http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/h/Evolution_Communication.html

title: The Evolution of Communication

by: Marc D. Hauser

publisher: The MIT Press 1997

other: 760 pages, bibliography, index

In _The Evolution of Communication_ Hauser approaches communication using the framework
of Tinbergen, combining perspectives based on mechanism, ontogeny, function, and
phylogeny. As he argues,

A complete analysis of communication requires a richly comparative perspective that
grapples with how communicative systems work (neurobiological, developmental, and
cognitive processes), why there are both similarities and differences in design across
species, and what the functional consequences of such design features are for an
organism’s survival and reproduction.

Hauser separates mechanism into the neurobiological and the psychological and
integrates phylogenetics with the other approaches, giving him four principal chapters —
on neurobiological, ontogenetic, adaptive, and psychological design and communication.

This is a huge scope, but Hauser restricts himself in order to allow for deeper
analysis. He concentrates almost exclusively on visual and auditory modes of communication
and phylogenetically on vertebrates.

And he makes no attempt (despite a bibliography that runs to 75 dense pages) at
comprehensiveness even there. Instead, he takes a few well-studied domains — mating calls
in frogs and birds, echolocation in bats, squirrel and primate alarm calls, primate social
communication, human language, and a few others — and presents key experimental results
and theoretical frameworks in detail. Techniques and methodologies are covered where
important.

The approach spans many disciplines — neurobiology, child development, psychology,
ethology, and linguistics, to name just a few — and one of Hauser’s goals is to encourage
inter-disciplinary cross-over by "reviewing research in areas that commonly exist in
the intellectual equivalent of solitary confinement". So _The Evolution of
Communication_, while technical, is aimed at people exploring beyond their own fields; it
is also ideal for the informed general reader.

The figures and diagrams are primitive and the halftones grainy, but _The Evolution of
Communication_ is an excellent illustration of how this doesn’t matter when one has the
_right_ figures and halftones, properly captioned and integrated with the text. Ecumenical
in approach but at the same time precise and rigorous in matters of detail, it is a work
which deserves widespread recognition.

—

%T The Evolution of Communication

%A Marc D. Hauser

%I The MIT Press

%C Cambridge, Massachusetts

%D 1997

%O paperback, bibliography, index

%G ISBN 0-262-58155-8

%P xiii,760pp

%U http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262581558

%K biology, psychology, linguistics

15 August 1999

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Copyright (c) 1999 Danny Yee )

http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/