“How Animals Communicate”
This book is meant to replace both Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research, published by Indiana University Press in 1968, and its companion volume, Approaches to Animal Communication, published by Mouton in 1969. All but one of the chapters are wholly new, and the organization of the contents has been substantially altered: a section on theoretical issues was added, while the one on interdisciplinary implications and applications was removed; and the section on communicative mechanisms was almost doubled. Perhaps most significantly—since this, in some manner, reflects the immense accretion of knowledge in this field—the section on communication in selected groups was expanded from nine chapters to twenty-five; for instance, whereas all the alloprimates could still be covered in one overview eight years ago, in this book the subject is barely covered in five separate chapters.
In addition to contributing chapter 9 to this book, Jack P. Hailman wrote a full-sized monograph on visual communication, which, in view of the importance of the topic and the excellence of his conspectus, is being published simultaneously by Indiana University Press, under the title Optical Signals: Animal Communication and Light.
In designing this volume, I received valuable counsel from Edward O. Wilson, whose personal review of many aspects of animal communication, in chapters 8-10 of his Sociobiology, is one of the more remarkable features of that monumental creation. I wish to thank May Lee, my editorial assistant for this project, for her devoted collaboration and for the two indexes with which this book concludes.
I have chosen to dedicate How Animals Communicate to Heini Hediger, who served as the director of the Zurich Zoo from 1954 until his recent retirement and was director of the Basel Zoo for ten years before that. Happily, he now continues to teach animal psychology and biology at Zurich University. Professor Hediger's work—embodied in numberless books and articles, both scientific and popular—is incomparably sensitive and subtle; his immense knowledge of the basic principles of animal communication, and particularly of the rules for two-way traffic between man and the multitude of speechless creatures, has been a model of scientific imagination applied to subjects of great human import for generations of his readers during fortythree productive years. His writings have been an inspiration to me from the beginning of my excursion into zoosemiotics, the more so since Hediger was the first student of animal behavior, in modern times, to appreciate the intimate relations of ethology and semiotics, and how the findings of each discipline can and must enrich the results of the other.
Bloomington, Indiana THOMAS A. SEBEOK
November 1, 1976
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