Book Review

Natural Selection and Social Behavior. Edited by Richard Alexander and Donald Tinkle. New York: Chiron Press, 1981, 532 pp., $37.50.

In Autumn, 1978, the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan celebrated its 50th year by hosting asymposium entitled Natural Selec- tion and Social Behavior. I believe it was the first major conference of this sort to be organized around the emerging discipline known (to some) as sociobiology, and it was exciting and suc- cessful. The proceedings have been edited by Richard Alexander and Donald Tinkle (the lat- ter, now tragically deceased) and finally, after three years, the results are available to us all. Despite the unfortunate delay between that first gathering and the current publication, the vol- ume, surprisingly, is not dated-testimony, per- haps to the lack of exciting new conceptual ad- vances in the field during the past few years. A discipline founded on a paradigmatic revolution thus seems to have entered at last into the stage of “normal science,” in which data have a chance of catching up with the rather breathless advance of theory during the preceeding 15 years.

Had this book been published ten years ago, it would doubtless have been hailed as a major advance, not only in the data contained but also in the theoretical perspective it presents. In the 198Os, however, the situation is somewhat dif- ferent: although the individual chapters are al- most uniformly excellent, the volume itself lacks a certain novelty or thrust. Using evolution to interpret social behavior was at one time novel

Received November 9, 1981. Address reprint requests to: David P. Barash, Depart-

ments of Psychology and Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

enough in itself to warrant a book (and much hoopla as well), but now one feels that some- thing new, some special focus within the field, is needed to justify book format. Indeed, Nat- ural Selection and Social Behavior resembles nothing else to much as several good issues of a major journal such as Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, bound up in hard cover. But don’t be put off-if you read the major journals, you should read this book.

Throughout their careers, editors Alexander and Tinkle have been models of careful and original thinking-I only wish their imprint was more apparent in this volume. In a sense, the editors’ impact can be seen, however, at least in that so many of the contributors are former students or colleagues, and perhaps also in the high quality of the work and the frequent efforts at establishing refutable alternative hypotheses. Regretably, however, there are no general sec- tion introductions and as a result, the first par- agraphs of many of the chapters review the same basic sociobiologic mantra again and again-in- clusive fitness and sexual selection theory, in particular. Editorial inaction is further apparent in that the 29 different chapters lack any com- mon format: some with summaries, some with- out, some are even free-form, without any dis- tinguishing sub-heads. Surprisingly, ESS theory does not appear anywhere in this volume.

The chapters themselves are so detailed and diverse as to be a reviewer’s nightmare, although their care and detail repay reading. For example: West Eberhard’s opening piece, describing her recent work on neotropical polybiine wasps, gives new cogency to the argument that even eusociality involves a powerful component of

43 Ethology and Sociobiology 3: 43-44 (1982) 0 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc., 1982 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, New York 10017

0162-3095/82/010043-02.SO2.75

44 Book Review

individual-level selfishness, in which nonreprod- uctives are making the best of their bad situa- tion. Noonan’s ,excellent quantitative work on Polistes fuscatus demonstrates the direct and indirect consequences of helping, and makes a strong case for the importance of the latter. (An ESS approach might have been profitable here, examining the persistence of single-colony founding as an alternative and presumably stable strategy.) Inclusive fitness theory is once again elegantly supported by Strassmann’s research on satellite nests in Polistes exclamans: the fre- quency of workers joining such nests is a direct function of relatedness to the satellite founder. By contrast to these studies of insect eusociality, the chapters grouped under “Correlates of male and female reproductive success in various ver- tebrates” are somewhat disappointing, espe- cially in the paucity of relevant data, although I particularly appreciated Ruby’s use of multiple stepwise regression to evaluate the importance of such phenotypic traits as size, age, and ac- tivity in reproductive success of male lizards. Burley makes a case for the evolution of sexual indistinguishability, an interesting converse of sociobiology’s obsession with the evolution of dimorphism via sexual selection. Alternative hypotheses are not crisply tested from her pig- eon data, however. Bradbury contributes an impressive effort to model the evolution of leks, emphasizing the importance of female home range size, but once again contrasting with a shortage of critical empiricism.

Fiala does an impressive job developing op- timality functions for sex ratio theory, then field tests his development of Fisher’s insights on red- winged blackbirds, a species whose young are decidedly (and conveniently) dimorphic. The work is excellent but, once again, difficult to test conclusively, not because of imprecision in either thinking or methodology, but rather be- cause of difficulty in measuring costs in nature when the fitness payoff-as in most cases-is distant in time. Five chapters consider cooper- ative breeding in birds, reviewing this fast-mov- ing field and making valuable empirical contri- butions as well. Different viewpoints are presented, each ably argued: reciprocity (Emlen); personal gain (Ligon, Woolfenden); ecological factors, especially the availability of marginal versus optimal habitats (Koenig and Pitelka) and a particularly valuable piece by Brown and Brown, which provides a useful, if controver- sial, clarification of inclusive fitness terminol-

ogy, and some overdue data on the effect of helper removal on fledgling success.

Hoogland offers abundant data on kin selec- tion and coterie size in prairie dogs, and Sher- man treats infanticide in ground squirrels with the simplicity, cogency, and care that we have come to expect of his work. Differences between male and female infanticidal strategies are re- vealed clearly, I believe for the first time. Haus- fater et al. give us a nice change of pace, dem- onstrating the application of computer simulation models to primate sociobiology, especially the role of dominance rank and age in determining lifetime reproductive success, the fitness con- sequences of infanticide, and the role of a fe- male’s dominance rank in determining her fit- ness.

The six concluding chapters on human beings are heavily anthropologic and probably more revelatory to social scientists than to biologists, at least partly because of the confusing nomen- clature of human kinship systems. Daly and Wilson’s landmark study of child abuse and neg- lect in evolutionary perspective finally appears, and Dickemann relates claustration of women to confidence of paternity. As in her earlier work with which I am familiar, no new data are pre- sented, but a delightful crosscultural and histor- ical review provides impressive evidence for some important new ideas. Flinn reviews mar- riage choice patterns in sociobiologic perspec- tive, emphasizing the inclusive fitness implica- tions of cross-cousin marriage; Irons argues that lineage exogamy has evolved to enhance male success in acquiring wives, by the pooling of resources; and Chagnon uses his seemingly un- ending trove of Yanomamo data to analyze vil- lage fissioning and terminological kinship with the philosopher’s stone of inclusive fitness the- ory. Finally, editor Alexander wraps it up with a rambling and rather discursive essay on “Ev- olution, Culture and Human Behavior,” strangely poetic and well worth considering.

Although we might debate whether this book warrants being a book, there can be no question about the quality of its contents. The contribu- tors are to be congratulated, and sociobiologists can be grateful for an accessible feast of theory and data, likely to remain satisfying for some time to come.

David P. Barash Departments of Psychology and Zoology

University of Washington, Seattle