Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more