628 Animal Behaviour, 35, 2

The Problems of Biology. By J. MAYNARD SMITH. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1986). Pp. viii + 134. Price s 12.50 (hardback), s (paper- back).

Biology used to be taught as a discipline like Latin irregular verbs, a set of particular facts which happen to be so but which could just as well have been otherwise. If a piece of knowledge could be reversed without disturbing the rest of our world view, it is hard to get excited about it, and hard to remember it since it is one fact among so many. But a fact that is introduced as the necessary solution (or at least a neat solution) to what would other- wise have been a self-evident problem is a fact that is both intrinsically interesting and easy to remember. Realizing this is, in my opinion, the secret of being a good biology teacher. John Maynard Smith is an excellent teacher and he knows the secret full well. Though he doesn't actually say so, it is implicit on every page of his Problems of Biology. Russell's Problems of Philoso- phy were problems that still needed to be solved. Maynard Smith's Problems of Biology are, in many cases, the problems to which the most interesting facts and principles of biology are already the solutions.

John Maynard Smith had a first career as an engineer designing aeroplanes. After the war he gave up his career to learn biology. There is a comfortable living to be made by any engineer moving into biology, for much about organisms can be explained in engineering terms and most biologists do not know any engineering terms. The Zoology Department of one of our great universi- ties for years cashed in on this 'country of the blind' principle. John Maynard Smith is fully capable of doing it too, but he has preferred to concentrate on more challenging and universal problems, mostly problems of evolution, not least as they relate to animal behaviour.

There is a version of the 'country of the blind' principle that applies to literary style. Readers of scientific prose are so starved of conventional literary graces that one has only to throw in a few morsels of classical allusion, or garnishings from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, to see them eagerly swallowed as evidence of rare stylistic excellence and 'readability'. John Maynard Smith has no need of such one-eyed man tricks (notwith- standing an odd coincidence: 'I used to play squash reasonably well, although I have only monocular vision. The calculations I must have performed to decide where the ball was going to be, and to hit it, are staggering, but I managed (so long as I did not stop to ask how I was doing it)'). He knows that what the science writer needs is unpretentious prose

that is honestly devoted to making plain what was unclear, to making transparent what was obscure.

Maynard Smith began his biological career apprenticed to J. B. S. Haldane. He has some of Haldane's versatility and formidable intelligence, but he is much more sensible than Haldane and much less prejudiced. He has not written as much for the general reader as Haldane, and The Prob- lems of Biology shows this to be a pity. He offers us the same authoritative clarity, but without Hal- dane's intrusive and almost instantly dated politi- cal asides. It was astute of Oxford University Press to forget about Maynard Smith's particular exper- tise in evolution, and exploit instead his Haldane- like breadth and ability to bring evolutionary insights to the whole of biology. The result is a whole series of fresh thoughts, for instance on brain mechanisms, development, and animal behaviour, which the author would probably not otherwise have put on paper. Obviously there is a chapter on evolution, but this central subject is more fully treated in the admirable companion volume (the jackets share the same enigmatic Smartie design) on The Problems of Evolution by Mark Ridley.

The quality that, for me, shines from every page of both books is honest clarity. I refer to an honest desire to understand how things work in simple terms, and to communicate that understanding to others. These might seem fairly minimal qualities in a science writer, but they are surprisingly far from universal. It needs no saying that living things are not simple. If you find a very complex thing anywhere in the universe you can be sure that it either is living, was living, or is an artefact of something living. The question is, what shall be our response to all this complexity? How shall we understand it? How shall we write about it? There are two main approaches. One is to face up to it and try to reduce it to simpler elements that we can understand. This is the approach of a Maynard Smith. The other way is to lie down under the difficulty of the problem, even to glory in it, and discuss it in language whose obscurity matches the complexity of the phenomenon. I do not here mean honestly difficult language, say mathematics that does justice to the complexity of the problem. I mean language that injects additional, wanton complexity, as in the Philosophy version of the 'country of the blind' principle: 'Bet I'm the only biologist in the class who knows the meaning of dialectical alienation of ontologically prior episte- mological structuralist interactionist holism.' Imagine the exact antithesis of this kind of thing, and you will get a good idea of Maynard Smith's style of writing, and his style of thinking.

Maynard Smith ends his preface with a charac- teristically graceful acknowledgment to a col-

Book Reviews 629

league, to whom ' . . . I have not shown a single word, for fear that he would make me rewrite the whole thing. However, those who know us will see that much of the book is a debate between us, in which he is not allowed to get a word in edgeways.' You can't help feeling grateful.

RICHARD DAWKINS Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, O.~([brd OX1 3PS, U.K.

Methods' of Sampling and Analysis of Data in Farm Animal Ethology. By PER JENSEN, BO ALGERS & INGVAR EKESBO. Basel: Birkh~iuser (1986). Pp. 86. Price sFr. 25 (paperback).

This is a short volume in Birkh/iuser's Tierhaltung series on animal management, ecology, ethology and health. It will be of use to all those embarking on animal behaviour research, irrespective of whether the subjects of that research are on a farm, in a laboratory or in the wild state. The sections with the widest ethological relevance are those on the design of an ethological study, the recording of behavioural frequencies and the analysis of beha- vioural sequences. These sections summarize most of the important papers on ethological method- ology with useful illustrations and examples. Some aspects of the explanations would be more useful if taken further, for example sociometric matrices need more analysis if social orders are to be compared with other variables such as weight or hormone levels. Also, the discussion of how to analyse transition matrices does not include the much improved modern statistical procedures such as Brown's algorithm.

The organization of the volume is a little confus- ing since important topics are mentioned briefly early on with no mention of the more detailed surveys to come later. The recording of behaviour in relation to time really requires a detailed expla- nation early in such a volume and points such as how to define a bout of an activity should be dealt with in more detail. The use of manual recording methods and event recorders, including computer- linked systems, is discussed in three different parts of the book. This would be most useful if it was in one section quite early in the book and more information should be given on the use of key- boards for recording behaviour without looking away from the animal. The punch-card system described on page 57 looks rather archaic now. Automatic recording systems, including the use of

transponder-operated feeding systems, could also be discussed in more detail.

One chapter describes the desirability of making an ethogram for the animal species studied. In practice, one set of behaviour measures is usually adequate in a research study. A comprehensive knowledge of the behaviour of the animal is desirable but there is little more need for a formal ethogram than for a complete list of the animals' physiological processes. A final adverse comment is that the chapter on statistical methods is rather brief. Despite some inadequacies, as might be expected in any book of this kind, the authors have produced a book which is informative and easy to read. The general value of the information pro- vided and comparatively low price should mean that this book will find its way on to the shelf of many new behaviour research workers.

D. M. BROOM Department of Pure & Applied Zoology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 2A J, U.K.

Predator-Prey Relationships. Perspectives and Approaches from the Study of Lower Vertebrates. Edited by MARTIN E. FEDER • GEORGE V. LAUDER. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press (1986). Pp. x+ 198. Price s (hardback), s (paperback).

This is an unusual book in many respects. Based on a symposium held during the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Ichthyology and Herpetology in 1985, it does not suffer from the usual defects to be found in so many volumes of conference proceedings. All the examples deve- loped in the book relate to fishes, amphibians and reptiles and there are only two, very brief references to optimal foraging theory. The editors' objectives, which are largely achieved, were to produce a book that deals more with novel ideas and approaches than with data, and to cover work on animal groups for which we have a deep understanding of their morphology and physiology. The result is a very innovative contribution to the predator-prey literature, full of novel insights and ideas for the average ethologist, for whom this field is largely a world of algebra and avian examples.

The various chapters cover a variety of aspects of animals that are important either in catching prey or in avoiding being eaten; these cover morpho- logy, neurophysiology, energetics and behaviour. Perhaps the most sharply focused and contentious chapter is that by G. Roth, in which he presents an alternative model to Ewert's concept of 'prey-