The Beast Within : Understanding Culture: The Psycho-Zoological Basis of Communication

"I find this book to be a very unusual -indeed a quite unique- and original piece of work that explores the outer parameters of what constitutes culture and language. [...] The work is extremely wide-ranging, from evolutionary biology to linguistics to developmental psychology, to philology and mythology. It is comprehensive, synthetic and insightful, erudite, well researched and fluently written. At the centre of the research stands a paradigm of evolutionary socio-biology, and more particularly a work of psycho-linguistic zoology, from which universalist anthropomorphic hypotheses are postulated. The central hypothesis is that of a communicative substratum underpinning all biological life-forms -not only humans and primates, but extending to wolves and to insects." - Dr. Kieran Keohane, Senior Lecturer & Head of Department, UCC, Ireland