ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR, 2004, 67, 993e994doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.01.002

Book Review

Animal Innovation. Edited by SIMON M. READER & KEVINN. LALAND. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003).Pp. x+344. Price £55.00 hardback, £19.99 paperback.

My interest in animal innovation was first piqued byReader & Laland’s (2001) paper in which they demon-strated that, contrary to expectation, juvenile primateswere less innovative than adults. This stood in directcontradiction to the experience my collaborators, DrewRendall and Peter Henzi, and I had when we decided to tryto weigh the baboons in our study troop. We used a largebalance with a mirror placed on top and placed it next toa sleeping site. The juveniles were all over it instantly,from the moment it first appeared. The adults, on theother hand, would not go anywhere near the contraption,even when we increased its height to make it moreattractive as a spot from which to monitor the environ-ment (a very adult preoccupation). The nearest we got toan adult weight was when the lowest-ranking female inthe troop sat next to it while her juvenile son loungedinsouciantly upon it. At first, we thought she was leaningon the scale, but when we got closer we realized that shewas holding her arm half an inch above it, hovering overit but not actually touching it. This neophobia of theadults was in striking contrast to the continued attractionof the juveniles towards the scale, so how could adults bemore likely to incorporate innovative behaviours intotheir repertoire when they were so reluctant to try outanything new? I therefore approached Reader & Laland’sedited volume in the hope that it would help to solvesome of the contradictions between their comparativeanalyses and these observations. Happily, I can reportthat, while it may not have resolved the contradictionentirely, I was given lots to think about and came awayconvinced, like the editors and authors alike, that thestudy of animal innovation asks some important ques-tions and deserves serious attention.The book begins with an overview of animal innovation

by Simon Reader & Kevin Laland: how to define andrecognize it, the cognitive and evolutionary implicationsof innovation and, most importantly, the need todistinguish innovation as a process from innovation asa product. There is obvious value to be had in startingright at the beginning in this way, but, and this really isa personal bias, and not a criticism, I felt that this chapterwould have worked better at the end, as a way ofsummarizing and reiterating the issues raised throughoutthe book. To make things symmetrical, I would thereforehave started the book with the last chapter by MarcHauser, which asks some very pertinent questions re-garding the nature of innovation and what it tells us about

990003e3472/04/$30.00/0 � 2004 The Association

the minds of the animals that produce them. Again, itworks well where it is, but Hauser raises some key pointsabout the mechanism of animal innovation (how can wetell a lucky accident from the product of a curious mind?When is an innovation truly innovative and when is itjust a variation on a theme?) that would have been usefulto think about while reading the other chapters.The remainder of the book is divided into three main

sections, dealing with comparative and evolutionaryanalyses, patterns and causes of animal innovation andinnovation, intelligence and cognition. Throughout, thecomparative analyses concern mainly birds and primates,since only these groups have, as yet, been studied in anydetail, while more detailed experimental work comes fromrats and the chimpanzee of the fish world: the guppy. Asalways in an edited volume, some chapters stand out morethan others, although this reflects where my interests lie,more than anything else. Lefebvre & Bolhuis’s medita-tions on the nature of modularity as revealed through theforaging innovations of birds was thoroughly engaging,and their conclusion that modularity is, as Fodor (1983)first suggested, limited to input systems, with thisdomain-specific knowledge acted upon by domain-generalcentral processes, echoes some of the suggestions beingmade for humans (e.g. Samuels 2000).Other highlights for me included Slater & Lachlan on

bird song, Galef on the relation between social learningand innovation and Laland & Van Bergen’s chapter onexperimental tests of innovation in guppies (whichdemonstrated how a simple motivational factor, hunger,can lead to innovative behaviours and can also explaindifferences in innovation frequency between the sexes).My favourite overall though was Russell Greenberg’sexcellent discussion of neophilia and neophobia inrelation to innovation. Obviously, this was the keychapter with respect to my own particular bugbear andit was where my interest in these issues really began totake hold. Rather than lying at the extremes of a contin-uum, Greenberg argues that neophilia and neophobia actin concert to exert independent effects on animals’behaviour, interacting in complex ways to producea variety of patterns that relate back to a species’ ecology,as well as individual developmental stages. The notionthat the balance between these two emotional responsesto novel stimuli determines how likely it is that an animalwill innovate is highly persuasive, and it seems to me to bean area where field observations and experiments couldmake a real contribution to the study of innovation, asopposed to more formal laboratory settings.Greenberg shows that young birds, like juvenile ba-

boons, also tend to be highly neophilic, but that neophobiagradually increases over the course of development, while

3for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR, 67, 5994

attraction tonovel objects declines rapidly.He suggests thatinnovation-prone species may retain juvenile plasticityinto adulthood, which could provide a basis for innova-tion. This, however, does not explain the baboon case, andseveral of the primate-based chapters by Box, Byrne and Leealso note that juveniles seem predisposed to be moreinnovative than adults, contra Reader & Laland. However,reading Animal Innovation as a whole gave me some hint ofhow this contradiction might be resolved: throughout thebook, all authors are at pains to point out that innovationsare learned behaviour patterns that become stable compo-nents of the behavioural repertoire. It seems to me thatincorporation of behaviour as a stable component of therepertoire is far more likely to happen in adults than injuveniles. Adults, by definition, experience few morpho-logical and psychological changes once they reach this lifestage, whereas the juvenile period is characterized bynothing but change. As Bjorklund & Pellegrini (2002) haveargued, with respect to human child development, thismay have selected for high behavioural flexibility anda reduced likelihood of gaining expertise among the young.Acquiring a stable behavioural repertoire too early mayprove maladaptive, since what is effective at one stage ofthe juvenile period may prove useless at a later one. Highlyplastic behaviour and a lack of expertise may thus beadaptive components of ontogeny, rather than merereflections of an immature nervous system. This argumentfits well with those of Greenberg, with respect to the highneophilia of the young, but militates against juvenilesdisplaying behaviours likely to be categorized as ‘innova-tive’ or ‘novel’ as required by the techniques developed toidentify innovation in the literature. Juveniles may in-novate frequently throughout ontogeny, but drop behav-iours from their repertoire too quickly to allow them to be

picked up by researchers, or they may behave in ways that,to our eyes, appear to be suboptimal, clumsy and un-learned, so that we do not always recognize them for whatthey are.

Probing the relation between development and in-novation is one of the ‘ten unanswered questions’ thatReader & Laland pose in their opening chapter and,having now read Animal Innovation for myself, I can assurethem that their book does indeed ‘provide a stimulus togenerating answers to.these interesting and importantquestions’, even if I am going to try to do so in the lowlybaboon, and not the groovy guppy.

LOUISE BARRETTSchool of Biological Sciences, Crown Street,University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZB,U.K.

References

Bjorklund, D. & Pellegrini, A. D. 2002. The Origins of HumanNature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Washington D.C.:

American Psychological Association.

Fodor, J. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

MIT Press.

Reader, S. M. & Laland, K. N. 2001. Primate innovation: sex, age

and social rank differences. International Journal of Primatology, 22,787e805.

Samuels, R. 2000. Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychol-

ogy and cognitive architecture. In: Evolution and the Human Mind:

Modularity, Language and Meta-cognition (Ed. by P. Carruthers &A. Chamberlain), pp. 13e46. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.