tell researchers the block they held was "blue" and after biting it that it was "wood." He could count up to six and identify shapes, and he knew more than 100 words in English. He even made up a few of his own - "bannery," a combination of banana and cherry, was what he called apples.

Perhaps most remarkably, Dr. Pepperberg was able to teach Alex to use the word "none." Even humans have a tough time with zero - the number didn't make it into European mathematics until the middle ages. But Alex, who had been taught to use "none" to describe the absence of difference between objects, caught onto the idea quickly, even spontaneously using "none" to describe the color white.

At the time of his death, Alex was learning the numbers seven and eight, multi-syllable words and the beginnings of how to read. Dr. Pepperberg estimated Alex had the emotional age of a 2-year-old child and the intelligence of a 5-year-old. He was deeply attached to his human friends; when Dr. Pepperberg went off on speaking engagements, Alex would pull his own feathers out with anxiety at her absence. His last words to were, "I love you."

I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, and tut-tutting about the dangers of anthropomorphizing, of seeing human qualities in animals. Indeed, researchers like Dr. Pepperberg, and others who have tried to teach language skills to animals, are often marginalized by their colleagues, accused of sentimentalizing science, of careless research tainted by attachment to their subjects.

These critics have their own biases, however, their own blinkers. They assume mankind to be the most evolved species on earth. They are anthropocentrists who use Homo sapiens as the measure of perfection, and false assumptions to make a science of superiority.

And so, over the centuries we have devised many tests of what separates humanity from the animal kingdom. It has been argued, for example, that only humans use tools, or have self-awareness, or plan for the future. That only people understand numbers, have the ability to generalize, have individual identity, and cultural traditions that are taught by one individual to another. Every one of these contentions has been proven false.

Language is the last stand for the anthropocentrists of the world. They assert that only humans are born with a "language center" in the brain and an innate sense of "universal grammar."

But there are new theories being developed by evolutionary linguists. They believe spoken language is only one of many ways that the complex genetic history we share with most of the animal kingdom can be expressed. They have shown that just because animals don't talk the way we do, it doesn't mean that they don't think or plan, that they don't have emotions or ideas, that they don't communicate.

Animals do communicate with one another and with us, even if they don't use human-style words to do it.

Elephants send messages to one another across long distances using sounds the human ear can't detect. Baby dolphins babble just like human infants do; adult dolphins actually have unique "names" they use to introduce themselves. Chimps trained in sign language know how to lie to one another and to scold their human keepers. Orangutans blow kisses to each other at bedtime.

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