Laurance R. Doyle (born 1953) is an American scientist who received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.
His first job was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an imaging engineer, where he was in charge of analyzing pictures of Jupiter and Saturn sent from the spacecraft Voyager.
[3] Doyle is currently seeking to compare dolphin whistles and baby babble in an attempt to make predictions about extraterrestrial communications.
He believes that by measuring the complexity of communications for different species on Earth, we could get a good indication of how advanced an extraterrestrial signal is using an application of Zipf's law.
In 2012, he appeared in the episode "Will We Survive First Contact," of The Science Channel series Through the Wormhole narrated by Morgan Freeman.