Talk:Animal communication
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is supported by WikiProject Cats.
This project provides a central approach to Cat-related subjects on Wikipedia. |
|
| B | This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.) |
|
The human/animal cognition section needs fixing. I suggest mention of Brian Hare's work on shuman cocial cue reading in primates and dogs [1]. I deleted the human/animal telepathy edit by 86.129.206.167.
The "many meanings" of a dog's tail wag list seems to be inflated. Many of the items overlap. -jw bjerk
The definition of the term "animal communication" (first sentence) is way too broad. The way it currently stands, it would include almost every form of physical interaction between animals - intentional and non-intentional, including parasitism, predation, copulation, etc. 84.52.177.91 09:48, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Ant scent trails
Mention ant scent trails.Jidanni 00:32, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Removal of the dolphin name/call paragraph.
Please accept my apologies for not having commented earlier; I meant to do so but forgot. :-) I'll be back later with proper cites, but the short version is that the press stories almost uniformly mis characterized the study, conflating distinct calls for members of the group (which are interesting enough as it is, since to date mostly primates seemed to have had them) with proper names which would be something very notable indeed. The distinction between using a call (vocatively) or a name (referentially) is slightly subtle, but critical as far as cognition goes.
At any rate, the press coverage of the study was universally bungled (as "science" reporting almost unfailingly does). While the study itself is probably interesting and notable enough to mention, the hash popular press made of it isn't. I'll see next week if I can access that study from my university library subscription for proper cites. — Coren (talk) 01:04, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
On a related note, I would suggest that popular press "news" on science topics always be viewed with suspicion as sources for a statement in a scientific article-- my experience is that when the research isn't willfully mischaracterized into nonsense for the sake of a "good story", it's still so distorted that it becomes so wrong one can't even believe the opposite of what's written. :-) — Coren (talk) 01:08, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah, even better. Strike one for truly open science: the paper is available online! I'll be re-adding the paragraph, now, properly tempered by what it actually says. :-) — Coren (talk) 01:17, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
There we go. That's a far cry from the press clippings! :-) It's still very interesting, however, and I can't wait for the results of follow-up research. — Coren (talk) 01:41, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Section reorganization (almost no textual change)
I've regrouped the sections as follows:
Beforehand, the article plunged into interspecies/intraspecies. Only it covered interspecies first, the actual background on communication being included within intraspecies. A better layout for the article would be:
- General sections on communication - form, function and interpretation
- Intra (first as its more developed and studied) then intra-species communication
- Other aspects (evolution, linguistics, cognitive aspects)
I have made virtually no textual changes other than reorganize the sections as above. The "intraspecies" section now needs enlarging with actual information specific to intraspecies communication, rather than being used as general background on animal communication in general (as it was before). I've tagged it as "sectstub" for this purpose.
FT2 (Talk | email) 13:27, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Thomas Sebeok
Shouldn't this article say something about Thomas Sebeok since he coined the term "Zoosemiotics" and really pioneered animal communication studies?--98percenthuman 00:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Too much gulls
The forms of comunication lacks information of body part, which is the most important, and describes too much about the Herring Gull, which I think it's not good as body language description since it seems to be way too complex and is a reaction due to colours, not fully body language. Position of cats' ears and tail seems to be a better example to body language explanation. (I have some source if needed) Or I'll edit it later... (CyberTigerrr (talk) 08:37, 3 January 2008 (UTC))
- I think there's so much about the herring gull because of it's historic role in the study of animal communication. Nikolaas Tinbergen's research on communication in gulls is mentioned in the Nobel Prize press release. I know of no research of anything like a similar impact conducted on cats. Pete.Hurd (talk) 17:43, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
- I'd be tempted to agree with CyberTigerrr here; while the scientific relevance of the gulls is indisputable, as an introductory/summary text a bit more prose relating to animals more familiar to the readers would probably also be a good thing. There are good bits in Dog communication, for instance, that could stand a bit of summarizing and would be good in this article. — Coren (talk) 18:22, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Something's missing(?)
I don't know if I'm too far forward, but what I sense may be missing in the article are:
- the structure of warning calls: threat-type / direction,
- the same structure of collective food calls and food communication: honey-bee direction / distance / amount,
- the imitation gesture behaviors of primates, and the sound imitations of singing birds, purposes and connection to idea communication,
What's hinted in the article is metacommunication, the ability to surpress, feign and otherwise willedly control the communication by "tactical" reasoning, but it should be stressed more in order to make connexions toward human language. Said: Rursus ☻ 06:22, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
