Preface to the second edition

This book is designed to bring together people already working on chemical communication and to encourage others, especially chemists (who have a vital role in this research), to take up the challenge. My aim has been to make an evolutionary understanding of chemical communication, including pheromones, accessible to a broad scientific and lay audience.

Pheromone research brings together scientists with many different areas of expertise, from a rich diversity of chemists to biologists of many kinds. Each area of expertise has its own jargon and concepts – a behavioral ecologist speaks a different language from a neuroscientist. The book recognizes that every scientist is a novice outside their own subject, even science close to their own, so I try to explain ideas in terms understandable by non-specialists while at the same time aiming to be up to date and detailed enough for the specialist. I also wanted to write a book that could be enjoyed by the majority of the world’s scientists whose first language is not English and thus also clearer for everyone.