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Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Perspectives. Marc Bekoff and John A. Byers, eds. 274 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1998. $32.95.
Next time you visit the zoo, study the young animals. You will notice, perhaps to your surprise, that young animals not only play, they play a lot. And play is not a luxury afforded only by those animals lucky enough to lead the cushy life of a zoo creature-animals in nature play all the time.
When behavioral ecologists hear that animals spend a great deal of time engaged in a particular behavior, a little light goes off in their heads and they immediately start thinking "adaptation." After all, every behavior has costs and benefits, and only those in which the latter outweigh the former should stick around very long; hence most behaviors, especially those that animals do often, are good candidates for being adaptations. In fact, behavioral ecologists can go overboard on this front and at times are accused of creating "adaptationist stories." Yet somehow people have tended not to weave adaptationist stories about the evolution of play-rather, just the opposite. Every possibility besides play as an adaptation was given a day in the sun. Once you read Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Perspectives, you will see that there is little doubt now that play has been shaped by natural selection-that is, it is adaptation.
This ambitious volume's editors lay out five critical issues regarding play: Which animals play? What are the typical age-specific rates of play? What exactly does play do for a...