Author's Introduction
- In Cheshire, a fox is poised to pounce on its mate when a badger bursts from a bush. The badger starts chasing the fox, which keeps leaping away, finally distancing itself. Then the fox suddenly turns back, approaches cautiously, and jumps sideways, facing the badger head-on. Back arched, head low, it stops, remains still. After a pause, the badger swiftly resumes the chase, causing the fox to hop around before lunging at its companion and darting off together.
- In Orlando, three dolphins are swimming in unison when one forms a perfect bubble ring. Another immediately approaches and blows another ring, which merges with the first to create a larger hoop. The third dolphin appears to attempt to pass through it, completing their improvised choreography.
- Animals often engage in play, from the spectacular to the subtle. Hyenas stage mock brawls, cats spin in circles chasing their tails, octopuses play push-and-pull with bottles, dogs bury sticks only to dig them up moments later… Even polar bears have been spotted playing with dogs, grabbing them in what looks like a hug, rolling in the snow, and letting the dogs gently nibble their lips. Such scenes make us grin with delight. But is that all there is to it?
- Animal play can seem trivial, even laughable. Often defined as an intrinsically rewarding activity, yet offering no immediate survival benefits, its very existence is puzzling. While it has long been hypothesised that play serves as a rehearsal for adult behaviours, some studies suggest that it might not be crucial to their development. Similarly, although some scholars propose that play allows animals to expend surplus resources (time, energy, neural activity) – which could explain play’s prominence in pets – this does not account for its widespread occurrence in wild species. Play challenges us with its apparent lack of biological necessity.
Author's Conclusion
- Recent studies have highlighted the link between animal innovations and evolutionary change. One well-documented case is birdsongs. In many bird species, songs are learnt and form part of their local cultural heritage. In other words, they have been invented, with each population having its own song patterns. And the greater the difference between the songs, the harder it becomes for males from one population to mate with females from another, as they don’t know the local ‘dialect’. Indeed, populations with different dialects also seem to constitute distinct genetic subspecies, hinting at a speciation process sparked, or at least accelerated, by cultural diversity.
- Another example involves black rats, which developed a technique for opening pinecones. This innovation gave them access to a new resource and enabled them to invade nearby forests. It is reasonable to hypothesise that this environmental shift will, over generations, lead these rats to evolve differently from their urban counterparts, as they now face distinct selective pressures – a change initiated by their pinecone invention. Moreover, acquiring this new technique imposes a cost on the rats, requiring the effort to invent or learn. This means that, if a genetic variant arose in the population that made the behaviour easier to develop and less costly to acquire, it would likely be selected – individuals carrying the variant would leave more offspring inheriting it. Therefore, innovations can alter selective pressures and, if the right genetic variations emerge, drive evolutionary change – a process known as the Baldwin effect.
- If invention promotes the animals’ adaptation to new conditions and, in some cases, enables evolutionary change, and if play reveals their capacity for invention – and even appears to be the activity par excellence through which animals develop their inventiveness – should we go further and ask: could the most playful species also be the most capable of meeting ecological challenges? Could play itself sometimes drive adaptation and evolution? Some researchers have proposed this hypothesis but, for now, it lacks empirical evidence – or rather, empirical research. It is almost as if the hypothesis were too seductive for the gravitas of scientific enquiry, as though scientists preferred to conceal the fact that their research is driven less by the prospect of useful solutions than by the sheer pleasure of discovery.
- The exploration and potential corroboration of this hypothesis could, nonetheless, offer a glimpse of another way of living with other animals – one not based on hierarchy or exploitation, but on playful relationships. Like Pippo and Albertine, Safi and Wister, ravens and wolves, we could perhaps co-create with other species the conditions for a shared world. This would not mean simulating shared activities, as in typical play, but drawing from interspecific play the effort to understand other species – an effort that could foster real collaborations, or at least ones that are realisable because they are desirable.
Author Narrative
- Mathilde Tahar-Malaussena is a philosopher of biology working as a research fellow at University College London, in the framework of the research project Animal Inventiveness: A New Insight on Agency in Evolution, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She is the author of Du finalisme en biologie (2024).
Notes
- An interesting Paper: the embedded videos are worth watching too - especially the polar bears playing with dogs.
- While play can be a training exercise or a trial of alternative ways of doing things, I get the impression that for dogs it's just fun.
- There are 10 Aeon Comments, each with a reply by the author, though I've not studied them yet.
- This relates to my Note on Animals.
Comment:
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