THINK! Being a Student of Frank B. Livingstone

When I began my adult life as a programmer in 1961, IBM used to hand out little orange desk-top signs with their corporate motto in big letters: THINK (Figure 1). This comes to mind as I try to provide a sense of what it was like, thirty-some years later, to be one of Frank Livingstone's students. Frank was one of the legends of biological anthropology, as prominent and influential as any anthropologist with an interest in genetics, and indeed in all of anthropology. He was one of few in his generation who worked squarely within anthropology in its most profound sense, but had a fully professional understanding of genetics and the evolutionary theory of his day.

Frank contributed to human biology in many ways. His work was classically anthropological in the best four-field sense. Integrative understanding was an essential part of his work, not window-dressing rhetoric. His career spanned an era of much less technical knowledge and specialization, and a much slower pace than the world we live in today. But if integrative thinking takes too much time for today's students, or is out of fashion, it is not out of place. I think that shows regularly in many ways—though I know I'll get nowhere with any younger readers by suggesting that they slow down and learn something besides their specialty. Today, doing so will take an unusual kind of person, but in my day, with Frank as a major influence, it was possible for anyone.

Contributions to Research

Frank's work was focused on an understanding of the role of population structure and natural selection in the distribution of human variation, as illustrated by variation associated with malarial resistance. Frank achieved this with computer simulations rather than with the collection of new data or experiment. He wrote many papers on variation and its origins, and on the interesting dynamics of evolution at the gene level, as a function of demographic structure, competing mutations, and the selective force of malaria.

Frank contributed to other areas of anthropology through his application of evolutionary and genetic thinking. His ideas on the interaction of culture, genetics, and population structure were what made him most famous. His 1958 paper in the American Anthropologist on the role of the evolution of agriculture in the distribution of malaria is his most legendary paper. But he wrote on many other subjects, of particular note, the role that behavior and language may have played in the evolution of modern humans; this required more than a superficial understanding of the fossil record, of hunter gatherers and other small-group human cultures, of archeology, and of linguistics. His work was widely read and cited.

Frank came along at the time when the modern or neo-Darwinian synthesis was becoming reinforced by population and molecular genetic studies of variation that provided data that could be applied to the study of human history, origins, and evolution. He was energized by the unifying theory provided by the modern synthesis, and how it could be applied to humans. We may be the best species to study genetically today, given all the data and resources pouring in, but at that time few genes were known. It may be quaint to remember that sickle cell was almost the universal example of balancing selection known, and along with a few blood types among the few actual genes to which we could apply population genetics theory. Frank used relevant concepts from behavioral evolution and comparative behavioral studies, an area then burgeoning within anthropology and elsewhere. And he had an ecological perspective.

Contribution to Students

Frank's contributions were not restricted to his research, but included the influence he had on his many students, in class and out. I write this brief reminiscence of the influence Frank had on my own life and my sense of what he...