Customer Reviews

Principles of Animal Communication

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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.

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 ..........