Human Population Dynamics: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (review)

The title of this edited volume accurately describes its contents: cross-disciplinary perspectives on population. Originating from the 15th workshop of the Biosocial Society in 2000, Human Population Dynamics brings together a wide array of researchers of demography, social and biological anthropology, genetics, ecology, history, and geography. The aim is to actively foster integration between the biological and social sciences and to expose the reader to different approaches to the study of population change over time. As G.A. Harrison notes in the foreword, demography, or more broadly, population studies, play a central role in much of human biology, bringing together social and cultural factors that structure human populations with their effects on genetic structure and variation. Potentially, then, these papers should be of broad interest to students and researchers in the many fields concerned with human biology.

This holistic, integrating approach respects a long tradition in anthropology and population studies. An obvious example of this heritage is Harrison and Boyce's (1972) volume The Structure of Human Populations. Indeed, I initially wondered if the present book was an update of this classic, especially because Harrison supplied the foreword and because two of the chapters are by contributors (J.I. Clark and P. Kunstadter) to the earlier book. As it turns out, however, Human Population Dynamics reprises only parts of the Harrison-Boyce volume. Further, TheStructure of Human Populations was explicitly devised to be a university text, to introduce students to a coherent body of information while dismantling arbitrary disciplinary barriers. Human Population Dynamics might well serve as a supplement to such a course but would be hard pressed to carry a course on its own, and it could not compete with the breadth and depth of the recent text by Stinson et al. (2000).

Nonetheless, Human Population Dynamics provides useful and interesting contributions. After a good introduction by the editors that lays out the cross-disciplinary framework and summarizes the contents of the volume, the substantive chapters begin with a survey of formal demographic principles by A. Hinde. Not surprisingly, this chapter is heavy on definitions but also presents core ideas concisely. J. Clark's contribution, from a geographic perspective, emphasizes spatial factors, especially the growth of megacities around the world. Some truly frightening information is spread throughout this paper; for example, two-thirds of the world's population now lives within 60 km of a coast. When this fact is considered along with expected effects of global warming ... In the following chapter, R. Layton presents a nice example of the relationship between sociocultural factors such as inheritance rules and population dynamics.

As for several other chapters, a complex topic is treated in little more than a dozen pages, perhaps enough to give a taste for the subject. A more explicitly historical approach is R. Smith's chapter on society and demography in nonindustrial populations, mainly European but with a brief glance at India, China, and West Africa. Again, this is a big issue to address in a limited space. Still, Smith does not take refuge in generalities but points out that easy answers (e.g., the equation Europe = low fertility and Asia = high fertility) are not necessarily always correct. In a related chapter, E. Rousham and L. Humphrey examine different aspects of infant and child mortality. They point to disease and malnutrition as interacting major causes, with social factors such as economic inequality playing a strong role in patterns of child survival.

There are two genetically oriented chapters. The first, by J. Bertranpetit and F. Calafell, is a survey of aspects of genetic variation and microevolution in human populations ranging from quite basic information on DNA to fairly detailed and technical points. I found much to agree with in their assessments, such as the value of bringing population and molecular genetics together and the need to avoid confusing...