Professor Gordon Burghardt - The Origins and Diversity of Play

Our understanding of the evolution and phylogeny of playfulness in animals is surprisingly minimal, largely because the function of play in both human and nonhuman animals remains controversial. Furthermore, play has largely been ignored as a deeply rooted behavioral phenomenon, since it seemed restricted to endothermic vertebrates with large brains. Improved criteria are now available for identifying play in diverse animals. After briefly documenting phenomena that meet such criteria in all classes of ver