Introduction to the Primates (review)

Introduction to the Primates, by Daris R. Swindler. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 1998. xv + 284 pp. $23.50 (soft cover).

When I first began teaching an integrated introductory primatology course in 1973, I was fortunate to use as a text Wilfred LeGros Clark's excellent book, The Antecedents of Man. It was inclusive, elementary, and inexpensive. Along with the new behavioral works of the previous decade, it could be used as a conceptual foundation for a course that covered basic primate biology and the recent discoveries in both primate behavior and paleontology. Soon, however, it was unavailable, and until now nothing ever quite replaced it, so that each year was an adventure of selecting from a new array of poor choices, since nothing stayed in print for very long and strictly behavioral ecology texts became more popular. Now, an introductory and comprehensive text has joined a recently competitive market in the great evolutionary anatomy tradition of Le Gros Clark.

Introduction to the Primates by Daris Swindler obviously derives from the author's career as a highly successful teacher dealing with similar textbook problems. The author attempts the monumental task of providing sophomores a rudimentary background in contemporary comparative anatomy, primate paleobiology, behavioral ecology, and conservation biology in a modest 250 pages of text. In fact, Le Gros Clark is frequently quoted, and some excellent figures have been borrowed from his and the contemporary works of Schultz and the Napiers. Since all of the many clear and useful figures, excellent drawings, artwork, and even poetry that ornament and document this entertaining and informative textbook avoid color or other special effects, the cost is kept at a minimum in a nonprofit university press publication that should remain available for a decade or more.

As an introductory text it also is usefully peppered with conceptual comments or scientific aphorisms, sometimes parenthetically, that provide further understanding rather than detailed knowledge. Debate and skeptical scrutiny are often discussed as basic principles of science, while numerous examples are given of concepts such as mosaic evolutionary trajectories or the compromise of opposing selective forces. In the Le Gros Clark tradition, the contemporary study of structure and function are discussed as essential to the interpretation of fossils. Variability and the difficulties of reducing it to an arbitrary classification are also often discussed, and the overall emphasis is on facultative primate behavior more in the Napier tradition than in the Le Gros Clark tradition. In the interest of space Swindler often cites a reference or two for further information on an interesting topic, such as obstetrics, that is rather cursorily glossed in the text. He also deals well and fairly with current controversies such as the molecular clock (p. 74) or the questionable uniqueness of the human adolescent growth spurt (pp. 186-189).

The field of primatology has grown immensely in the three decades since the Le Gros Clark paperback was in print, however, such that the task of writing such a comprehensive text in that "old" tradition is truly monumental. Consequently, this first edition--which I hope will be superseded with a revision--suffers from being incomplete, imprecise, and inconsistent. The low cost will allow supplementary readings, but care will be needed by the instructor to correct and clarify the text.

An instructive and selective glossary of nine pages compensates somewhat for the brevity of the text and complements the many well-labeled figures, especially in the anatomy and growth chapters, but these efforts to make the text inexpensive also result occasionally in incomplete coverage of important topics or concepts. The first chapter, for example, provides a detailed and amusing history of the human preoccupation with primates, but the events of this century, especially the pioneering studies of the Japanese, are conspicuously absent. In another example, the bottlenecking of genetic drift is not mentioned as an evolutionary mechanism in the establishment of new karyotypes (p. 68), even though the work of Jon Marks is cited; instead, their great variance indicates "much selection in the...