454 BOOK REVIEWS

dental casts. The Nymegen Study consisted of three cohorts, each followed for five years from 4 to 9, 7 to 12, and 9 to 14 years of age. Extensive use was made, also, of 30 human skulls collected at the University of Nyme- gen. The labial and buccal cortex of the al- veolar bone was removed to depict the spatial arrangement of the permanent teeth and their relationship to the roots of the deci- duous teeth at various developmental stages, root formation of permanent teeth, resorp- tion of deciduous teeth, and the eruptive paths of the permanent teeth. Moreover, “nu- merical data” were used from a published report (Riolo et al., 1974) analyzing 120 series of dental casts and standardized lateral head radiographs, obtained as part of the Elemen- tary and Secondary School Growth Study conducted at the University of Michigan.

The book is intended for dental students, dental practitioners, and orthodontists to learn about growth and development of the dentition. The interest in the “transitional” dentition for clinicians relates to the often irregular positioning of the permanent inci- sors and canines, after their emergence, the so-called “ugly duckling” stage, which greatly disturbs parents and challenges the clinician in deciding whether interceptive treatment is necessary to ensure proper alignment of the teeth or whether self-correc- tion will occur. This dilemma is briefly dis- cussed in the last two chapters of the book.

This review will follow the lead stipulated by the authors in that a descriptive atlas model was selected, rather than a scientific report, to teach growth changes in the denti- tion. To facilitate this objective, each phase of transition was carefully segmented and discussed in a separate chapter.

The reader can develop an understanding of the transformation of the deciduous denti- tion into the permanent dentition by study- ing the illustrative material in this book and the comprehensive legends to the figures. The

text provides a somewhat repetitive narra- tive, which is partly unavoidable, but, none- theless, little effort was made to go beyond a descriptive essay. Some facts and figures could have served dental students and clini- cians; they need these for an analytical ap- proach to diagnosis.

The authors themselves recognized a fun- damental limitation of their study by omit- ting all inferences to occlusal relationships of the teeth during the two transitional pe- riods. This omission pertains particularly to the permanent first molar occlusion, which is invariably depicted in neutroclusion, while in two-thirds of children the transitional phase exhibits cusp-to-cusp occlusion that later shifts into neutroclusion, amongst oth- ers, by utilization of the leeway space result- ing from the shedding of the deciduous second molar. This reviewer also missed informa- tion on mesial drift of the teeth associated with vertical growth of the alveolar processes (studied earlier by van der Linden).

Since the interest of the clinician in the developing dentition is largely focused on the probability of self-correction of malaligned incisors in the ugly duckling stage, more ex- amples and analyses of favorable and unfa- vorable trends would have been welcome.

Nevertheless, the authors have produced a worthwhile account of the development of the permanent dentition, and their illustra- tive material is excellent.

COENRAAD F.A. MOORREES Harvard School of Dental Medicine Forsyth Dental Center Boston, Massachusetts

LITERATURE CITED

Riolo, ML, Moyers, RE, McNamara, JA, Jr , and Hunter, WS (1974) An Atlas of Craniofacial Growth: Cephalo- metric Standards From the University School Growth Study. (Monograph No. 2, Craniofacial Growth Series). The Center of Human Growth and Development, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

EVOLUTION NOW. Edited by J. Maynard Smith. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. 1982. 239 pp., figures, tables, references. $9.95 (paper).

With the recent centennial of Darwin’s death and the continued debate over evolu- tion versus creationism, there have been nu- merous books published dealing with the

models, methods, and results of evolutionary biology. One of the recent arrivals to this scene is John Maynard Smith’s inexpensive contributed volume. Evolution Now is a col- lection of 22 articles published between 1977 and 1982, with the majority (12) taken from the journal Nature. The six sections of the book, and the number of papers in each, are: “The Origin of Life” (2), “The Evolution of

BOOK REVIEWS 455

the Genome” (4) “Lamarckian Inheritance and the Puzzle of Immunity” (21, “The Pat- tern of Nature” (2), “Evolution-Sudden or Gradual?” (6), and “The Evolution of Behav- ior” (6). Preceeding each of these section is a short but highly informative overview by Maynard Smith.

The stated purpose of this volume is to present papers dealing with recent ap- proaches to many of the problems with which Darwin originally dealt. Maynard Smith’s guide for article selection emphasizes short, up-to-date papers, and notes that certain areas (e.g., the evolution of breeding systems) have been neglected for lack of suitable arti- cles having these qualities. This may be true, but perhaps several short papers written es- pecially for this volume could have been so- licited. In fact, though I like the general structure of the book, I would prefer a vol- ume of solicited review articles rather than a collection of previous work.

A review of an edited collection of previ- ously published papers must focus on two questions: 1) How useful is this volume to a researcher? (Should he or she buy it rather than obtain reprints of selected articles?), and 2) How useful is this volume as a text in a course? Here, I comment briefly on the book from the perspective of a researcher and teacher of physical anthropology.

Three of the six sections are most useful to a physical anthropologist or human biologist. The section “The Pattern of Nature” con- tains two articles dealing with cladistics. I found Patterson’s paper to be an excellent review of the goals and methods of cladistics, and Charig’s critique of cladistics to be use- ful, although rather short (as are many of the papers in this volume, reflecting their origi- nal publication in Nature).

The section “The Evolution of Behavior” presents a number of papers dealing primar- ily with testing of various sociobiological hy- potheses. These papers can serve to stimulate classroom discussion of the problems inher- ent in application of the results to the human species. Two of the papers in this section deal specifically with primates: Packer’s analysis of reciprocal altruism in baboons, and Har- court et al.’s investigation of the relationship between body weight, testis weight, and breeding systems among 33 primate species.

For myself, the most interesting papers were in the section on the rate of evolution. Gould’s article contains much food for thought for physical anthropologists. For ex- ample, the idea that speciation is often ran-

dom and a process initially independent of selection is one gaining support in evolution- ary biology. I think the time is ripe for the human fossil record to be reassessed in light of such ideas. For example, the Johanson- White model of Plio-Pleistocene hominid ev- olution removes A ustralopithecus africanus from the lineage leading to Homo on the basis of an increase, followed by a decrease, in posterior tooth size if A. africanus were included in the Homo lineage. If speciation is random with respect to morphology, then their rationale is weakened.

Gould‘s main point, however, is that the process of macroevolution is decoupled from the process of microevolution. He presents a case for a hierarchical structure in evolution- ary theory. Opposing viewpoints are also pre- sented in this section, particularly in Lande’s paper, which defends the idea that microevo- lutionary and macroevolutionary processes are not independent. I think the recent paper by Stebbins and Ayala (1981), which is a de- tailed critique of Gould’s idea, would have been a more appropriate contribution in this section of the volume. Also included in this section are several excellent papers dealing with the analysis of speciation and selection in various animal species.

Is this a book that one would buy for him- self or order for a course? While I feel a number of papers on cladistics, evolutionary rates, and behavior should be read by all physical anthropologists, acquisition of se- lected reprints would most often suffice. On the other hand, the volume is rather inex- pensive. Although I would use some of the papers for seminars and classes, I do not feel the need to use this as a required text, since many of the papers, though interesting and informative, would not be read. Maynard Smith notes in his introduction that this book is valuable for the nonspecialist. I would not recommend this as a text for a general audi- ence, but prefer Futuyma’s (1983) recent book for someone interested in, but not familiar with, macroevolution.

JOHN H. RELETHFORD Department of Anthropology SUNY College at Oneonta Oneonta, New York

LITERATURE CITED

Futuyma, DJ (1983) Science on Trial: The Case for Evo-

Stebbins, GL, and Ayala, FJ (1981) Is a new evolutionary lution. New York: Pantheon Books.

synthesis necessary? Science 213:967-971.