The Mathematical Approach to Biology and Medicine

much more than it gives. There are about 75 subheadings in the text, each allotted an average of three pages, under which topics are introduced, defined , and briefly commented upon and/or exemplified. This format gives the book a "lecture-note" flavor, as does the blackboard-quality of many illustrations, the lack of references and documentation in the text, and the somewhat pedantic style in which much of the book is written. Furthermore , topics are frequently introduced or terminated with statements reflecting the author's opinions, which are often neither qualified nor adequately developed. For example, in the section on "Genes and Simple Behavior" the construct "intelligence" is devalued as ".. . a catch-all term masking the ignorance of the researcher," and later in the book the reader is told that ".. . if (intelligence tests) measure anything, (they) measure a gross complex of neurophysical activity." These comments are of questionable pedagogical value, and they neither amplify nor are they amplified by anything else in the text. In the chapter on "Culture and Human Behavior ," a paragraph concerning the work of Franz Boaz is concluded with the unqualified observation that "Filling the mind with unstructured material can be just as debilitating to clear thought as armchair theorizing about the basis of real behavior." Similarly, after a reasonably clear presentation in the first chapter of the heredity-environment issue, the author unnecessarily concludes with, "The so-called 'Nature-Nurture controversy' is dead except in the minds of a few unsophisticated individuals." In the last two chapters, "Culture and Evolution" and "The Adaptive Model," some ways to view cultural evolution are suggested. Using terminology that is not clearly defined, some borrowed from game-theory and cybernetics, the author expresses the fundamental notion that traits, be they biological or cultural, persist because they are useful to organisms displaying them. He stresses a need for the application of a biological model of evolution to anthropological problems and a need for viewing "systems" (populational as well as physiological) as self-regulating. Finally, in a rather abstract fashion, the idea that there is a fundamental unity between cultural and biological evolution is developed. The spirit of this book is well illustrated by a design that appears on the dtust cover of this, and every other, member of the Wiley series on Quantitative Methods for Biologists and Medical Scientists. It shows a caduceus supported by the maximal ordinate of the normal distribution. The …