The University of California, Davis, faculty has selected animal behaviorist Peter Marler, professor emeritus of biology and psychology, as its 1995 Faculty Research Lecturer, one of the campus Academic Senate's most prestigious honors. "Colleagues have called Professor Marler 'the dominant intellectual leader in the study of animal communication,' 'the preeminent scientist in the field of animal behavior,' 'the most distinguished living ethologist,' and 'a giant . . . a genius (in our) midst,'" said Thomas W. Schoener, professor of biology and environmental studies, and chair of the selection committee. Marler has dedicated much of his life to the study of animal communication and to the broader area of ethology, the study of animal behavior. As an ethologist, he has spent almost four decades studying how animals, mostly birds and primates, communicate and how their methods of communication develop. His landmark work with songbirds has led to a radically new view of the relationship of learning and instinct. The two were once thought to be diametrically opposed. Now it is generally accepted that learning, as it occurs in nature, is typically driven by instinctual influences. "Professor Marler's research on bird song has led to fundamental insights into the principles of neurobiology of memory and learning and into the importance of social and auditory experiences in shaping communicative skills," Schoener says. "It is valued by investigators in such disparate fields as linguistics, child development, speech and hearing." Song learning in birds may be one of the few animal models for some aspects of speech development in humans. Young male sparrows (the females rarely sing) have an early "critical period" when they must learn their species' songs in order to sing as adults. They begin with a rambling twittering that can last for days, akin to babbling in babies. The sounds develop in several distinct songs until, one by one, the sparrows throw away all but the one they will use for the rest of their lives. In addition to revealing possible models for the study of human brain function, such research helps to unravel the interplay between heredity and environment in the control and development of communication systems and of behavior in general. Marler was born and educated in England. He received two Ph.D.s, the first in botany from the University of London (University College) and the second in zoology from the University of Cambridge. Two early papers, one showing a rather universal physical design in the predator-warning calls of many unrelated songbird species and another introducing the concept of species-specific communication signals, have been cited nearly 400 times. In his zoology doctoral work, Marler and his professor were the first to demonstrate that songbirds must learn the song of their species. In 1957, Marler joined the UC Berkeley faculty, where he worked for nine years. There he identified several dialects of white-crowned sparrows in the San Francisco Bay Area, evidence for song learning in this bird species, and analyzed the processes by which the dialects are acquired. "Dialects are so well marked that if you really know your white-crowned sparrow, you'll know where you are in California," Marler has noted. In 1966, Marler co-authored the now-classic textbook with William J. Hamilton III, UC Davis professor of environmental studies, called "Mechanisms of Animal Behavior." The same year, Marler joined the faculty at Rockefeller University in New York, where he is now professor emeritus. Much of what is known about the parallels between song learning in birds and speech development in children stems from Marler's work at Rockefeller with swamp and song sparrows. There, in field experiments with vervet monkeys, Marler and his colleagues discovered the first evidence in non-human primates that animal calls did more than express an animal's internal state, they could name objects in their external environment, known as "functionally referential." In response to tape recordings played at a Kenya field site, monkeys ran into trees for leopard calls, looked up for eagle calls and looked down for snake calls, as though they had words for each of their major predators. When Marler returned to California to join the UC Davis faculty in 1989, he extended those studies to an animal model more easily studied in a controlled laboratory setting -- the chicken. Chickens have a relatively large vocal repertoire of 25 calls, including two distinct alarm calls -- an abrupt long whistle for aerial predators and a prolonged clucking for terrestrial predators. Using innovative video and computer animation techniques, Marler's group has recently demonstrated for the first time in birds that chicken alarm calls contain news other chickens can use. The work suggests that the parallels between animal communication and human language are more extensive than commonly imagined. The studies also more sharply define the uniquely human aspects of language. In addition to his theoretical contributions and empirical discoveries, Marler has invented novel approaches for the study of behavior, Schoener said. He was involved in the first field-playback experiment with primates; he helped create the most powerful computing system of its time for analyzing animal sound; and he pioneered digital video-editing techniques. Marler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a charter member of the American Psychological Association and recently received the Distinguished Ethologist Award of the Animal Behavior Society. He has held a Guggenheim and was president of the American Society of Zoologists. "In the words of a colleague, he 'single-handedly has steered the field of animal communication during the last 40 years, trailblazing at every turn,'" Schoener said. Established in 1941 by the Davis Sigma Chi Club, the Faculty Research Lecturer is awarded annually to those faculty members whose research contributions have greatly enhanced human knowledge and have brought widespread honor and recognition to themselves and the university. In 1951, the UC Davis Academic Senate assumed responsibility for the award. The most recent recipients have been David Brody, professor emeritus of history (1991); Shang Fa Yang, professor of vegetable crops (1992); Charles R. Goldman, professor of environmental studies (1993); and Thomas W. Schoener, professor of biology and environmental studies (1994). The recipient delivers a spring lecture on a topic in his or her field of study.