|
|
Monkey See, Monkey Say
| Article
# : |
17118 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
2,738 Words |
| Author
: |
Jack P. Hailman
|
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 predators in their environment. In this new book the authors put their research into a wider framework of natural history and social behavior in a quest not merely to understand vocal communication but also to demonstrate how it reveals the inner working of the monkey's mind.
Introducing vervets
The vervet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops) of East Africa has a social organization much like that of the familiar rhesus macaque, in that the vervet lives in matriarchal troops of mothers and their young. Males associate principally for purposes of breeding, young males leaving their natal groups for nearby bands, thus avoiding the adverse genetic effects of inbreeding. Vervets sleep by night and forage by day, when they must stay alert for predators such as eagles, leopards, and pythons. The monkeys
...
Read Full Article
|
|
