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Kingdom of Play - David Toomey ***

If we didn't have personal experience of other animals - pets in particular - it might be easy to consider play as a particularly human behaviour, yet, as David Toomey shows, a wide range of animals resort to play, even including some non-mammalian species. 

A starting point is the relative paucity of study of play in other animals - Toomey points out that this may partly be because it can be difficult to be sure if an action is play - it's very easy to anthropomorphise and interpret an action in another species in the same way we might see it in humans. It also does seem to be the case that many of those who study animals either consider play to be unimportant, or think of it primarily a function of pets, which they consider of little interest because they aren't animals in nature.

There are certainly plenty of questions here (even if answers are more thin on the ground) - why animals play, whether it's learned or built-in, does it have a developmental function, what determines whether a species will or won't play (somehow, playful scorpions seem an unlikely prospect)... and so on.

Toomey presents us with a number of interesting examples, but I am less certain we can draw enough conclusions to make this a scientifically useful topic as yet. In the end it is always going to be difficult both to assess whether a behaviour is play, or simply looks like play, and what is happening as a result in - at least, in non-human species. Having said that, some of the interpretations seem reasonable - for example the aspect of play as a way of training for the unexpected: this perhaps also limits the concept of play to animals that distinguish the expected and the unexpected. We also meet along the way scientists unfamiliar to many popular science readers, such as American psychologist James Mark Baldwin. 

Toomey justifies the subtitle of the book by saying 'Since natural selection shares a great many features with play, something I don't think he presents any good argument for being true, we require no great leap of reasoning to say that life itself, in the most fundamental self, is playful.' I really can't accept the logic of this. In the end, we are surely presented with the same philosophical problem that Thomas Nagel addressed in his famous 'What is it like to be a bat?' paper - we simply can't put ourselves into the heads of another species. There will always be guesswork involved.

Despite these concerns about the how far Toomey goes with his conclusions, there is no doubt that this is a thought-provoking title. Toomey's writing style can sometimes be a little obscuring of the point he is trying to get across, but it's a topic that deserves more exploration.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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