Talking with Animals Book

Reading Talking with Animals may provoke the questions: how do you like your biology? Rare or well done? Do you want to be astounded by the rich variety of life on earth, until you are punch-drunk on examples? Or do you want to get to the bottom of things, to understand that mathematical and physical laws that govern how life evolves and operates? One suspects that Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek would like to get her teeth into the deep, underlying problems of her subject. As the BBC's new face of Natural History, however, she's more often seen in bush outfits and scuba gear, celebrating the exuberance of the natural world. So Talking with Animals, which accompanies her BBC series about animal communication, is not simply a good book (though it is certainly that); it is also the triumphant climax to a rather difficult balancing act. (The publishers--who have had to perform their own balancing act by designing this hybrid of science text and coffee-table book--should also be congratulated.) Uhlenbroek's handsomely illustrated collection of wonders is also a profound (and meticulously referenced) enquiry into how we marry our ideas about ourselves to our ideas about the natural world. When it comes to the cross-species behaviour of humans and wolves, who tamed whom? When it comes to language use, are we unique? (When prairie dogs and even chickens can be shown to use representational language, one rather suspects not.) Arch-communicators ourselves, we tend to think of complex communication as the preserve of the flash and quick and the clever. Uhlenbroek shows that, on the contrary, communication is a project on which even the humblest, loneliest and most self-sufficient organisms are engaged. --Simon IngsRead More