Sociobiology Of Communication: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (oxford Biology)

Sociobiology of Communication: an interdisciplinary perspective This page intentionally left blank Sociobiology of Communication An interdisciplinary perspective E DI T E D BY Patrizia d’Ettorre and David P. Hughes 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2008 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–921683–3 (Hbk) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 978–0–19–921684–0 (Pbk) Preface Communication bridges biology disciplines, and beyond As we first designed this book, the title we had in mind was Communication among social organisms, and its aim was to make the most of an integrated and interdisciplinary approach in order to seek commonalties across a diversity of taxa expressing social behaviour. The ultimate hope was trying to identify the underlying general principles of communication. However, when thinking about a possible table of contents and list of contributors, it became obvious to us that the general principles would also apply to communication within organisms and perhaps even to non-organisms. Communication is the essence of any interaction, without communication social interactions are simply impossible. We wanted to present communication as a ubiquitous and unifying biological principle but our title didn’t quite take us there. Having bothered several colleagues and the OUP team with what was becoming a pressing issue, we were pleased to accept the suggestion of our friend Kevin Foster who—while enjoying a beer at the evening-pub during the 2007 congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in Uppsala—came up with Sociobiology of Communication. We believe this title is duly qualifying for the plethora of communication issues that are addressed in this book, since Sociobiology is nothing less than the study of the biological bas