Coding and Redundancy: Man-Made and Animal-Evolved Signals. Jack P. Hailman.
Eduardo Mercado · Integrative and Comparative Biology · 2008
In what ways are fire-ant odor trails like wind socks, turkey gobbles like radar, or lottery tickets like sex pheromones? Objective techniques for comparing and contrasting such widely varying communicative signals and systems are rare, and historically such comparisons have been metaphorical. In Coding and Redundancy, Hailman presents a quantitative method for analyzing and classifying signals that highlights commonalities and differences between evolved and invented signals. Many past works comparing human communication with that of other animals have focused on the uniqueness of human language and how understanding the “simpler” communication systems of other species can provide insights into the much more complex linguistic system used by humans. Hailman takes the opposite approach by analyzing some of the simplest signaling systems used by humans, such as traffic lights and painted curbs, and then drawing parallels between these systems and more sophisticated communication systems that animals have evolved. Identifying animal signals and their utility is much trickier than it might at first seem. You see a zebra twitch its ear. Was it sending a signal to other zebras that it would soon be leaving? Or, perhaps it was letting a nearby predator know that it had detected its presence? Or, was it simply flexing a muscle, orienting to a sound, or responding to an irritating insect? Such ambiguities are not an issue when you see a stop sign. The basic premise of Hailman's book is that analyses of simple human codes (which are known to be used for communication) can provide an objective conceptual framework for characterizing and better understanding animal behavior and communication.