Volume 25, Number 3 · March 9, 1978
Animal Babel
By J.Z. Young
How Animals Communicate
edited by Thomas A. Sebeok
Indiana University Press, 1,152 pp., $57.50
Among the surprises that have come from biology in the last few decades is the finding that animals so often communicate with each other. The discovery that so many species have a sort of language has been one of the intellectual set-backs that our 'gut feeling' of superiority has suffered since Copernicus showed that the Earth is not the center of the solar system and Darwin revealed that our physical ancestors were rather like apes. Until quite recently it has been generally assumed that human language is unique, and certainly our power of communication greatly exceeds that of all other animals in complexity and versatility. But it now becomes clear that communication is a fundamental property of all living things. The discovery of the mechanism of inheritance by nucleic acids (DNA) has shown that every cell of every organism is controlled by the operations of what can only be called a set of instructions embodied in an elaborate code. Through every moment of our lives these instructions are read and copied by processes that are justly called transcription and translation, and so used by the cells to help them to perform their daily duties by making the correct new proteins. These discoveries have compelled biochemists to think about such unfamiliar matters as the nature of codes and languages, while linguists must come to realize that what they thought was unique to man is a universal property of life.
Review, 2403 words
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