Special Issue: Mechanisms & FunctionThe origin of meaning in animal signals
Section snippets
The evolution of social signals
Animals are often involved in overtly competitive interactions: over food, territory, or mates. But rather than immediately escalating to physical fighting, competition is more likely to take the form of displays, like the roars of red deer, Cervus elaphus (Clutton-Brock & Albon, 1979), the jousting of stalk-eyed flies (Wilkinson & Reillo, 1994), the croaking of male frogs (Ryan, 1985), or the loud wahoo calls of male baboons (Fischer et al., 2004, Kitchen et al., 2003). Thanks to decades of
Information
Evolutionary models of communication invoke the concept of information, but their exclusive focus on function leaves them agnostic about the content of information or how it is acquired. Grafen (1990, page 521), for example, stated that ‘at ESS the receivers will have adjusted their assessment rule so that they determine correctly the true quality of a male’, but he did not specify the content underlying the assessment rule or how its adjustment is achieved. For Grafen, all that mattered was
Constrained vocal production
In human language, meaning is a two-way street: signaller and recipient are equally flexible in production and perception, and they typically exhibit ‘semantic parity’, sharing a common representational framework that underlies each person's comprehension of what the other means (Fitch, 2010).
By contrast, when Marler began his research on nonhuman primate vocalizations in the 1960s, the prevailing view held that call production in monkeys and apes was little more than an involuntary reflex –
Summary
Peter Marler led the way in posing thoughtful, challenging questions about the meaning of animal signals, the nature of the information they convey and their function in nature. He inspired and conducted experiments to test hypotheses about communication, the mind, and the differences between animal communication and language. Although he shyed away from general theories, we are, thanks to Peter and many others, now much closer to a broad view of how communication works in different species (
Acknowledgments
Our greatest acknowledgment is to Peter himself, who served as a mentor, intellectual inspiration and friend during so much of our scientific work. The research on vervet monkeys and baboons described here was supported by the National Science Foundation (IBN95-14001), the National Institutes of Health (MN 62249), the National Geographic Society, the Leakey Foundation, Rockefeller University and the University of Pennsylvania. We thank Bill Searcy and two referees for comments on an earlier
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2022, Evolution and Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :If the individuals are inducing an empathetic-like response in the observers/raters, they may appear more likeable because of this. Or, it could be that an honest signal of weakness may represent an example of benign intent (Seyfarth & Cheney, 2017) and/or a willingness to engage in a cooperative rather than competitive interaction, something which could be a ‘likable’ or preferred trait in a social partner. Regardless of the mechanisms linking stress behaviour with likability, this finding represents a potential adaptive benefit to communicating stress.
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