Animal Innovation

Simon M. Reader & Kevin N. Laland (2003)

Oxford University Press

ISBN 0-19-852622-9 (paperback) £19.99, 0-19-852621-0 (hardback) £55.00

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There are few things in life as dispiriting as having one’s work described as “not sufficiently novel”. This damning criticism usually falls somewhere between the phrases “we regret to inform you” and “we receive many excellent papers/applications”. The need to be innovative is an important one for primatologists wishing to be published and funded. But what of our study animals - what role does innovation play in their lives, why does innovative behaviour evolve and what can it tell us about their cognitive abilities? Animal Innovation is a really excellent edited volume dealing with just these sorts of questions. Six of the fifteen chapters in this book concern non-human primates specifically and it is these, naturally, that will be of most interest to readers of Primate Eye.

Reader and MacDonald (Chapter 4) adopt a comparative approach to examine potential ecological correlates of innovation frequency among primate species. Contrary to expectation, they find that the frequency of innovation not related to a range of ecological factors (dietary breadth, species range and climatic variability), suggesting that environmental pressures may not be responsible for the range of innovation seen among extant primate species.

In Chapter 9, Box discusses the characteristics of marmosets and tamarins that make this group potentially such a promising one for studies of innovation. This chapter also draws attention to two aspects of innovation of which all primatologists should be aware. Firstly, studies of innovation may have crucial practical applications for primate conservation, forming a critical part of the training of animals prior to their release into the wild. Secondly, studies of environmental enrichment provide primatologists with the perfect opportunity to study innovative behaviour whilst at the same time attempting to improve the well-being of their subjects. 

Chapter 10 is a reproduction of Kummer and Goodall’s 1985 paper Conditions of innovative behaviour in primates. Many of the innovations described are ones familiar by now to many primatologists, with adult male chimpanzee Mike’s use of oil drums in his charging display perhaps the best known. This chapter really served I felt to highlight how far we haven’t come over the last twenty years in our study of such innovative acts.

Byrne (Chapter 11) analyses the database of tactical deception among non-human primates in an attempt to identify those that, on the balance of evidence, represent truly innovative acts. The intriguing range of behaviours described, although anecdotal in nature, highlights the potential profitability of studying deception as an innovative act.  

In Chapter 12, Lee presents a concise overview of primate innovations as responses to the challenges posed by environmental variability and advocates a cost-benefit approach to the study of such innovative behaviours. This seems a very strong approach to take even if, as the author recognizes, we have only just started to gather the data needed to do so (and indeed perhaps still need to determine exactly what sort of data are needed in this context.)

Russon (Chapter 13) details a broad catalogue of innovative behaviours in rehabilitant orang-utans. The unfortunate early lives of these animals mean that most must acquire the knowledge and skills to survive in the wild without the usual opportunities for social learning. As a result, they provide a rich source of information on innovative behaviours and these are examined from a cognitive viewpoint.

The chapters described above are the ones I read first of all. Having then also read the ‘non-primate’ chapters, I would strongly advise all readers to do the same. I found Laland and van Bergen’s chapter on experimental approaches to study innovation in guppies particularly interesting. Adopting a similar, rigorously controlled empirical approach to primate innovation would, I am sure, bear great fruit. Hauser’s concluding chapter highlights this and other potentially useful approaches to the study of innovation and poses some fundamental questions about the nature of innovation and the processes underlying it, questions to which we as yet have no answers.

Overall, I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in primate behaviour. It describes a fascinating range of innovative behaviours seen in primate and non-primate species alike and is extremely thought provoking in describing the challenges to be faced by those wishing to drive this area of scientific enquiry forward. All chapters are highly readable and pitched at a level accessible to final year undergraduates – this makes the book an excellent text for courses in primatology or animal behaviour more broadly.

And finally - a thought for those who felt only too able to relate to the dispiriting words of the opening paragraph. The studies reviewed by Simonton in his chapter on human innovation suggest that the most innovative individuals not only have the greatest number of successful ideas but also have the most failures. If you have more ideas that fail than anyone else you know, just think – you’re halfway to being one of the true innovators. That, at least, is how I am looking at it…

STUART SEMPLE

Centre for Research in Evolutionary Anthropology

Roehampton University