Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on December 7, 2007
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2008 48(1):153-154; doi:10.1093/icb/icm102
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This article appears in the following Integrative and Comparitive Biology issue: Aeroecology: Probing and Modeling the Aerosphere–The Next Frontier [View the issue table of contents]
Book Review |
More Than Kin and Less Than Kind. The Evolution of Family Conflict Douglas W. Mock.
Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
Correspondence: E-mail: aclark{at}binghamton.edu
More Than Kin and Less Than Kind. The Evolution of Family Conflict Douglas W. Mock.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006. 267 pp., 21 halftones. ISBN: 0-674-02248-3, $16.95.
This is a delightful, humorous book on a serious and theoretically important topic that has both entertained and puzzled scientists for a long time. The book covers a huge range of species, from plants to pigs, and relates the broad principles explaining the evolved interactions within families to the many strange particulars of specific cases. The intended audience is clearly science-oriented nonspecialists and they get a wonderful, whirlwind tour by a knowledgeable guide who himself helped lay the theoretical groundwork and provided much of the important empirical data for the scenarios he relates with such relish. Part of the fun of reading this book lies in Mock's dry turns of phrase and the sense of humor that is so familiar to anyone who has had the good fortune to hear his talks in conferences and other, more formal venues.
Mock's presentation of family conflict in the nonhuman animal world is also important for a number of reasons. First, it depicts a kind of science that is sometimes hard to convey accurately to nonscientists. Inserted throughout, as personal anecdote or stories about the work of his colleagues and graduate students, are real pictures of animal behavior in the field. (One can only imagine that the long hours in blinds in swamps led to the many quirky phrases for describing the infant wars being documented.) But, rather than leaving the reader with pictures of scientists taking pictures of eagles or lounging in beach chairs, he takes the time to lead us from those first observations, to experiments, to the building of general theories, and back again to the field. There is a clear theme of making key observations and then amplifying these into quantitative support (or lack thereof) for theory, both by experiment, but also by careful quantification of natural situations without manipulation. While these kinds of stories are sometimes told by science writers who note in wonder what these strange people did next, Mock can tell it like an insider, who appreciates both the oddity of this lifestyle and can laugh at himself or his fellow field workers, but is also driven by the necessity of field tests to ground theory.
Second, there is much for the fellow scientist and student in this overview. The topic is important because conflict and cooperation are fundamental evolutionary issues in all interactions between cells and within communities of species. Our intuitions of nice, peaceful families aside, families offer a social context in which certain aspects, such as trait frequencies or sharing, can often be specified well enough that the evolution of conflictual and cooperative traits can be explored theoretically and empirically. In fact, it is the contrast between our intuitions about niceness and the observation of conflict that has driven much of the research. Mock not only highlights where we have gotten so far, but also identifies open questions, e.g., the bases for parental preference for younger coots, or theoretically developed questions for which the empirical evidence is still meager. He spends quite a bit of time toward the end developing the issue of the worth of late-hatched, now somewhat starved siblings. An alert would-be graduate student could take note: there are really general and unsolved issues here, with implications for understanding development, conditional strategies, and also evaluating the amount of insurance bought by parents when making an "extra" offspring. A small literature on long-term (fitness) effects of early short-term deprivation in birds and other animals is developing and should give us new insights into many details of these kin-treatment systems. Perhaps they are sloppier than we imagine; perhaps there is finer tuning that we will uncover. Of course, one cannot write a book like this without describing systems and issues that one is less familiar with than others. The details given on smaller altricial birds (e.g., fledging age of redwings; feeding by male budgerigars) are slightly less accurate than for the egrets and herons Mock knows so well. Some explanations, e.g., for a prevalence of male parental care in fish, have more complexities and are less well settled than described. But these are really quibbles in the face of such a broad and rollicking tour of an important topic. This is a book for ecologists and animal behaviorists to give to their families and also require their undergraduate and graduate students to read.
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