Shaping Primate Evolution: Form, Function and Behavior. Edited by Fred Anapol, Rebecca Z. German and Nina G. Jablonski. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. 426 pp. $120.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-81107-4

C 2005) Journal of Mammalian Evolution, Vol. 12, Nos. 3/4, December 2005 (
DOI: 10.1007/s10914-005-7337-3 Book Review Shaping Primate Evolution: Form, Function and Behavior. Edited by Fred Anapol, Rebecca Z. German and Nina G. Jablonski. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. 426 pp. $120.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-81107-4. This book, dedicated to Charles Oxnard, is composed of quantitative studies of biological structure by a diverse group of authors. The range of specific topics addressed is broad, but the editors’ efforts and the historical narratives offered throughout by Charles Oxnard combine to make it a well-organized, cohesive collection that is enjoyable and instructive to read. The book opens with a historically enlightening Appreciation by Cartmill. What Cartmill says he learned from Oxnard is to doubt one’s measures and then to learn how to remove those doubts. In other words, since the application of any quantitative method always gives an answer, how can you know the answer is correct? Doubts are removed by asking and re-asking the same scientific questions with alternate data sets, by formulating competing hypotheses, by experimenting with new methods, by evaluating those methods with the intent of finding their weakness (and this is most efficiently done using simulated data sets where correct answers are known), by discarding methods that are flawed or that provide ambiguous results, and by trying again. Answers must be evaluated by paying attention not only to mathematical and statistical issues, but, as exemplified by the work of Charles Oxnard, by maintaining focus on the biological question. From data collection through interpretation of results, it is imperative to doubt your own work. Reservations about quantitative data are removed by keeping the essence of the biological question at the forefront and recognizing the quantitative methods for what they are: tools that may open doors to some answers, but more likely more doors to new questions. The book is ordered into five sections organized around general themes. Part I, “Craniofacial form and variation” includes an instructive passage by German regarding the differences between longitudinal and cross-sectional data. This chapter provides valuable lessons for those who have not yet had first-hand experience analyzing growth series and serves as a valuable reminder to others. A much-needed discussion of how to handle samples of longitudinal data sets would have served as a welcome and needed guide but was not included. How, for example, does longitudinal data from one individual, or a small number of individuals (usually from the same litter) affect your results? Since longitudinal data are dependent data, how should they be properly handled statistically? Issues like these are becoming more important as more and more biological anthropologists turn to animal models. O’Higgins and Pan introduce the problematic taxonomy of African colobines following a paradigm that they have established in other studies of nonhuman primates by 543 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 1064-7554/05/1200-0543/0
544 Book Review offering a comprehensive exposition of the software Morphologika. Miller, Albrecht and Gelvin provide perhaps the most exhaustive of studies in this section in their analysis of Homo and modern gorillas using what the authors refer to as population thinking. Put simply, population thinking focuses on how to characterize variation in modern analog species in a way that reflects biology. Almost all criticisms that I considered while reading this chapter (e.g., the gorilla sample comes from a very limited slice in time as compared to the fossil data; use of an alternate analog species will change results and interpretation of the study) were eventually discussed by the authors. Although the authors’ constant reminder of the value of the population-thinking approach is bothersome, this is a clean, thorough and informative analysis. The authors clearly lean towards the interpretation that the fossil Homo remains are representative of a single species, but their case is made even stronger by their objective evaluation of the limits of their data and their methodology. The chapter by Anapol and colleagues in the second section, “Organ structure, function, and behavior” provides a concise preliminary summary of muscle fiber architecture and informed commentary regarding the relationship between bone and muscle and their uses for the study of evolutionary morphology. Jouffroy and Medina’s chapter provides an important review of the use of histoenzymology and immunocytochemistry for the study of muscles and suggestions for how these techniques can be used to study structure–function relationships in primate muscles. Peter Lucas’ overview should be required reading for any functional morphologist wanting to understand the complex relationships between feeding behaviors and tooth shape. de Winter presents an interesting multivariate analysis of brain structure and locomotory types using volumes of non-overlapping brain parts from five mammalian orders. A comparison of this work to those where quantitative brain data other than volumes and proportions are used to characterize “shapes” of brain components (e.g., Aldridge, 2004) should provide interesting contrasts. In Part III entitled, “In vivo organismal verification of functional models,” Hylander and coauthors provide a large and convincing study of the relationship between jaw adductor muscle force and symphyseal fusion. Their study of an old question is hypothesis-driven, systematic, and well done. As someone who does not do biomechanical research, I benefited greatly from the clear writing and careful logic used in the study of the functional difference in hind- and forelimb function in quadrupedal walking presented by Li and colleagues. The authors provide ample evidence of the problems encountered when the sample size is small (sometimes consisting of a single individual), and demonstrate the difficulties of calculating something as simple as a mean when the data represent quantitative measures of a biological behavior as complex as locomotion. The section, “Theoretical models in evolutionary morphology,” provides three clear examples of ways to explicitly evaluate various hypotheses that relate to bipedalism. Jablonski and Chaplin formulate predictions about necessary anatomical adaptations to assess the validity of selective agents that have been proposed as instrumental in the development of bipedalism. They provide an instructive review of the existing theories and their evaluation of the fossil evidence prompts rejection of two of these hypotheses. Stern and colleagues offer an insightful evaluation of the limitations of the traditional inverted pendulum model of the stance phase of human bipedalism. I was at first put off by the very long list of symbols and abbreviations that precede the text, but the definitions provided (...truncated)