✍ Scribed by John L. Fuller
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Developmental psychobiology and behavior genetics are somewhat uneasy partners in the scientific enterprise. Researchers in the former field are apt to concentrate on the effects of environmental variation upon the course of development. An implicit assumption is sometimes made that the organism's behavior is passively molded by the treatment imposed by the investigator. On the other hand behavior geneticists sometimes seem t o be saying that tracing a variant behavior to a mutant gene or dividing the variance of a metrical trait into additive, dominant, and environmental components explains how the variation comes about. Such extreme views are not as common as they were; still, studies of the coaction of genetic and environmental variables upon behavioral development are less common than they should be.
This volume was intended to provide a survey of current European activity in behavior genetics. It succeeds reasonably well though some important laboratories are missing, but it is not surprising that a book assembled in this fashion lacks a central theme and serves more as a sampler of review and research papers than as a systematic treatment.
The volume contains seventeen chapters divided among 2 sections: I. Biometric genetic and evolutionary aspects; 11. Phenogenetic and regulatory aspects. The latter will probably be more directly relevant to the interests of the readers o f this journal. However, the developmentalist wishing to become acquainted with the specialized language of biometrical genetics, the nature of diallel crosses, and the kind of evolutionary deductions will find concise accounts in Chapters 1 and 2 by Jinks and Broadhurst plus an application of the methods of human behavior in Chapter 5 by Fulker. The remaining papers in Part I are probably of interest primarily to ethologists and students o f the evolution of behavior.
One theme that recurs over and over is the interaction between environment and genetics-a theme which occurs even in those chapters with a strong ethological bent.
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This book is preaented as the Proceedings of the IFIP-IMIA International Working Conference on Computer-Aided Medical Decision-Making, the second one of this kind, which was held from 30 September till 4 October, 1985 in Prague. It is more than only 79 documented papers a t about 390 pages. Although