BOOK REVIEWS
sense. As someone who had a parent
with multiple-personality disorder, I can
absolutely assure Brown that initiation
and progressive rehearsals are not neces-
sary and that to view the disorder as
requiring them because of a preconcep-
tion could lead to wrongly conceived
treatment and possibly disastrous results.
Brown gives a superficial impression
of having studied the history of multiple-
personality disorder, but in fact all his
knowledge of the early period seems to
be derived from a single book by Wil-
liam James. No works by Morton Prince,
Pierre Janet, Boris Sid is or Alfred Binet
are listed in his bibliography. Indeed,
there is nothing listed by John Watkins,
perhaps the United States' leading
expert on this subject at the moment.
A strong protest must also be made
against the use by Brown of a sloppy
technique known as 'token referencing'.
The book is peppered with contentious
statements followed by names and dates
placed in parentheses. Very rarely does
Brown give a page number. This techni-
que has spread like a cancer through
academic and historical literature, and it
is sad to see its spores germinating in
books purporting to be scientific. The
result of token referencing is that the
labour of checking references far
exceeds the labour of reading the book,
and can become impossible. (With histo-
rians dealing with manuscripts this is
often by design.)
It is a great pity that so much fascinat-
ing material as is to be found in this
book is shaped around the theme that
"we can consider hypnosis not as a single
entity but as one culturally defined con-
text of a rhythmic biologic opportunity
to enter into a number of different states
of consciousness. There do not appear to
be any reliable psychological or phy-
siologic concomitants of trance that are
unique to hypnosis .... " For it has been
known for years that electroencephalo-
gram readings show trance to be a state
distinct from sleep, waking or medita-
tion. In one of the most interesting
sections of the book, Brown surveys
work on ultradian rhythms of the brain,
but his survey of hemispheric lateraliza-
tion is not up to date and as a result is
misleading.
It is marvellous that he includes in a
book on hypnosis discussion of tribal
trance material from anthropologists,
and a great deal of discussion of
neurophysiological matters. These are
extremely important and all too often
lacking from hypnosis books. Neuro-
transmitters, subcortical functions, nasal
airflow, muscle paralysis in sleep and the
"basic rest activity cycle" are also wel-
come items for consideration in the
book. But they are not digested properly
by Brown, and he gives the impression
of having rushed into print too soon.
510
And his conVIctIOn that "though there
are changes in brain function in hypno-
sis, they are not unique to hypnosis" gets
us ultimately nowhere. He believes hyp-
nosis is simply "a complex cognitive
task". So is trying to make sense of
Brown's position. 0 to avoid inbreeding, and of the difficul-
Robert Temple is the author of Open to
Suggestion, a survey of recent developments
in hypnosis. He may be contacted c/o David
Higham Associates Ltd, 5-8 Lower John
Street, Golden Square, London W1R 4HA,
UK.
Kindred spirits
Linda Partridge
Kin Recognition. Edited by Peter G.
Hepper. Cambridge University Press:
1991. Pp. 457. £60, $89.50.
ANIMALS are capable of prodigious feats
and dismal failures in recognizing their
kin. A Mexican free-tailed bat mother
can find her own offspring in a cave
containing a million bats, whereas a
hedge-sparrow mother fails to recognize
a cuckoo egg in her nest, even though it
is coloured quite differently from her
own eggs. This volume provides 14
accounts of mechanisms and consequ-
ences of kin recognition in animals,
some dealing with particular taxa such as
amphibians and primates, others with
particular issues such as fetal learning.
Two of the key issues in kin recogni-
tion covered in the book are whether
prior familiarity with relatives is neces-
sary and, if so, how this information is
used. In contrast to Oedipus, sweat bees
and many other Hymenoptera can discri-
minate on the basis of smell between
related and unrelated individuals without
any prior experience of conspecific indi-
viduals. Young adults nonetheless learn
the odour of the colony and of the
brood. How these sources of information
are used under natural conditions is not
known; several of the book's contribu-
tors point out that information that can
be shown to be present in one context
may fail to be used in others, or may be
acquired or used only if the normal
source of information is absent. Disen-
tangling these issues in the complex
environment of chemical communication
in social insects is not easy. M. H.
Johnson provides an excellent account of
similar issues in filial imprinting in birds,
a clear example of predispositions to
learn to recognize particular stimuli. A
general conclusion is that animals can
gather unused information about kin,
which may be selected for use in other
contexts.
As in the oedipal myth, failure to
recognize kin can have two consequ-
ences: incest and neglect of relatives.
© 1992 Nature Publishing Group
Incest can be harmful because it causes
'inbreeding depression', that is, it de-
creases the progeny's fertility or likeli-
hood of survival. C. J. Barnard and P.
Aldhous provide a useful review of how
nonrandom mating arises from selection
ties of distinguishing this cause from
others such as dispersal, population
structure and sexual selection. For exam-
ple, much work shows that mice in the
laboratory can discriminate on the basis
of smell between mice carrying different
major-histocompatibility-complex alleles
and that females can use this complex as
a cue to block implantation of a litter
sired by the previous mate if they are
exposed to a strange male. But it is not
clear whether this system is used to
avoid inbreeding or, indeed, whether it
is used at all in the wild.
M. D. Beecher elegantly analyses the
conditions under which bird parents
might be expected to recognize their
offspring. Interspecific cross-fostering
experiments with avian chicks are almost
always successful, showing that bird pa-
rents do not discriminate between their
own young and those of others, the
exceptions occurring for species where
the young birds naturally move between
nests. For most bird parents, young in
the nest are overwhelmingly likely to be
offspring, and the costs of rejecting an
offspring are greater than those of
accepting an unrelated individual. Fail-
ure to reject strange young need not
imply an inability to recognize offspring.
Rough-winged swallows will feed bank
swallow chicks, but double-take before
doing so, and will feed their own young
in preference if given a choice between
them and young bank swallows. Young
birds before fledging may often benefit
from not being recognizable to adults -
presence in the nest is enough of a cue
for parental purposes, and if a chick
does accidentally wander it will be less
likely to be attacked and more likely to
be adopted by non-parents. Young birds
often become recognizable to their pa-
rents after fledging because their loca-
tion is no longer a reliable cue to their
identity.
The book is useful, well edited and
carefully balanced. If there are omissions,
they are the absence of clear chapter
summaries and the lack of any discussion
of plants or unicellular organisms. The
mechanisms of self-incompatibility in
plants are now being unravelled at the
molecular level, and unicells provide
many fascinating examples of the rules
of chemical warfare between different
clon~. 0
Linda Partridge is in the Institute of Gel/,
Animal and Population Biology, Division of
Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh,
West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK.
NATURE· VOL 355·6 FEBRUARY 1992