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

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

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more