Product Description: The relations between behavior, evolution, and culture have been a subject of vigorous debate since the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). The latest volume of Perspectives in Ethology brings anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists together to reexamine this important relation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this study, Thompson explores the links between the two most popular collections of medieval narrative. Looking at the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales in their entirety, Thompson reveals many surprising similarities--ranging from the way they discuss fiction to their treatment of it--which have, until now, remained unnoticed...read more

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Product Description: An evaluation of the significance and usefulness of anthropomorphism and anecdotalism for understanding animals and humans. The 29 critical essays, written by historians, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and primatologists, consider the debates between scientific and cultural analysis which fuels the question: Why anthropomorphize? These discussions suggest a number of reasons, pro and con, diving into the nature of anthropomorphism itself, and related topics in consciousness, cognition, and language...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 'A book rich and various in ideas and substance...It belongs on the shelf of anyone wanting to keep up with what is happening in ethology.'-Bioscience, from a review of an earlier volume Beginning with Volume 11, Nicholas S. Thompson takes over the editorship of this remarkable series...read more

Product Description: The current volume focuses on behavioral similarities and differences within individual animals, larger populations, and species as a whole. Research from ecological, social ontogenetic, physiological, and other perspectives is presented to explicate specific behaviors, as well as to provide a more profound understanding of how behavior work influences thought about evolutionary processes...read more

Mitchell and Thompson have compiled the first interdisciplinary study of deception and its manifestations in a variety of animal species. Deception is unique in that it presents detailed explorations of the broadest array of deceptive behavior, ranging from deceptive signaling in fireflies and stomatopods, to false-alarm calling by birds and foxes, to playful manipulating between people and dogs, to deceiving within intimate human relationships. It offers a historical overview of the problem of deception in related fields of animal behavior, philosophical analyses of the meaning and significance of deception in evolutionary and psychological theories, and diverse perspectives on deception--philosophical, ecological, evolutionary, ethological, developmental, psychological, anthropological, and historical. The contributions gathered herein afford scientists the opportunity to discover something about the formal properties of deception, enabling them to explore and evaluate the belief that one set of descriptive and perhaps explanatory structures is suitable for both biological and psychological phenomena.