This book explores the strikingly similar ways in which information is encoded in nonverbal man-made signals (e.g., traffic lights and tornado sirens) and animal-evolved signals (e.g., color patterns and vocalizations). The book also considers some coding principles for reducing certain unwanted redundancies and explains how desirable redundancies enhance communication reliability.

Jack Hailman believes this work pioneers several aspects of analyzing human and animal communication. The book is the first to survey man-made signals as a class. It is also the first to compare such human-devised systems with signaling in animals by showing the highly similar ways in which the two encode information. A third innovation is generalizing principles of quantitative information theory to apply to a broad range of signaling systems. Finally, another first is distinguishing among types of redundancy and their separation into unwanted and desirable categories.

This remarkably novel book will be of interest to a wide readership. Appealing not only to specialists in semiotics, animal behavior, psychology, and allied fields but also to general readers, it serves as an introduction to animal signaling and to an important class of human communication.

2.1 Binary coding  72
3.1 Damselfly census  80
3.2 Damselfly entropy  81
3.3 Turn signal probabilities  86
3.4 Turn signal entropy  87
3.5 Multi-valued coding  116
4.1 Touch tone signals  120
4.2 Speculum code words  123
4.3 Duck census  129
4.4 Multivariate coding  160
5.1 Intrinsic redundancy  175
6.1 Morse code lengths  189
6.2 Redundancy reduction  194
7.1 Designed redundancy  214
Figures
2.1 Examples of simple one-bit signals  31
2.2 Example of fractional-bit signals  36
2.3 Another example of a fractional-bit signal  37