Comparative Books - Page 5

Economics in Nature: Social Dilemmas, Mate Choice and Biological Markets

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Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Behavioral Sciences -> Cognitive Psychology

Editorial Review:

Studies of sexual selection, interspecific mutualism, and intraspecific cooperation show that individuals exchange commodities to their mutual benefit. The exchange values of commodities are a source of conflict, and behavioral mechanisms such as partner choice and contest between competitors determines the composition of trading pairs or groups. These "biological markets" can be examined to gain a better understanding of the underlying principles of evolutionary ecology. In this volume scientists from different disciplines combine insights from economics, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences to look at comparative aspects of economic behavior in humans and other animals.

Behavior and learning

Howard Rachlin

By: W. H. Freeman Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $0.70

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Test Your Cat's Creative Intelligence: Eighteen Easy-To-Use Test Cards to Verify Your Cat's Artistic Ability

Burton Silver, Heather Busch

List Price: $12.95 By: Ten Speed Press Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

My Literary Cat 4 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

My cat tried to eat the book. Does this signal a voracious literary appetite?

Uh oh..... 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

My dumb cat just tested 40 points higher than my IQ. Now what do I do?

I have dumb cats 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This book was very interesting, but if you have an older, spoiled kitty, paid previously to just lay around, don't expect a lot. I enjoyed the book, but unfortunately I found that my cats' artistic abilities are limited to NOT looking at the pictures.

I REALLY throughly enjoyed your book. 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 22 people found this review helpful.

The reason I enjoy your book is because I have a great facination in cats I havn't read the whole book yet but I am hoping to save up. I have five cats and enjoy there company. It would make such a lovely gift for family & friends. So go buy the book (test your cats intellagence) and go test your cats knowledge,you never know your cats IQ could just well be better than yours. By Louise Nicholls

Editorial Review:

Written by the author of "Why Cats Paint", this volume is a home test that can be used to determine whether a cat has the potential to be an artiste. A series of 20 easy-to-use text cards from the Museum of Non-Primate Art allows readers to evaluate their cats on such factors as right brain/left brain thinking, image recognition and other harbingers of advanced aesthetic sensibilities. Cats indicate their responses by pawing, sniffing or walking away in disgust.

Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children

Amazon Price: $130.00 List Price: $130.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $80.00

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> By Topic -> Imagination

Editorial Review:

This book provides an overview of recent research presenting conflicting interpretations of children's understanding of the psychology of pretense and describes sociocultural factors which influence children's pretenses. Studies of nonhuman primates provide examples of their pretenses and other simulative activities, explore their representational and imaginative capacities and compare their skills with children. Although the psychological requirements for pretending are controversial, evidence presented in this volume suggests that great apes and even monkeys may share capacities for imagination with children and that children's early pretenses may be less psychological than they appear.

Animal Consciousness (Frontiers of Philosophy)

Daisie Radner, Michael Radner

Amazon Price: $23.98 List Price: $23.98 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: Prometheus Books Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $5.50

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Not as informative as you would think. 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Definitly a work if you like philosophical logic. It exhibits overkill in the area of research, but does not provide clear cut answers. It uses the A is B, A is not B, etc. type of research. Many sources are presented, however it is not reader written. I still do not know if animals have a consciousness or if I am just stupid.

Editorial Review:

Any intelligent debate on the ethical treatment of animals hinges on understanding their mental processes. The idea that consciousness in animals is beyond comprehension is usually traced to the 17th-century philosopher Ren. Descartes whose concept of animals as beast machines lacking consciousness influenced arguments for more than 200 years. But in reviewing Descartes' theory of mind, Daisie and Michael Radner demonstrate in "Animal Consciousness" that he did not hold the view so frequently attributed to him. In fact, they contend that Descartes distinguished two types of consciousness, which make it easier to discuss the conscious experiences of animals and to trace the debate into the post-Darwinian era.

The ape's reflexion

Adrian J Desmond

By: Dial Press/J. Wade Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $0.07

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Silent Partners

Eugene Linden

List Price: $17.95 By: Crown Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $0.01

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Horrifying Look at a Shameful Legacy 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Linden's report is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. It reveals how some of the superstars of the ape language experiments of the '70s, as well as several lesser-known primate research subjects, were callously discarded after the funding (and subsequently interest) dried up. With a few happy exceptions, their lives are now miserable -- or over.

It's as bad as the chimps from the space program, who after years of careful training were sold to laboratories for medical experiments. Most of Linden's subjects -- after being reared in human company and taught to use sign language or symbol-boards -- were sold to laboratories, placed in zoos, or attempted to return to the wild (with disasterous results).

The image of a despondent gorilla in a dank concrete zoo cage, signing desperately to passers-by "get me out, get me out!" will haunt me forever.

What happened to the chimps? 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book traces the aftermath for the subjects of the ape language experiments, especially what happened to the apes themselves. Since the publication of Linden's earlier book, Apes, Men and Language, Linden has had a special interest in the personalities, both human and ape of the participants in the ape language experiments. In this book, he revisits some of the key researchers, such as Roger Fouts, to see where the ape research has taken them. He interviews these researchers, trying to get some insight into the internal politics of ape research. He also traces the history of what happened to Washoe, Nim Chimpsky, and Koko following the famous language experiments that they participated in during the early part of their lives. He even makes a trip to Africa to see how well Lucy, a chimp who was raised in a human family, is getting along in a training program designed to help her adapt to life in the wild.

On reading the sub-title "The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments", I had expected that the book would include some analysis or retrospective of what was learned from the ape experiments, and how this has affected our current understanding of ape language or human language. Linden, however, doesn't touch on this topic. Instead, he pretty much confines his reports to tracing the present whereabouts of the animals themselves. When it comes down to it, the informative content that Linden includes in this book could have been presented much more concisely, perhaps even in a single long feature magazine article. Indeed, in several places in the book, Linden seems to intentionally pad the material with irrelevant details, such as the make of the car he used when driving to visit an animal, perhaps to bring up the total word count to monograph level. Nevertheless, the language of the book is quite accessible to general readers and may be very interesting for people concerned about animal rights issues and informed consent amongst nonhuman participants in scientific research. On the other hand, readers who want to learn more about the linguistic implications of the ape language experiments might find other books on the topic more satisfying.

Emotion in man and animal: its nature and dynamic basis

Paul Thomas Young

By: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $5.99

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How We Got to Be Human: Subjective Minds With Objective Bodies

William H. Libaw

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book is about what science frequently dodges or even denies: subjective life as experienced by animals as well as humans. Mixing what is known from science with some novel ideas, science writer William Libaw provides a provocative and stimulating thesis on the origins and evolution of consciousness. Among the intriguing ideas presented are the following: for the earliest animals that had it, subjective experience itself had Darwinian adaptiveness in a rapidly changing environment; the use of gestures and deception among apes and some birds suggests conscious concepts in their mental activity; complete spoken language came first from the mouths of a group of children who inherited the previously unused genetic language capability; and human males have retained the animal rutting instinct and amplified it with conceptual prurience, which leads them to eroticise females, and sometimes pressure them to have sex.As the subjective world of any other creature cannot be observed directly by any of us, this book plays detective to deduce from gestures, deceptive behavior, and language some of the concepts that play a key role in ape and human minds. This is an interesting and original synthesis of a great deal of evidence and ideas about the origins and nature of our subjective minds.

The Pinnacle of Life: Consciousness and Self-Awareness in Humans and Animals

Derek Denton

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An older, very interesting examination of consciousness. 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Denton is a keen biological observer (a physiologist by trade) of the phenomenon of consciousness both human and animal. Two things about this book that make it a worthwhile purchase. First is the discussion of experiments conducted on secondary awareness, or self-awareness as performed on higher primates. Second is Denton's interview with one of the last great metaphysical dualists known in our time, Sir John Eccles. His interview with natural historian Miriam Rothschild is very insightful reading as well.

Denton seriously wants to know how mammalian neural machinery gives rise to what we call human consciousness and what its precursors are in our animal cousins. His work parallels that of American Gerald Edelman in some respects as the two scientists make hay of primary, sensual consciousness in contrast to secondary, cognitive awareness of primary sensual consciousness; otherwise known as self-awareness. Edelman goes into more detail but Denton fairly covers the gist of this distinction.

Denton is clearly a materialst in his scientific view of brains and how they give rise to consciousness. He clearly states so when he ventures "consciousness is indivisibly a function of the brain...without the function of the brain there is no mind, no consciousness...no soul...if a person is inseperablem from his brain it is senseless to ask which of them controls the other." Obviously neither controls the other, they are one. Long live the death of mind/body dualism; if only our species could just make it over that one little hurdle. With Denton however, we have a monistic materialist at the helm; always an edifying prospect.

He runs through the standard litany of neuroanatomy and neurophysiological diagrams and definitions, attending well to the important RAS, reticular activating system in the brain stem which coordinates the lower, unconscious neural functions with the upper, corticallly conscious neural systems. This trails off into case studies of hemispheric differentiation and REM dream function; studies on the adaptive function of why we dream.

Denton covers his share of philosophy and animal correlates in this relaxing little book. The book ends merrily with interviews of naturalist Miriam Rothschild, Nobel Prize winning biologist Sir John Eccles, and Dr Donald Griffith. A fine, unpretentious essay on human and animal consciousness and its probable neural correlates, with some astounding interviews by some astounding people.