It has been decided that these dances are performed and understood on the basis of instinct: the semantic conventions of the system are innate, and do not have to be learned or taught. Using this system, a worker can report on a source of nectar at a location to which none of the colony has ever previously been. To a certain extent, therefore, the system is flexible. Whilst it appears that bees cannot communicate about anything except nectar - or, if they do, it is via other equally specialised small systems, the claim that bee dancing possesses creativity does not appear to be exaggerated since, at least in theory, an infinite amount of unpredictable and appropriate information relating to the parameters of direction and distance can be transmitted. However, the idea of verticality, for instance, expressed by the English word 'up' cannot be expressed, nor can complex thoughts and feelings present in human philosophy, literature and science. The difference in the creativity of the 'language' of the bee and human language is an important one, yet despite his claim for the exclusiveness of language creativity to humans, Chomsky explicitly recognizes the possibility that certain ideas, concepts and feeling may well be inexpressible in human language. This situation mirrors the fact that there are many things which cannot be expressed in the 'language' of the bee.

Like bees, dolphins do not have a 'creative' communication system in the human sense - even though they make underwater 'clicks' which are surprisingly sophisticated. These clicks are intermittent bursts of sound, each of which lasts less than a thousandth of a second, in frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. By listening for their echoes, a dolphin can find a tiny eel in a bed of mud or a tiny fish seventy meters away. The dolphin first sends out a very general click, and then progressively modifies it as it gets echoes back, so allowing it to get more and more accurate information. As far as we know, a dolphin's communication is restricted to the size and location of shapes, though a possibility is that a progressively modified click might end up being the 'name' for the object finally pinpointed; semantic properties for dolphin communication may evolve.