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Monkey See, Monkey Say
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17118 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1990 |
2,738 Words |
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Jack P. Hailman
Jack P. Hailman is the author of Optical Signals: Animal
Communication and Lights (1977) and other titles in the field
of animal communication and behavior. He is professor of
zoology at the University of Wisconsin and is the former
editor of the journal Animal Behaviour. |
HOW MONKEYS SEE THE WORLD
Inside the Mind of Another Species
Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990
359 pp., $24.95
According to Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The flowering moments of the mind/Drop half their petals in our speech." And so it is "Speech" reveals "minds" imperfect by human standards but impressive compared with those we once believed animals possessed.
It scarcely seems possible that it has been decades since Jane Goodall introduced us to wild chimpanzees and George Schaller to gorillas. The number of subsequent books about primate behavior that are authoritative yet accessible to the general reader is just short of astounding, among the latest being Frans de Waal's absorbing analyses of "politics" and reconciliation behavior in apes and monkeys. Wife-and-husband team Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth now present us with an outstanding new contribution to this genre. More accurately, they transform the genre into something ambitious indeed.
How Monkeys See the World goes beyond observation of social behavior of individually identified primates in a natural setting. For the first time a primate monograph includes detailed communication analyses, uses extensive field experiments, and integrates wide-ranging laboratory studies. The book is a mountain rooted in natural history that soars to a philosophical summit - with a trail better blazed at the beginning but providing interesting travel all the way to the peak.
Speech belongs solely to the human primate but controversy rages over the extent to which animals possess basic linguistic abilities. Psychologists and zoologists searching for clues to the evolutionary origin of human language have marshaled two kinds of evidence for linguistic abilities of animals. One is the extent to which certain intelligent species - chimpanzees, dolphins, sea lions, parrots, and others - can be trained to communicate using American Sign Language for the deaf or purely contrived language-like systems. The other line of evidence relates to discoveries and analyses of language-like aspects of natural communication, especially vocal exchanges in primates and birds. Authors Cheney and Seyfarth entered the fray through this second route when hey claimed some years back that vervet monkeys had "words" (special alarm calls) for different kinds of
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