Principles of Animal Communication [Hardcover]

J. W. Bradbury (Author), Sandra Vehrencamp (Author), Jack W. Bradbury (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0878931007 | ISBN-13: 978-0878931002 | Publication Date: January 1998 | Edition: 1

Aimed at upper-level undergraduate and first year graduate students, this book covers all aspects of the subject from neurobiology and evolution to physics and economics. Starting with the physics and physiology of signal production, propagation and reception, the book proceeds to the economics of cooperating communicators and ends with a discussion of the complications arising when the interests of sender and receiver do not coincide. A variety of signal analysis and evolutionary methods are explained and demonstrated using examples. Although the authors emphasize a quantitative approach throughout, only a basic knowledge of algebra is needed and the relevance of all the results is explained. The authors also identify unresolved issues - subjects for future research.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A masterful review of a very difficult literature. For now, it is the definitive treatment of animal communication. -- Donald A. Dewsbury, Contemporary Psychology

Product Details

• Hardcover: 882 pages
• Publisher: Sinauer Associates; 1 edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878931007
• ISBN-13: 978-0878931002
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,189,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative in some areas, others present wrong information, September 21, 1998

By 

[e-mail] Paul Moore (Bowling Green State University) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Principles of Animal Communication (Hardcover)

The authors do a wonderful service in collecting and combining a wide body of literature into a readable book. This is a large and tedious job and the authors do a fairly decent job. One area that is particularly off-base is the chemical communication chapter. The authors cite very little literature that is newer than 1988 and base their whole chapter on erroneous theories. I have told all of my students to throw this chapter away.

0 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Text book that Unless you have to, April 17, 2011

By 

Truth seeker (Calif) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Principles of Animal Communication (Hardcover)

If you are required to buy this TEXT BOOK for a university class, then I suppose you have to! It is pedantic, self aggrandizing, WAY OVERLY COMPLEX, monument to ego, patronizing on the one hand (& in the extreme!), attempt to apply mathematics to what is a social subject matter- which quite frankly cannot work! It is like trying to apply numerical principals to Freud! The erroneous assumption here is that animals are dumb autonimatons that have simplistic motives that can are 'guessed' by a researcher (in this case the authors or the cited sources) and the formulas applied to yield numerical statistics. Recent research shows that animals are VERY FAR from simplistic in their motives or thought patterns as previously thought. Constantly in this unwieldy volume is the words "assumed", "probably", etc.- as if an entire species has but a single motive for a behavior, which is a direct result of the Skinnerian behavioristic BS that All creatures, Including Man himself can be reduced to Predictable Simplistic (single) cause & effect behavior, and then this applied to reality as FACT, and then treated as a valid prediction of behavior. Increasingly in Today's science what we see is a negation of that kind of thinking, that animal behavior is NOT driven solely by genetics, that individual in a species animals Vary Widely in responses to the same situation. Unfortunately this is (to my knowledge) the only book that covers this subject. I would suggest to students that wish to study individual species that they concentrate on research done on that particular species of interest. I cannot in truth take attempts to apply mathematical formulas to behavior (it might work for paramecium!) to predict results and then have the product of such a calculation treated as a hard prediction of future behavior in all future instances! What I see here is, with it's 'in bold' words and concepts is a class room work that is designed not to explain a subject, but to 'test students' in a university course- i.e. regurgitation for a grade. But maybe that's just me, and the way I see it ..........