Nicholas S. Thompson – författare

ON THE FUTURE OF PERSPECTIVES When Patrick Bateson and Peter Klopfer offered me the editorship of Perspectives in 1992, the world of academic publishing was in one of its periodic upheavals. Subscriptions to series-even distinguished series such as Perspec­ tives-had been declining and individual volume prices had been rising, a trend that if continued could only result in the series pricing itself out of the market. In the course of the negotiations around the change of editors, the publishers offered a cost-cutting solution: change the production pattern to "camera ready" and elimi­ nate the costs of indexing and proofreading. While I could see the sense in this proposal, I was reluctant to accept it. Part of what I had always liked about the volumes in this series was that they were real books, intelligently proofread, nicely laid out, and provided with proper indexes. Thus, I in return offered a "Devil's bargain": the publisher should maintain the present quality of the series for two more volumes and make a renewed effort to advertise the series to our ethological and sociobiological colleagues, while I as the new series editor committed myself to a renewed effort to make Perspectives the publication of choice for writers who are trying to get their message out to the world intact and readers who are seeking clear, coherent, comprehensive and untrammeled presentations of authors' ideas and research programs.

This volume is perhaps best characterized by its interdisciplinary nature and reliance on an eclectic range of approaches. One theme that naturally emerges from the collected essays is that of causation versus analogy. Phenomena defined at multiple levels can in principle be studied in two ways - vertically and horizontally. The vertical strategy directly specifies causal relations holding between levels, whereas the horizontal approach looks for parallels between levels, seeking to isolate shared causal properties. One of the essays here stands directly for the vertical strategy, while another warns explicitly against the perils of a loose selectionist analogy among levels. Other parallels between evolution and culture are probed, calling attention to the general limits of analogy, or carefully noting the respects in which the proposed analogy is expected to break down. The other themes of economics, optimization, and stability, when not explicitly mentioned, lurk in the background of any treatment of culture and behaviour in relation to natural selection.

Evaluates the significance and usefulness of anthropomorphism for the scientific understanding of animals by presenting diverse ideas from historians, philosophers, anthropologists, primatologists, psychologists, behaviorists, and ethologists.People commonly think that animals are psychologically like themselves (anthropomorphism), and describe what animals do in narratives (anecdotes) that support these psychological interpretations. This is the first book to evaluate the significance and usefulness of the practices of anthropomorphism and anecdotalism for understanding animals. Diverse perspectives are presented in thoughtful, critical essays by historians, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, behaviorists, biologists, primatologists, and ethologists. The nature of anthropomorphism and anecdotal analysis is examined; social, cultural, and historical attitudes toward them are presented; and scientific attitudes are appraised. Authors provide fascinating in-depth descriptions and analyses of diverse species of animals, including octopi, great apes, monkeys, dogs, sea lions, and, of course, human beings. Concerns about, and proposals for, evaluations of a variety of psychological aspects of animals are discussed, including mental state attribution, intentionality, cognition, consciousness, self-consciousness, and language.

Richerson and Boyd analyze the possible relations between climatic change in the Pleistocene and the evo­ lution of social learning, evaluating the boundary conditions under which social learning could increase fitness and contribute to culture.

The relations between behavior, evolution, and culture have been a subject of vigorous debate since the publication of Darwin''s The Descent of Man (1871). The latest volume of Perspectives in Ethology brings anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists together to reexamine this important relation. With two exceptions (the essays by Brown and Eldredge), all of the present essays were originally presented at the Fifth Biannual Symposium on the Science of Behavior held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 1998. The volume opens with the problem of the origins of culture, tackled from two different viewpoints by Richerson and Boyd, and Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado, respectively. Richerson and Boyd analyze the possible relations between climatic change in the Pleistocene and the evo­ lution of social learning, evaluating the boundary conditions under which social learning could increase fitness and contribute to culture. Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado examine how a shift in the diet of the genus Homo toward difficult-to-acquire food could have determined (or coe­ volved with) unique features of the human life cycle. These two essays illus­ trate how techniques that range from computer modeling to comparative behavioral analysis, and that make use of a wide range of data, can be used for drawing inferences about past selection pressures. As culture evolves, it must somehow find its place within (and also affect) a complex hierarchy of behavioral and biological factors.

ON THE FUTURE OF PERSPECTIVES When Patrick Bateson and Peter Klopfer offered me the editorship of Perspectives in 1992, the world of academic publishing was in one of its periodic upheavals. Subscriptions to series-even distinguished series such as Perspec­ tives-had been declining and individual volume prices had been rising, a trend that if continued could only result in the series pricing itself out of the market. In the course of the negotiations around the change of editors, the publishers offered a cost-cutting solution: change the production pattern to "camera ready" and elimi­ nate the costs of indexing and proofreading. While I could see the sense in this proposal, I was reluctant to accept it. Part of what I had always liked about the volumes in this series was that they were real books, intelligently proofread, nicely laid out, and provided with proper indexes. Thus, I in return offered a "Devil''s bargain": the publisher should maintain the present quality of the series for two more volumes and make a renewed effort to advertise the series to our ethological and sociobiological colleagues, while I as the new series editor committed myself to a renewed effort to make Perspectives the publication of choice for writers who are trying to get their message out to the world intact and readers who are seeking clear, coherent, comprehensive and untrammeled presentations of authors'' ideas and research programs.

ON THE FUTURE OF PERSPECTIVES When Patrick Bateson and Peter Klopfer offered me the editorship of Perspectives in 1992, the world of academic publishing was in one of its periodic upheavals. Subscriptions to series-even distinguished series such as Perspec­ tives-had been declining and individual volume prices had been rising, a trend that if continued could only result in the series pricing itself out of the market. In the course of the negotiations around the change of editors, the publishers offered a cost-cutting solution: change the production pattern to "camera ready" and elimi­ nate the costs of indexing and proofreading. While I could see the sense in this proposal, I was reluctant to accept it. Part of what I had always liked about the volumes in this series was that they were real books, intelligently proofread, nicely laid out, and provided with proper indexes. Thus, I in return offered a "Devil's bargain": the publisher should maintain the present quality of the series for two more volumes and make a renewed effort to advertise the series to our ethological and sociobiological colleagues, while I as the new series editor committed myself to a renewed effort to make Perspectives the publication of choice for writers who are trying to get their message out to the world intact and readers who are seeking clear, coherent, comprehensive and untrammeled presentations of authors' ideas and research programs.

Mitchell and Thompson have compiled the first interdisciplinary study of deception and its manifestations in a variety of animal species. Deception is unique in that it presents detailed explorations of the broadest array of deceptive behavior, ranging from deceptive signaling in fireflies and stomatopods, to false-alarm calling by birds and foxes, to playful manipulating between people and dogs, to deceiving within intimate human relationships. It offers a historical overview of the problem of deception in related fields of animal behavior, philosophical analyses of the meaning and significance of deception in evolutionary and psychological theories, and diverse perspectives on deception-philosophical, ecological, evolutionary, ethological, developmental, psychological, anthropological, and historical.The contributions gathered herein afford scientists the opportunity to discover something about the formal properties of deception, enabling them to explore and evaluate the belief that one set of descriptive and perhaps explanatory structures is suitable for both biological and psychological phenomena.