By William Etkin, Ph.D.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
and The City College of The
City University of New York

BROADLY CONSIDERED, COMMUNICATION is not only important to social
organization but is the essence of the socialization process. To justify
this statement we must consider what we mean by the terms social and
communication as related to animal behavior. We consider animals to
be social when they remain together in groups as a result of behavioral
responses to each other. Thus sheep in a herd are genuinely social be-
cause they stay in the group as a result of their reactions to one another,
whereas insects gathered around a light at night are not because they
stay together by virtue of a common response to this environmental factor.
In other words, the existence of the social group presupposes that the
members provide stimuli which evoke responses in other members of
the group by which the group is held together. The provision of stimuli
eliciting social responses from other members of the group is what we
mean by Communication. Clearly such stimuli need not be vocal, nor
need they have other characteristics of human speech such as being a
mutual exchange, depending upon learned symbols, etc. In this chapter
we wish to examine animal communication thus broadly conceived, in
the hope that such an examination will widen the scope of our thinking

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