Disciplines generate private lexicons. For ours, ''biocultural'' has an elusive appeal. Most of us employ research strategies designed to sort out cultural from biological cause. It is an intransigent task. This slender volume, a special issue of the Journal of Human Ecology, examines the interplay of culture and biology in families worldwide. Its international perspective-12 chapters by authors from 7 countries-provides a useful challenge to Eurocentric models of how families impact their children's development. The chapters, however, vary so widely in style, focus, and methodology that the reader will find little to pin down in the way of bridging conclusions. Once again, the biocultural remains elusive.
The book's senior editor, Wolanski, also contributes 2 chapters. The first chapter reviews many of the author's theoretical contributions to our understanding of how households and larger habitation patterns impact child development. We see, for instance, that if we are to detail how the organism responds to environmental stress, we must move beyond patent adaptation or maladaptation toward the idea of subpathologies created by over or under adjustments to stress.
Wolanski's concluding chapter eschews flow charts in favor of detailed comparisons of family structure and growth outcomes in Japan, Poland, Mexico, and Korea. Japan challenges the standard western assumption that superior growth outcomes are associated with smaller family sizes. Only 1.5% of the variance in Japanese stature is determined by family size, compared to fully 13% of the variance in Korea and Mexico; genetic variance for size also varies substantially between countries. Out of such findings, Wolanski concludes that the zero sum assumptions of population heritability models-greater explained genetic variance requires less explained environmental variance-may distort our thinking about how