Evolutionary Anthropology 221
BOOK REVIEWS
Genes, Sex,
Intelligence, and
the Meaning of Life
Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in
Human Evolution
By Alison Jolly (1999) Boston: Harvard
University Press. 518 p. $29.95 (cloth).
ISBN 0-074-00692.
Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at
Human Behavior
By Bobbi S. Low (2000) Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 408 p. ISBN
0-691-02895-8.
The cutting edge in biology these
days is in molecular genetics, cell bi-
ology, and biochemistry, at least that
is what we are led to believe. These
certainly are the fields that are experi-
encing the most growth and receiving
the most funding. Students are also
drawn to these areas of study knowing
that the job market is ripe for those
who know their way around a labora-
tory. In sharp contrast, most feel that
evolutionary biology, or any kind of
natural history that focuses on whole
animals, is ancient history. Who
needs to know how or why whole an-
imals behave when people in lab coats
can parcel out DNA and dissect indi-
vidual cells down to organelles?
Surely, the secret of life is in the de-
tails. And yet, there have been major
advances in evolutionary biology in
the past four decades, advances that
may not have made headlines, but
nonetheless have fundamentally
changed the way we view the world.
Evolutionary biology is comple-
mentary to the other biological sci-
ences because its goal is to step back
and look at the bigger picture. And
lest we forget, it is a section of biology
that has a long and rich history. It has
taken a century of evolutionary think-
ing since Darwin to form a coherent
theoretical approach to behavior, a
bank of computers to model what
those theories predict, and an army of
behaviorists to stand in the sun for
hours and see what animals really do
to make sense of the real world. The
results have sometimes been spectac-
ular. We now know, for example, that
genetic relationships guide behavior;
that individuals of all species are de-
signed by natural selection to weigh
options and strategize; that males and
females often act differently for good
evolutionary reasons. More interest-
ing, while reducing the behavior of
various animals into small acts, we
have recognized that nothing is sim-
ple, that creatures, even one-celled
ones, are complex. In general, evolu-
tionary biologists have shown that
passing on genes is indeed a compel-
ling force underlying much of animal
behavior. If that isn’t the cutting edge
of science, what is?
The two books I will review are tes-
timonies to these advances in evolu-
tionary biology. Alison Jolly’s Lucy’s
Legacy is a broad introduction, while
Bobbi Low’s Why Sex Matters takes a
more narrow view and concentrates
on humans. Each in its own way
makes a statement about why study-
ing whole animals and their behavior
is important.
Although its subtitle refers to sex
and intelligence, Lucy’s Legacy is re-
ally a compendium of all that has
been accomplished in animal behav-
ior and evolutionary biology since
1960. The book begins at the begin-
ning, with the evolution of life, and
ends where we are today—facing
globalization by one species, Homo
sapiens. In between, Jolly passes
through a panoply of subjects. She
moves swiftly through the evolution of
sex, mating tactics, cooperative be-
havior, male and female biological
differences, the influence of females,
intelligence, learning and thinking,
and human development, among
many other subjects. The reader can
only say “Whew!” upon reaching the
last chapter. But the array is the point.
Here we have all the major achieve-
ments from the past few decades and,
taken together, as they are in this
book, the whole is impressive.
Clearly, the book reflects the author,
a renaissance women with a deep
knowledge of biology and a penchant
for the poetry that dots this volume. As
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy comments on the
book jacket, Jolly is “one of primatolo-
gy’s old souls”; this book has all the
vision, past and future, that an old soul
should have. Although Jolly has never
had the recognition or the media atten-
tion that other female primatologists
have had, she is highly regarded within
the field. Jolly conducted the first long-
term study of ring-tailed lemurs (or any
lemurs) on Madagascar, a study she
continues today. This work was impor-
tant during the early days of primatol-
ogy because it went against the grain of
the more standard studies of Old World
monkeys and apes. The lemurs, Jolly
soon discovered, were female domi-
nant, thus revising then-standard mod-
els of primate social interaction. Even
more significant, Jolly was the first to
propose that primate brain size and
complexity might have evolved to keep
track of social machinations. Her view
in this book, then, is that of a field re-
searcher who has been working and
thinking about biological issues as long
as primatology has been a discipline.
Jolly is at her best when writing
about humans. As an anthropologist,
she feels compelled to unravel various
scenarios on the evolution of human
groups from the hunting-and-gather-
ing way to life to the modern first
world condition. Here she looks at
some old saws that have been dis-
cussed endlessly by others, such as
“concealed” ovulation, the proposed
environment of evolutionary adapta-
tion, the pair bond, and the human
diaspora. But she also comments
nicely on the role of culture in our
evolution: “However, since humans
have created culture we have never
stayed in one style of life long enough
for fishermen to evolve webs on their
toes, or hunters to grow claws. We
have apparently never even had time
to evolve mental habits that would
distinguish hunter from fisherman.
Instead, we have, on a grand scale,
evolved the need to learn the idiosyn-
cratic habits of our tribe.”
More interesting, Jolly takes a risk by
trying to make some sense of where
humans are today. In these chapters on
globalization and modern technology
she is thoughtful and provocative, her
writing worthy of discussion with col-
leagues and students. Take, for exam-
ple, her section on what really sets
Homo sapiens sapiens apart from other
222 Evolutionary Anthropology
creatures and our ancestors: “Four
huge, new factors have entered human
behavior in our own species’ past. The
first two are material greed and storage,
or transfer, of surplus production. To
amass possessions beyond immediate
needs for the day or year sets us apart
from most other animals. Only a few
cache food, or build multiyear termite
hills and beaver dams. A third factor is
social status. All animals know inequal-
ities between sick and healthy, those
with good or bad territories, those at
the top or bottom of the pecking order.
But we are almost the only ones besides
ants, bees, wasps, and naked mole rats
where some individuals actually com-
mand the labor of others and appropri-
ate their surplus. Finally, there is the
power of ideas—memes with their own
reproduction inside out minds. So far
as we know, there we are absolutely
alone.” Throw that paragraph at a
group of undergraduates in anthropol-
ogy and see where it goes.
In this book, Jolly’s vision is broad
(across species), philosophical, liter-
ary, and historical, and some might
find it overwhelming. By necessity,
she has to gloss over most subjects,
presenting teasing tidbits and then
moving on. Sometimes she digresses
to stories of her own life or comments
from literature. Add to that her voice,
which is friendly and intimate, and
you have a dense but almost breezy
history of modern biology, a one-
woman tour-de-force that will either
impress readers or leave them ex-
hausted and frustrated, wanting to
know the details. In either case, Lucy’s
Legacy stands as a solid history of evo-
lutionary biology and primatology.
Low’s book is more focused on hu-
mans, but it too covers a lot of ground.
The title Why Sex Matters refers not to
the act of sex, although that obviously
matters as well, but to how one’s sex
fundamentally molds behavior. And it
matters for humans as well as other
species. “I want to explore the ecology
of being male and female, beginning
with simple rules and with what I can
discern about environments with
which the evolutionary rules inter-
act,” she writes. Her approach is eco-
logical, meaning how a particular en-
vironment with particular properties
affects the way creatures behave. In
this, Low’s view is different from that
applied in most analyses of human
behavior, which are either cultural or
biological. She also has a fine under-
standing of how complex the relation-
ship between ecology and behavior
can be: “The link between genes and
bits of body or behavior is rather like
the link between a cake recipe and the
resulting cake. There is no one-to-one
mapping. One cannot pick up this
crumb and match it to that word or
phrase in the recipe.” (p. 15)
Low, like Jolly, begins at the begin-
ning, with the evolution of sexual re-
production. But very quickly she takes
on human behavior, and her ap-
proach is sophisticated and detailed;
this book would be much harder than
Jolly’s for undergraduates to tackle. In
a section on “The Ecology of Human
Mating Systems,” for example, she
tears apart the easy concept of polyg-
yny, exposing how this mating system
really works in various societies and
explaining why it probably appeared.
Surprisingly, Low has found that po-
lygyny appears most often in areas of
high pathogen stress. Thus, from a
man’s point of view, polygyny makes
sense: Different mothers mean chil-
dren with more variable immune sys-
tems. Here is a biological explanation
for polygyny in human societies that
is complimentary to cultural notions
that polygyny is only a symbol of
power and control. She also makes
sense of some of the more esoteric (at
least to Western sensibilities) rules of
marriage such as cross- or parallel-
cousin marriage. Control of resources
can predict who gets to marry whom
and who gets to keep what, which in
turn translates into who has how
many babies.
Low’s analysis of human behavior
becomes more complex when she fac-
tors in life history and reactions to
change. In one analysis, she uses the
histories of several towns in nine-
teenth-century Sweden to chart what
happens to men and women in gen-
eral, and what happens to their repro-
ductive success, when environments
change. Human behaviors such as re-
maining single or not having children
are suddenly seen in a new light. Peo-
ple, of course, are as deeply, evolution-
arily, affected by their environmental
fates as are nonhuman animals caught
in a drought or drowned in a flood.
BOOK REVIEWS
Low, like Jolly, also takes on the
future. And like Jolly, she sees a way
for humans to bend their natural self-
ishness into cooperation: “Humans
are like lemmings, and other living
organisms, in some basic ways. They
must solve a series of ecological prob-
lems—in which individual and group
‘interests’ are likely to diverge. Group
living introduces subtlety into the evo-
lutionary rules.” Low then takes this
line of thought into a variety of human
realms—religion, property rights, war,
and the impact of others—and points
out our flaws. We are often caught, she
suggests, between doing the right thing
and some social trap that we find para-
lyzing. “We are logically inept, but so-
cially adept,” she writes. Low also feels
that much of human behavior can be
traced to a fundamental drive to detect
cheaters, a social rudder that guides
what we do, which, in turn, often makes
a mess of our lives. In the end, Low
says, we are a species that evolved to
“garner, consume, be fertile, give to our
children, and not look too far ahead.”
And that, we are now forewarned, is
the framework for globalization.
Obviously, the last word on the evo-
lution of human behavior has not yet
been written; there is so much more to
learn about ourselves. These books
are well-grounded in evolutionary the-
ory, physiology, animal behavior, and
ethnography. Amazingly enough, each
book represent an example of what
E.O. Wilson has called “consilience”
where various disciplines come to-
gether and cooperate to understand
how the world works; the authors are
consiliators all by themselves. In that
sense they represent the best of old-
school biology while, at the same
time, pointing to the future of science.
Some might need to get lost in DNA
and the interior of cells for a while,
but eventually we have to come out of
the molecules and see what’s going on
in the real world. Life moves forward
not cell by cell, but by the death and
reproduction of whole organisms.
And when we lose sight of that crea-
ture interacting with its habitat, we
have lost the meaning of life.
Meredith Small
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14850
© 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.