Summary

Human population biology is one of the few remaining integrative multidisciplinary sciences in today's reductionist scientific world. The reductionist approach is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the biomedical sciences where both long-term research and the ability to integrate and synthesize large bodies of data toward a solution of a broadly defined problem are now all but non-existent. In contrast, the concepts of human adaptability and plasticity and their development within an ecological framework emerged from the so-called ‘golden age’ of human biology in the 1960s and continue to thrive despite the changes that have taken place over the past three decades. This theme focuses on issues of human–environment interactions and resultant biological and behavioral outcomes in populations worldwide. The golden age of human biology flourished at a time when research dollars were plentiful, theoretical conceptualizations and constructs broad-based, multidisciplinary approaches emphasized and when many isolated human groups were beginning to emerge into the modern world. The historical and theoretical aspects regarding biological adaptability studies are appropriately addressed by L. Schell (this volume) and will not be reiterated here.

Among the contributors and supporters to an understanding of human biological adaptability was Professor Gabriel Lasker, whose 1969 article (Science 166, 1480–6) helped focus this issue by presenting a three-part construct of human biological adaptation that was defined as ‘… a modification in structure or function that enables an organism to survive and reproduce’ (Lasker, 1969). It was represented by a temporal sequence that included the concepts of genetic adaptation, developmental adaptation or plasticity (lifelong) and acclimatization (short-term).