Nature and nurture in animal communication (2001)

The Design of Animal Communication. By Marc D. Hauser & Mark Konishi. MIT Press, Cambridge. 1999. 701 pp. ISBN 0262 08277 2. In recent years quite a few books on animal communication have been published showing that this is a thriving field within behavioural biology. Among them are updated general textbooks (Hauser, 1996; Bradbury & Vehrenkamp, 1998), a book on research methods (Hopp et al., 1998), and even one on a topic as specific as the role of experience on vocal development (Snowdon & Hausberger, 1997). So what else could be published now that would not just repeat what we have already seen? Nevertheless, and against all odds, The Design of Animal Communication edited by Hauser and Konishi turns out to be a valuable addition to the literature. It manages to present a variety of case studies that throw light on different aspects of animal communication, often looking at the same problem from very different angles. The volume came out of a symposium in honour of Peter Marler held in March 1997. Many of the contributors have worked with Peter Marler at one time or another. The fact that almost all aspects of communication are covered in this book demonstrates the enormous influence he had on this field. The book also covers a wide range of different animal species including insects, fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals (including three chapters on human communication). Of the 24 chapters, 16 use either a bird or a primate as the model species. But since the emphasis is on general issues like the influence of nature and nurture on behavioural development, endocrine phenomena, signal production mechanisms or the communication of emotion, I think that researchers (like myself) working on other animals will find it equally interesting. The book is split into three parts, each of which deals with one of the Tinbergen questions (mechanisms, ontogeny, evolution). There is no separate part on functional aspects of communication. Each section has an introduction by the editors which gives the reader a better understanding of the broader view. The first section on mechanisms concentrates mainly on the neuroethology of signal production and perception. However, I particularly liked the chapter by Suthers on the motor basis of vocal performance in songbirds including the use of two independent sound generators in the syrinx and the use of ‘minibreaths’ to maintain uninterrupted song output. The second part on the ontogeny of communication consists of six chapters, the first of which was written by Marler himself. In fact, discussions of the influence of nature and nurture on communication can be found throughout the book, not only in this section. Interestingly, Marler himself now takes a much more integrative view, while a lot of the other contributors are still more extreme at least in the way they phrase things. Expressions like ‘genetically determined’ or ‘genetically fixed’ still crop up in various chapters which seems strangely antiquated these days. The chapter I liked best in the second part is by Patricia Kuhl and describes how experience influences language perception in humans. She presents a native language magnet model which explains why infants can initially discriminate between all phonetic units that exist but subsequently lose this ability. The last part of the book on the evolution of communication contains nine chapters and is actually a mixture of papers that deal with the evolution and function of communication signals. Here we can read about issues like electric communication (Hopkins), character displacement (Gerhardt), sensory exploitation (Ryan and Rand), categorical perception (Wyttenbach and Hoy) and brain lateralization (Hauser). Two chapters that I found particularly interesting are by Searcy and Nowicki on functions of song variation in song sparrows and by Cheney and Seyfarth on cognitive mechanisms underlying vocalizations in nonhuman primates. All in all, I can highly recommend The Design of Animal Communication to anyone interested in animal communication. All chapters are of very high quality. It is a fairly specialized book but I think that even an interested undergraduate would find it a valuable source of information. It gives an excellent overview of our current knowledge and also presents new ideas and quite a bit of new information.