Kingdom of Play
What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Inside of a Dog and The Soul of an Octopus, a fascinating, charming, and revelatory look at the science behind why animals play that shows how life—at its most fundamental level—is playful.
In Kingdom of Play, critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution?
Monkeys belly-flop, dolphins tail-walk, elephants mud-slide, crows dive-bomb, and octopuses bounce balls. These activities are various, but all are play, and as Toomey explains, animal play can be seen as a distinct behavior—one that is ongoing and open-ended, purposeless and provisional—rather like natural selection. Through a close examination of both natural selection and play, Toomey argues that life itself is fundamentally playful.
A globe-spanning journey and a scientific detective story filled with lively animal anecdotes, Kingdom of Play is an illuminating—and yes, playful—look at a little-known aspect of the animal kingdom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What purpose does play serve animals? Toomey (Weird Life), an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, attempts to answer that question in this disappointing study. Noting that "there is no universally accepted theory of play," Toomey evaluates the evidence for various hypotheses, one of which holds that play allows young animals to practice behaviors that will be evolutionarily advantageous as adults. As Toomey points out, however, a study of meerkats found that those that play-fought more as pups were no more likely to win real fights as adults. Another possibility is that play constitutes "training for the unexpected," Toomey writes, explaining that researchers have observed langur monkeys "deliberately compromising their vision and balance" by shaking their heads during play, which might be practice for recovering their balance when they face a real threat. There are plenty of amusing anecdotes, as when Toomey describes an aquarium turtle that would "ride" the nurse shark that shared its tank by gently biting its tail and hanging on as it swam away. Unfortunately, the author's discussion of the potential neuroscientific and genetic underpinnings of play feels rushed and insubstantial, and the scant number of recent studies cited raises questions about whether the science is up to date. This comes up short. Photos.
