Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- 1 The pervasiveness of plasticity
- 2 Plasticity in early development
- 3 Plasticity in the growth of Mayan refugee children living in the United States
- 4 The place of plasticity in the study of the secular trend for male stature: an analysis of Danish biological population history
- 5 Plasticity, growth and energy balance
- 6 The study of migrants as a strategy for understanding human biological plasticity
- 7 Human migration: effects on people, effects on populations
- 8 The use of surnames in the study of human variation and plasticity
- 9 A biological anthropological approach to measuring societal stress of parasitic disease: a case study of schistosomiasis
- 10 Biological adaptability, plasticity and disease: patterns in modernizing societies
- 11 Human biological adaptability with special emphasis on plasticity: history, development and problems for future research
- Index
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- 1 The pervasiveness of plasticity
- 2 Plasticity in early development
- 3 Plasticity in the growth of Mayan refugee children living in the United States
- 4 The place of plasticity in the study of the secular trend for male stature: an analysis of Danish biological population history
- 5 Plasticity, growth and energy balance
- 6 The study of migrants as a strategy for understanding human biological plasticity
- 7 Human migration: effects on people, effects on populations
- 8 The use of surnames in the study of human variation and plasticity
- 9 A biological anthropological approach to measuring societal stress of parasitic disease: a case study of schistosomiasis
- 10 Biological adaptability, plasticity and disease: patterns in modernizing societies
- 11 Human biological adaptability with special emphasis on plasticity: history, development and problems for future research
- Index
Summary
Physical anthropologists and even their successors, biological anthropologists, have often perceived the influence of environmental variation on developmental processes as a dreadful nuisance. This, of course, it is if one is using the phenotypes as measures of the genotypes that are required for establishing affinities and evolutionary relationships between populations; and such objectives dominated anthropology throughout most of this century. When, however, attention is turned to questions of developmental regulation and growth, adaptability and homeostasis, fitness and health, the environmental factors that affect these processes and phenomena become the essential focus of interest. In many respects (though not all) it is the genetic variance that becomes the nuisance. Increasingly, such issues have become of concern in biological anthropology, and the ecological dimension of the discipline is now considered to be as important as the evolutionary one. Ultimately, anyway, they represent different aspects of much the same coin.
The recognition of the importance of environmental dimensions owes much to the researches of Gabriel Lasker. At the time that he was undertaking his pioneering studies in Mexico, almost nothing else was being done on the nature of plasticity in humans, only in animals. He recognized not only the importance of the phenomenon but also how, in the much more difficult circumstances presented in human biology, it could be rigorously investigated by natural experiments, especially those involving migration.
The contributions to this book by colleagues and friends of Gabriel Lasker pay tribute to that pioneering work and well show the range of enquiries opened up by it. The concept of plasticity is widened well beyond the developmental one with, for example, contributions on demography, isonymy and epidemiology, but these are all fields in which Gabriel Lasker has made notable achievements.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human Variability and Plasticity , pp. xiii - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995