The editors, professors of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, have produced an edited volume that is suitable for senior undergraduate or beginning graduate courses in evolutionary psychology and psychobiology. The handbook consists of 21 chapters divided into three parts:
The editors, professors of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, have produced an edited volume that is suitable for senior undergraduate or beginning graduate courses in evolutionary psychology and psychobiology. The handbook consists of 21 chapters divided into three parts: ideas, issues and applications. Each chapter is written by a noted specialist and, together, the chapters cover most of the domains interest in evolutionary psychology. An attractive feature of the book is that the chapters are quite even in quality and level of difficulty, with the exception of an interesting chapter by Hudson Kern Reeve on kinship and reciprocity that is a little more difficult than the others.
Not surprisingly in a handbook of evolutionary psychology, the authors are like-minded in their commitment to a Darwinist approach to behavior. Nevertheless, there are three areas of continuing debate that are well explicated in this volume. The first is the tension between evolutionary psychologists who are primarily interested in a species-typical design of the mind and a growing number of behavior geneticists who seek to understand heritable behavioral differences among individuals from an evolutionary perspective. This issue is beautifully captured by Michael Bailey's evenhanded chapter, Can Behavior Genetics Contribute to Evolutionary Behavioral Science?
The second debate is between those theorists who conceive of people as "adaptation executors" and those who conceptualize people as "fitness maximizers." The former argue that, because current psychological mechanisms were designed to maximize reproductive success in ancestral environments, current reproductive success is not theoretically informative. The latter argue that relative reproductive success in current environments provide useful information concerning species-typical reproductive strategies. In her concise chapter, Not Whether to Count Babies, but Which, Laura Betzig argues strongly that contemporary relative reproductive success is more lawful from an evolutionary perspective than popularly believed, a conclusion that is buttressed by Bobbi S Low's chapter on the evolution of human life histories.
The debate over the theoretical merits of examining contemporary reproductive success is closely related to the broader issue of the nature of the environment of evolutionary adaptation and its relation to contemporary environments. Charles Crawford, in his chapter, Environments and Adaptations: Then and Now, argues that no general answer is possible because different adaptations were created at different times, and because people tend to re-create features of the ancestral environment in contemporary societies. A possible example of this tendency is the limited (constant?) number of close friends and collaborators with whom people interact, regardless of the complexity and size of larger social systems. Crawford advises a piecemeal approach to the important question of the nature of the environment(s) of evolutionary adaptation.
A fourth issue, although not one that divides evolutionary psychologists, deserves comment. The most frequent criticism of a Darwinist approach to behavior is that evolutionary hypotheses cannot be rigorously tested. In his chaptmon R Hoer, Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses, Harlcomb III provides a thoughtful discussion of the progress that has been made and the most promising strategies for improving Ernst Mayr's "one long argument."
In conclusion, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is a very worthwhile book. Apart from its great expense, it would make an excellent textbook for an upper-level undergraduate course in evolutionary psychology. My solution to the pricing issue for my course is to put a copy of the book on reserve in the library and to assign chapters from it to accompany Robert Wright's easy-reading but persuasive The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology in Everyday Life (1994. New York: Pantheon Books).
Chitty, D. (1996). Do lemmings commit suicide? Beautiful hypotheses and ugly facts. N.Y.: Oxford.
No they don’t but there is a picture on the cover of a lemming making a non-fatal leap from a rock.
Written by the elder statesman of population ecology. Chitty argues that we still don’t understand population swings in animals and that it is our (including his) fault. The science just hasn’t been good enough. Not enough strong inference research.
This book is jumpy and hard to follow. Some of the book’s features seem to be a result of the author’s aging. The early history of population ecology is interesting. Each section is begun by a quote of some kind, many of these are quite good.
Cockburn, A., Cockburn, E., & Reyman, T.A. (Eds.). (1998). Mummies, disease and ancient cultures (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
A very odd new edition of the original mummy book. Very uneven chapters, some of which shouldn’t have been included. Among the book’s problems is the frequent failure to present enough context to inform very particularized and detailed discussions of individual mummies and, more understandably, missing information about some of the cases presented. Nevertheless, there are items of interest. I was absolutely amazed to discover the enormous number of mummies there are, especially in Egypt. There are some pathetic stories of how individuals met their demise, like the chronically unhealthy Inuit child who ate gravel (not gravol) in a futile attempt to keep from starving and the folks who got buried by accident and inhaled earth. Ancient populations had lots of parasites as well as lung damage from inhaling smoke from cooking fires in enclosed spaces or in Egypt, from inhaling sand.
Coen, E. (1999). The art of genes: How organisms make