Book Reviews

Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B: A Dis-ease, A Cause, and A Cure. By Kenneth J.Carpenter. xiv + 282 pp. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press. 2000. $40.00(cloth).

The history of the recognition and identi-fication of vitamins corresponds to the de-velopment of the field of nutrition itself. Asrecounted by Kenneth J. Carpenter eventsbracketing the onset of the 20th century, co-inciding with the emergence of molecularand physiological understandings of diseaseand its alleviation, make a story that is fac-tually rich and instructive for contemporarynutritionists and others. Carpenter has pre-viously presented a history of vitamin C(1988), the first dietary constituent recog-nized for causing a deficiency to be synthe-sized, and is eminently qualified as a scien-tist and writer to chronicle the place ofthiamin (vitamin B1) as an essential nutri-ent of historical import.

Thiamin is central to modern concepts ofnutrients both in fact and fancy in that inchemical class it symbolizes the concept ofvitamins, or “vital amines” as introduced byC. Funk in 1912. The recognition of an ac-tive substance in rice bran by G. Grijns in1901 and the elucidation of the chemicalstructure of thiamin by R.R. Williams andcolleagues in 1936 are culminating eventsamong the efforts of many researchers thatwas motivated by efforts to understand andprevent beriberi. The alarming increase inthe incidence of this disease in Asia in thesecond half of the 19th century correspondedwith improved rice-milling technology.

Like a good novelist the author capturesthe readers attention with the intrigue of amystery. Although we know the answerfrom the outset, the interest lies in learninghow to get from a state of ignorance in anera where disease concepts were dominatedby microbial agents following the break-throughs of Pasteur and others in the 1870s.For scientists and non-scientists the advan-tages of hindsight make the litany of error,misconception, ego blindness, and politicsentertaining but also educational. As easyas it is to question the competence of scien-tists whose ideas of the cause of beriberiseem preposterous in relation to the molecu-

lar reality of nutrients we now take forgranted, greater reflection offers potentialinsight on contemporary scientific issues,process, and culture. While identifying therange of misdirections and human foibles,Carpenter is careful to fairly represent theintegrity, insight, and competence of manydedicated pioneers and the context of thehalf-century in which they strove to uncoverthe truth.

The contributions of several key scientistsare described within the research and pub-lic health efforts defined by national pro-grams of Japan and various colonial admin-istrations in Asia. We get glimpses of thecareers and contributions of key individualssuch as the Dutch researchers C. Eijkman,G. Grijn, and A. Vorderman. While it bringsthese and other neglected medical scientiststo the fore, the book evokes a desire to knowmore, that justifiably in relation to the focusof this account the reader would need to fol-low up elsewhere.

In addition to such snapshots the book of-fers glimpses into colonial history of the era.As distinct from military and political his-tory that is more mainstream to popularknowledge, I found this perspective on theera refreshing and I assume scholarly valuefor historians more broadly.

The twelve chapters forming the mainnarrative break down into two parts. Thefirst seven chapters comprise the historicalchronology that, in addition to accountingoutbreaks of beriberi in military and penalinstitutions and among the general public,and the efforts of Japanese, Dutch, French,British, and American authorities to ad-dress the problem, outlines several researchapproaches. Special attention is given to theimportant contributions of the chickenmodel and the successful identification ofthe chemical structure of thiamin.

Chapters eight to eleven couple technicalexpansions on chemical analyses of foods,physiological requirements for thiamin andrelated topics with scientific retrospectiveson the implications of the thiamin story forprevention of deficiencies of this and othersnutrients. The final chapter expands this di-rection with a discussion of insights and les-sons for science and medicine more broadly.In keeping with his effort to maximize thisusefulness of this account to a range of dis-ciplines, two appendixes, while following

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 13:699–707 (2001)

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the same format as the chapters, treat“Thiamin Chemistry” and “Thiamin Bio-chemistry” more specifically.

As a detective novel the book would bedisappointing, and as it moves into a tech-nical treatment its likely appeal is progres-sively restricted to readers with back-grounds in human biology and nutrition.Nonetheless this is a highly successful workthat will satisfy a wide audience.

TIMOTHY JOHNSSchool of Dietetics and Human NutritionMacdonald Campus, McGill UniversitySte. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec

A Population History of North America. Editedby Michael R. Haines and Richard H.Steckel. xxiv + 736 pp. New York: Cam-bridge University Press. 2000. $75.00(cloth).

The thirteen essays of this volume de-scribe and analyze the demography of NorthAmerica to date, the region being defined asthe present territory of the United States,Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Thechapters are organized by periods, locations,and origins (ancestry) of the population andtile the geographical and temporal spacewith minimal overlap, yet in an unevenmanner possibly related to data availability.The demographic history of the Caribbeanis described in one chapter, that of Mexico intwo, while America “North of the border”receives ten: two before the European colo-nization, three during the colonial period,three for the 19th century, and two for the20th century.

Beyond the coverage of basic demographicdata, the editors apparently allowed the au-thors of the different chapters to expand atwill on their own area of expertise or cur-rent interest. On the one hand, this hands-off strategy yields a set of chapters that areengagingly written and of high quality. Onthe other hand, the reader will likely befrustrated in any attempt to follow an argu-ment beyond a given chapter. The editorsthemselves seem hard-pressed to find cross-chapter threads in their 8-page introductoryand 7-page concluding chapters to this 700-page opus. Their introduction is largely de-scriptive of the following chapters and offerslittle justification for this vast enterprise,except for the fact that new data and newtechniques of analysis have recently gener-

ated a lot of new information on NorthAmerican populations. From the outset, thebook is thus geared toward readers lookingfor demographic information on a particularpopulation at a particular time.

These readers will find here a collection ofexcellent references. Among those is RussellThornton’s essay addressing the thorny is-sue of the demographic impact of Europeancolonialism on Native populations. The au-thor provides a fascinatingly rich picture ofthe demographic impact of the colonizationand demographic responses thereto. Expo-sure to new diseases was far from the onlypotential cause of depopulation. Other ex-ternal shocks to the demographic regime in-cluded “wars, removals, and destruction oftribal economic bases” (p 21), but their im-pact depended largely on the existing char-acteristics of different Native societies andtheir ability to change. In the second essayon the Native North American population,Douglas Ubelaker employs the tools of pa-leopathology to focus on disease patterns.The author finds support for the hypothesisthat morbidity and mortality actually in-creased with the adoption of agriculture.

In Chapter 4, the population register ofQuebec starting in 1608 allows HubertCharbonneau and colleagues to describe thedemography of the French Colony withgreat precision. The exceptional nature oftheir data is obvious upon reading the nexttwo chapters, dealing with the roughly con-temporaneous White and African-Americanpopulations of the colonial U.S. Their re-spective authors, Henry Gemery andLorena Walsh, display a great deal of inge-nuity to reconstruct a demographic picturewhen confronted with the common problemsof sporadic and uneven data sources.Clearly endowed with superior sources,Charbonneau and colleagues still make anexcellent use of their endowment and pro-duce perhaps the most compelling descrip-tion of a pre-modern demographic regime.The authors go beyond description and pro-vide convincing explanations for many as-pects of the Quebecois regime that cannot beadequately summarized here.

Robert McCaa’s essay on Mexico is an-other highlight of this book. The chapter isimpressive not just for the breadth of theperiod it covers (from the origins to the early20th century), but also for the author’s richanalytical palette from paleodemography tocomputer simulation. The reader will also

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find in this chapter the most extensive dis-cussion of the long-term regulation of a de-mographic regime and possibly regret thatthis is not a more central concern elsewhere.We are reminded in particular that extinc-tion was quite a possible outcome to in-sufficient or inappropriate demographicresponses to external shocks, better sum-marized so by the author: “paleodemo-graphic roulette was unforgiving” (p 251).Stanley Engerman’s essay on the Caribbeanalso covers from the origins to the presentbut the greater emphasis is on the colonialperiod, where one finds interesting similari-ties and contrasts with the earlier discus-sion of the slave trade and slaves’ reproduc-tive success in the U.S.

In Chapter 8, Michael Haines describesthe demography of the white population ofthe U.S. during the “long” 19th century(1790–1920). As expected, the author’s de-scription of mortality change in the periodand analyses of its possible causes, buildingin particular on his own landmark studywith Samuel Preston (1991), are first rate.But this well-balanced chapter also de-scribes fertility and migration, both internaland international. The analysis of the fertil-ity declines notes many points of tensionwith the demographic transition theory andsimilarities with the decline in France, thetheory’s notorious anomaly. Marvin Mc-Innis’ parallel description of Canada dis-plays a greater emphasis on the patterns ofthe fertility transition. His analysis at thecounty level maps and times fertility changeusing the framework and indicators of thePrinceton European Fertility Project. Rich-ard Steckel’s essay on the African-Americanpopulation during the “long” 19th centuryrepresents the best attempt to bridge over toother essays in the same volume. The au-thor contrasts slaves with free African-Americans in the U.S., slaves in the U.S.with slaves in other parts of NorthernAmerica, and African-Americans withwhites in the U.S. In this comparative light,the onset of the fertility decline among Af-rican-Americans in the U.S. appears intri-guingly early and close to that of whites inthe U.S., given the mortality, education, in-come, and urbanization levels of the late19th century African-American population.

The last three chapters describe the 20th

century in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.,respectively. These chapters are more dis-similar than their three 19th century coun-

terparts. Marvin McInnis’ second essay onCanada includes a particularly elaboratediscussion of international migration andregional distribution. Zadia Feliciano’s de-scription of Mexico is an ideal-type of themodern demographic transition with a pre-cipitous decline in mortality and a laggedfertility decline that allow for an extremelyhigh population growth rate in the interim.Richard Easterlin emphasizes economic ac-tivity in the U.S. and its demographic im-pact. The author reiterates his well-knownexplanations of the U.S. post-war babyboom and bust but in a relatively idiosyn-cratic manner, and the generalization of cy-clical post-transition fertility from his ear-lier writings finds little echo here. As inprevious chapters, the analysis of migrationtrends mostly in terms of push and pull fac-tors, a framework that appears slightly ob-solete to this reviewer, admittedly not a spe-cialist of migration theory. Based on theanticipated reduction of push factors (i.e.,high fertility rates) from Latin America andAsia, the prediction that “immigration fromthese areas to the United States will alsogradually subside” (p 653) appears risky,considering for instance fertility and emi-gration trends in Mexico over the past twodecades.

At the close of this collection of high qual-ity essays, there is nevertheless a sense oflost opportunity for the student of popula-tion processes. Most of what we know onlong term population dynamics and regula-tion comes from European populations anda reassessment of current demographictheories based on this sum of data wouldhave constituted a major contribution. Theeditors identify this potential, pondering“Can we formulate a replacement for con-ventional demographic transition theory?Do the studies in this volume suggest anyalternative answers to one of society’s mostimportant questions?” (p 682). Unfortu-nately that comes on the penultimate pageof text and as a suggestion for future re-search. Probably few readers will read thisvolume from cover to cover unless so re-quired by the imperatives of a due review,but those who attempt to ingurgitate thisfeast of data and to follow the many ex-planatory leads might feel a little cheatedby this “do-it-yourself” concluding sugges-tion.

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LITERATURE CITED

Preston SH, Haines MR. 1991. Fatal years: child mor-tality in late nineteenth-century in America. Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

PATRICK HEUVELINENational Opinion Research Center &

The University of ChicagoChicago, Illinois

Ecology of Aging. Human Ecology, Special Is-sue No. 8. By Anna Siniarska and NapoleonWolanski. 216 pp. Delhi: Kamla-Raj Enter-prises. 2000. $55.00 (cloth).

The book extends the classic lines of datacollection on the physiological trajectory ofage related changes. A wide range of evi-dence on the shape and rate of aging is pre-sented for a number of different environ-mental conditions. However, what waslacking in the papers was an integrative,theoretical, and mathematical model for thewidely disparate data. For example, therenow exists considerable evidence on the bio-logical mechanisms that may determine theabsolute limit to human life span. The Hay-flick limit (1965) suggests that human cellsmay undergo 50–60 replications before cellgrowth stops. Martin (1970) suggested thatroughly 0.2 cell replication was lost per yearlived between ages 30 and 80. This suggeststhat cellular DNA errors would limitlifespan to 250–300 years. This does nottake into account the fact that stopping rep-lication does not mean cell death. Morepromising phenomena are studies of the oxi-dation of mitochondrial DNA, which wouldsuggest a limit to the human lifespan of 129years (Miquel, 1998).

A number of other mathematical issuesmust be taken into account. The Gompertzfunction is not the only human hazard func-tion that has biological meaning. For one,there is the generalization of the Gompertzfunction to allow for individual differencesin the genetic endowment for longevity.These models do a far better job in explain-ing the decrease in the rate of accelerationof mortality above age 80, which the Gomp-ertz model does not successfully explain (seeStrehler and Mildvan, 1960; Sacher andTrucco, 1962). More important perhaps isthe fact that there is an entirely differentmodel of the age dependence of human mor-tality, i.e., the Weibull process model(Rosenberg et al., 1971, 1973). This model is

based on the proposition that mortality isdue to a thermodynamic model of proteindenaturation. The parameters of both theGompertz and Weibull processes can be ex-plicitly interpreted in terms of the activa-tion energy (in kcal/mol) required to triggera chemical reaction in cellular protein thatgenerates protein denaturation and eventu-ally cell death. The Weibull model leads tovery different implications about the activa-tion energy required for thermal cell deaththan the Gompertz. That model can be ex-tended to the case where the proportionalityfactor in either the Gompertz or Weibullfunction hazard function is a multivariatestochastic process where,

aeut, or atm, becomes

~xTQx!eut or ~xTQx!tm,

where x is a vector of risk factors (or physi-ological state variables, e.g., from Framing-ham) measured at g times. Thus, x is not astate vector of observations but is a param-etrization of the multivariate stochastic pro-cess in x. Estimation of Q and u (or m) showsthat improved measurements of the statevariables in x cause the value of u (or m) todecrease, i.e., the trace of the effect of unob-served variables on mortality representedby u (or m) becomes a portion of the effect ofthe observed process x. When x is fully in-formative about the state variables under-lying mortality then u → 0.0 and eut → 1.0;as does m → 0.0, tm → 1.0. In these modelsit is also possible to include a separate timemetameter so that the coefficients in the dif-ferential equation become functions of aFokker–Planck equation describing the dif-fusion of a genetic innovation through apopulation (see Kimura, 1955; Manton,2000).

The model can be estimated from the as-sessment of impairments in Activities ofDaily Living (ADLs), IADLs (instrument ofADL), and Nagi performance measures. Inthis case the stochastic process model is arandom walk for the individual in a con-vexly constrained space. This model hasbeen applied to data from the 1982, 1984,1989, and 1994 National Long Term CareSurvey (NLTCS) data for the U.S. elderlypopulation—a model that supercedes theactive life expectancy model as estimated byGuralnik et al. (1993). This is illustrated ina recent paper in Demography by Mantonand Land (2000).

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The latest round of the 1999 NLTCSshows that the stated assumptions aboutthe possibly negative effect of modern civi-lization is incorrect. In the 1982 to 1999NLTCS series the changes in the disabilitydistribution for persons aged 65+ can be de-scribed by six dimensions generated from 27discrete disability measures. It is of interestthat while all six dimensions were wellpopulated in 1982 two of the six dimensions(with intermediate levels of disability) dis-appear by 1999—along with a large overalldecrease of the prevalence of disability. Thedecrease is found in both the moderate level(2–3 ADLs impaired) of disability but also inthe most severe levels of disability in insti-tutions). The parametrization of the abovemodel has been done now for several majorlongitudinal surveys (e.g., the FraminghamHeart Study as well as the Honolulu HeartStudy), which shows the parameters mayextend over such populations.

This all suggests that the model for mor-tality as a function of loss of physiologicalfunction must include a negentropic, u1, aswell as an entropic, u2, term, i.e.,

~xTQx!e~u1+u2!t,

or, more parsimoniously, by the use of acomplex time variable such as

~xTQx!e~u1+iu2!t,

where the imaginary portion of the expo-nential term is embedded in a harmonic(sin; cos) series. Such models are now beingapplied to Framingham Heart data whereu1 represents the rate per year of the wear-out process and u2 represents the regenera-tion of physiological capacity (i.e., the ex-plicit estimation of the negenentropiccontribution). Such theoretical models caneasily be estimated from longitudinal dataand can thus provide a theoretical contextwithin which to evaluate the wide array ofphysiological data presented in Siniarskaand Wolanski (2000). The proposed data col-lection must, however, be constructed to beconsistent with the logic of the proposedmultidimensional stochastic model of thephysiological aging process (Manton andYashin, 2000).

LITERATURE CITEDGuralnik JM, Land KC, Blazer D, Fillenbaum GG,

Branch LG. 1993. Educational status and active life

expectancy among older blacks and whites. New EnglJ Med 329:110–116.

Hayflick L. 1965. The limited in vitro lifetime of humandiploid cell strains. Exp Cell Res 37:614–636.

Kimura M. 1955. Solution of a process of random ge-netic drift with a continuous model. Proc Natl AcadSci U S A 41:144–150.

Manton KG. 2000. Commentary on “Two-parameter lo-gistic and Weibull equations” provide better fits tosurvival data from isogenic populations of Caerno-rhabditis elegans in axenic culture than does theGompertz model. J Gerontol: Biol Sci (in press).

Manton KG, Land KC. 2000. Active life expectancy es-timates for U.S. elderly population: multidimensionalcontinuous mixture model of functional change ap-plied to completed cohorts, 1982 to 1996. Demography37:253–265.

Manton KG, Yashin AI. 2001. Conjectures about a newexperimental model for population age changes in lon-gevity, neurodegeneration and sensory loss: Apis mel-lifera. Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany), inreview.

Martin GM, Spaque CA, Epstein, CJ. 1970. Replicativelife-span of cultivated human cells: effects of donor’sage, tissue and genotype. Lab Invest 23:86–92.

Miquel J. 1998. An update on the oxygen stress-mitochondrial mutation theory of aging: genetic andevolutionary implications. Exp Gerontol 33:113–126.

Rosenberg B, Kemeny G, Switzer R, Hamilton T. 1971.Quantitative evidence for protein denaturation as thecause of thermal death. Nature 232:471–473.

Rosenberg B, Kemeny G, Smith LG, Skurnick ID, Ban-durski MJ. 1973. The kinetics and thermodynamics ofdeath in multicellular organisms. Mech Ageing Dev2:275–293.

Sacher GA, Trucco E. 1962. The stochastic theory ofmortality. Ann NY Acad Sci 96:985.

Strehler BL, Mildvan AS. 1960. General theory of mor-tality and aging. Science 132:14–21.

KENNETH G. MANTONCenter for Demographic StudiesDuke UniversityDurham, North Carolina

Man–Environment Relationship, in Honour ofAlex F. Roche. Edited by M.K. Bhasin andVeena Bhasin. 319 pp. Delhi, India: Kamla-Raj Enterprises. 2000. $45.00 (cloth).

This edited volume is the ninth in a seriesof Human Ecology Special Issues and is afitting tribute to Dr. Alex Roche, an indi-vidual who has been singularly important inhuman biology internationally. Dr. Roche isan expert in many areas of human biologyand physical anthropology, and this volumeacknowledges, in particular, the significantimpact he has had on the field of humanecology as the most recent Editor-in-Chief ofthe Journal of Human Ecology (1994–1999).The volume consists of 26 papers on variousaspects of human ecology, divided into fivemain sections: (I) Overview, (II) Environ-

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ment in the Perspective of the Past, (III)Ecological Adaptation, (IV) Ecological Biol-ogy, and (V) Ecology and Culture. The edi-tors are to be commended for bringing to-gether the work of a truly internationalgroup of scholars. There is a wide range oftopics covered, including population biology,nutrition, skeletal biology, genetics, growth,dermatoglyphics, and noise pollution. Mostof the papers are scientific investigations ofspecific population groups although thebook also contains a couple of review papers.

The title of the first section of the book asan “Overview” is somewhat misleading. Ofthe six papers in this section, only the firstpaper, by V.K. Srivastava, on “Environmentand Culture”, and the last paper, by D. De-vuyst and L. Hens, on “Measuring and As-sessing Sustainability at the Local Level”provide any form of a general overview. Theother four papers in the first section dealwith specific aspects of human biology inpopulations living in different environmen-tal conditions, and seem to be placed in thefirst section for lack of a better place.

The second section of the book dealingwith the environment from the perspectiveof the past is a highlight of the book. Thesection begins with an interesting paper byS. Padhy on the ancient (2000 B.C.) writingsof Maharshi Manu in his work Manusmruti,considered from an ethnobiological point ofview. This paper is followed by four well-written skeletal biology papers on popula-tions from South Asia, Egypt, and Syria.

The third section of the book containseight papers that deal with ecological adap-tation, beginning with a review by N.Wolanski that emphasizes the integrationof nutrition and human ecology. The re-maining papers in this section are a blend ofstudies on various topics that include an en-ergy intake survey in the Himalayas, a fa-milial study of body morphology and so-matotype, a review of paddy field dermatitisin India, an estimation of risk of oral cavitycancer in chewers of Betal quid (pan) in In-dia, a discussion of various health indicatorsamong Indian tribes and the implicationsfor health care, and an interesting discus-sion of the heritability of various growthcharacteristics by C. Suzanne and col-leagues from Belgium.

The fourth section of the book deals withdermatoglyphics and the genetics of variouspopulations including Native Americans,Slovakian Gypsies, and North-West Indi-

ans. This section is rounded out by a reviewof some less-studied serum protein and en-zyme polymorphisms in populations fromaround the world.

The fifth and final section of the book con-tains three papers. The first ties in the prin-ciples and practices of human ecology to thestudy and control of noise pollution, whilethe second covers the impact of dwindlingforest resources in India on the traditionalsystem of maintenance of village forest re-serve. The final paper in the book, by B.K.Battacharya, argues for the urgent need inIndia for widening the primary productionbase, and to avoid the dependence on singlecrops that could fail.

Man–Environment Relationship coversan impressive span of topics in human ecol-ogy. The papers range in quality, and manywould appeal to specialized audiences.Taken together, the group of papers is in-teresting; however, the volume could havebenefited from some more general reviewsto help the reader place the individual stud-ies into the theoretical framework of humanecology.

PETER T. KATZMARZYKSchool of Kinesiology and Health ScienceYork UniversityToronto, Ontario

On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel inGroups. Edited by Sue Boinski and Paul A.Garber. xii + 812 pp. Chicago: University ofChicago Press. 2000. $95.00 (cloth),$35.00 (paper).

On the Move is an overview of current re-search and theoretical issues in the ecologyand evolution of group movement in pri-mates (and a few other organisms). The edi-tors compiled this volume to “unravel thecomplexities of group travel,” and ended upwith providing a more complex picture ofgroup travel than they had expected. Bydrawing on contributors from animal behav-ior, anthropology, cognitive science, ecology,physiology, and psychology they create a se-ries of multi-disciplinary discussions high-lighting the complexity of group movementand the integral role that social behaviorplays in it.

The first section of the text revolvesaround the theoretical and actual behavior-

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al ecology of group movement in primates.K. Student (Chapter 1) stresses the impor-tance of an overall assessment of physiologi-cal costs and benefits when constructing be-havioral and ecological profiles, especiallyhypotheses related to ranging and foraging.She raises the issues of costs as they relateto variation among group members, sexualdimorphism, pregnancy, and infant carry-ing. The subsequent chapters in this sectionfocus on specific issues such as the determi-nants of group size, predation, mixed spe-cies associations, and territorial defense.Boinski, Treves, and Chapman (Chapter 3)provide a robust list of cautions regardingassumptions about the effects of predation.Their chapter acts as a refresher read on therole that predation may play in shaping pri-mate behavior. Chapters 3 and 4 providegood, current, summary tables, while thetables in Chapter 2 are mainly a review ofmuch of the information from Primate Soci-eties (Smuts et al., 1987).

Section two focuses on potential cognitiveaspects and constraints as they relate togroup movement. This section also involvesa discussion on the evolution of decisionmaking patterns. Here Dyer (Chapter 6)provides a good primer/overview on the so-cial insects and Jansen (Chapter 7) modelsprimate path choice, warning about the im-portance of moving away from simple mea-sures of forests to assess food diversity andavailability. Chapter 9 by Wilson presents avery important and interesting discussionregarding the role that multi-level selection(the update on group selection) may play inassessing movement strategies. This chap-ter is especially absorbing as it serves to re-mind the reader of the dynamic and ongoingdialogue in the field of evolutionary theory.

The third segment of the book, “TravelDecisions,” uses reports from specific pri-mate studies to present the diverse array ofdata regarding movement patterns in anumber of primate taxa. Of interest to abroader audience here are the chapters byMilton (Chapter 14), who compares pri-mates (including humans) to dolphins andparrots, and Watts (Chapter 13) who pro-vides a succinct overview of the famousVirunga gorillas movement and space use(including interesting notes on tramplingand vegetation re-growth).

In the first chapter in section four (Chap-ter 15), “Social Processes,” Sue Boinski (one

of the editors) highlights inter- and intra-group social manipulation and variables af-fecting travel coordination. Her conclusionthat “manipulation by individuals of themovement patterns of their own and othertroops is an arena of social interaction muchlarger in scale and complexity than theusual behavioral paradigm,” (p 468) is verymuch a statement of a main “take-home”point for this entire volume.

The final section involves a highly engag-ing discussion of group movement in mixedspecies flocks of birds (Chapter 18), ceta-ceans (Chapter 19), social carnivores (Chap-ter 20), fossil hominids (hominines) (Chap-ter 21), and one group of modern humans(the Turkana, Chapter 22). This section isintriguing, contains very important reviewmaterials in each chapter and probably hassome of the best written essays. Of particu-lar interest to those studying humans arethe discussions of body size, dietary strate-gies, and movement pattern models inhominids in Chapter 21 and the overviewof modern pastoralist patterns in Chap-ter 22. It becomes evident by the end of thetext that a wide array of complexity is ex-hibited by a number of overtly social taxa.Humans (and all hominids?) appear tooccupy the far end of the primate groupmovement continuum, but can be well ex-amined by methodologies used on manyother taxa.

While this is a stimulating and well-compiled volume, I did note the absence of afew areas. Specifically, I feel that the overallbook would have benefited from a chapteron the structure of primate limb morphologyand the physical and mechanical aspects oftheir locomotor patterns. Also, a chapter ortwo more on different types of humangroups and their movement would haverounded out the overall presentation andlured more human-oriented researchers tothe wealth of information in the nonhumanprimate chapters. I commend the editors forhaving put this volume together and sug-gest that their concluding remarks (“NewDirections for Group Movement”) should beread by all interested in any aspect of pri-mate or mammalian social organization andbehavior. This book is reasonably priced,well constructed, and will be a good additionto the library of researchers interested inhuman and/or nonhuman primate behavior.

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LITERATURE CITED

Smuts BB, Cheney DL, Seyfarth RM, Wrangham RW,Struhsaker TT (editors). 1987. Primate societies. Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press.

AGUSTIN FUENTESDepartment of AnthropologyCentral Washington UniversityEllensburg, Washington

Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain:The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax,and Thought. By Philip Lieberman. 221 pp.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.2000. $39.95 (cloth).

Lieberman makes clear on page one of hisintroduction that he believes that “languageis not an instinct, based on geneticallytransmitted knowledge coded in a discretecortical “language organ.” Instead it is alearned skill, based on a functional lan-guage system (FLS) that is distributed overmany parts of the human brain.” This posi-tion puts him at odds with Noam Chomskyand his followers such as Steven Pinker butis consistent with my and colleagues’ effortsto understand the interrelationship of at-tention deficit disorder, the affected neuro-anatomy, and the resulting behaviors(Baird et al., 2000). He argues that no onewill ever devise a universal grammar nordoes contemporary linguistic theory ad-equately describe actual speech behaviors.“The ‘rules’ of grammar proposed by lin-guists generally are not produced whenpeople converse” (p 14). In Chapter 1, en-titled “Functional Neural Systems,” he de-scribes how rules and representations arecoded similarly in neural networks. Differ-ent parts of the brain may have differentcytoarchitectonic structures but there ismuch redundancy and flexibility in how abrain becomes organized over the course ofdevelopment. He also reviews the methodsfor studying the brain. In Chapter 2, en-titled “Speech Production and Perception,”the physiological details of speech produc-tion are outlined, and he notes that “motorequivalence” or the ability of all animals toproduce a behavioral outcome through a va-riety of ways, ensures that understandablespeech is produced even when “normal”speech is somehow disturbed. It means thatthere cannot be an underlying universal ar-ticulatory gesture. Perception of speech alsoinvolves articulatory modeling. In Chapter

3, “The Lexicon and Working Memory,” hedocuments how the neural bases of lan-guage are not localized just to a few specificregions of the brain such as Wernicke’s orBroca’s areas. Rather the neural substratefor language reflects a distributed networkthat connects “real-world knowledge withthe sound patterns by which we communi-cate the concepts coded by the words” (p 81).The size of verbal working memory influ-ences an individual’s ability to interpret thesemantic, pragmatic, contextual, and syn-tactic information of a sentence. Chapter 4,“The Subcortical Basal Ganglia,” makes aconvincing case for some of the supportingneural structures for language in some ofthe oldest, “reptilian” parts of the brain. Thebasal ganglia are also implicated in thelearning of complex sequences of what be-come routine behaviors. This includesgrooming behaviors and the syntax ofspeech. He strengthens his argument by ex-amining cognitive defects associated withdamage, disease (e.g., Parkinson’s) and highaltitude. It is evident from these examplesthat both cortical and subcortical regions ofthe brain are part of the FLS. Motor se-quencing and syntax must be linked. Chap-ter 5, “The Evolution of the Functional Lan-guage System,” demolishes alternativemodels for how language arose. A slow,gradual Darwinian process best fits thefacts. His final Chapter 6, “Commentary,”argues for linguists to shift their researchsuch that their models better approximatelanguage reality. This book is required read-ing for anyone interested in the evolution oflanguage.

LITERATURE CITED

Baird J, Stevenson JC, Williams DC. 2000. The evolu-tion of ADHD: a disorder of communication? Q RevBiol 75:17–35.

JOAN C. STEVENSONBook Review Editor

Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Sciencein the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. ByUllica Segerstrale. × + 493 pp. New York:Oxford University Press. $30.00 (cloth),$15.95 (paper).

I took my first class in sociobiology in1976, and one of the texts of the class wasEdward O. Wilson’s (1975) now classic vol-ume that provided an up-to-date synthesis

706 BOOK REVIEWS

of the social behavioral research in animalbiology. His controversial theoretical frame-work linked behaviors to genes even in hu-mans and angered his Harvard colleagues,Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould,who rejected the human exemplars as badscience and likely racist. The ensuing con-troversy is described in this volume with ex-tensive analysis based on interviews, obser-vations of meetings, and quotes from bookreviews and responses to those reviews aswell as the texts that carried the contro-versy forward. Segerstrale is a sociologistwith a background in organic chemistry andbiochemistry. She provides detail consistentwith a feature article in the New Yorker butI could not put it down. Chapter 1 outlinesthe debate in broad strokes as both aca-demic engineering and as an opera. Thenext 19 chapters are divided into three sec-tions. Part 1, “What Happened in the Socio-biology Debate?” (nine chapters), is thebroader social and theoretical biological con-text into which Wilson’s initial book landedand a history of the debate in the 1970s and1980s. She discusses how environmentalismruled at the time but that popular books bybiosocial anthropologists and ethologistsand the Man and Beast conference in 1969set the stage for sociobiology by encouragingdiscussion across disciplines. She describesthe organization and reactions of critics in-cluding the Sociobiology Study Group of Sci-ence for the People, how British biologistssuch as John Maynard Smith, WilliamHamilton, and Richard Dawkins got involved

and how Wilson and his allies responded.She clarifies how other evolutionary debatessuch as the critique of adaptationist think-ing and neo-Darwinism and the unit of se-lection discussions were tied to the sociobi-ology debate. Part 2, “Making Sense of theSociobiology Debate” (six chapters), teasesapart the protagonists’ political and valuedifferences, their different approaches tothe practice of science and its relationshipto society, and how both sides were trying toscore both scientific and moral points. (Shenotes that controversy benefited both sides.)Part 3, “The Cultural Meaning of the Battlefor Science” (five chapters), describes thestate of the discussion 25 years later. Shefinds that the struggle between the cultur-alists and universal nature supporters re-solved in favor of the latter. She assesseshow Wilson reinvented himself or not, thecurrent state of neo-Darwinism and theGould and Dawkins debate, and the rela-tionship of these discussions to the “sciencewars.” She finishes with discussions on Wil-son’s goal for consilience, the difference be-tween scientific and moral truth, and how“the new essentialism meets the new exis-tentialism” (p 396). This evenhanded docu-mentation and analysis of a stimulatingtime for evolutionary theory is particularlyappropriate for those who are interested inor teach the history of science.

JOAN C. STEVENSONBook Review Editor

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