1196 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 103, No.
4 • DECEMBER 2001
War burials at Port Hudson near Baton Rouge and a case of
horse "homicide" in chapter 18.
Chapters 13 and 23 focus on Huey Long, one of the most in-
fluential figures in Louisiana. Chapter 13 recounts Manhein's
work surveying for cast-iron coffins on the grounds of the Lou-
isiana capitol. These coffins were believed to contain siphoned
state money buried during Huey Long's administration. Chap-
ter 23 relates the alleged assassination of Huey Long by Dr. Karl
Weiss and identifies Manhein's involvement with the exhuma-
tion of Dr. Weiss's remains as part of the forensic evaluation
performed by Drs. James Starrs and Douglas Ubelaker.
Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 17, 20, 21, and 22 describe recent
death forensic cases and the investigation to determine the indi-
vidual's identification. Manhein begins her first chapter with a
forensic case reminiscent of crime novels. Her allusions to the
"seducti ve odor forever permeating" a car and her bravado with-
standing "the smell of death" that was "turning grown men
away" were somewhat cliche. Chapter 9 is a good account of a
field investigation, discussing some of the equipment needed
for field work and some of the methods for mapping and record-
ing scene evidence. An illustration or photograph of a field in-
vestigation may have been effective for this chapter.
In many of the chapters, Manhein briefly elaborates on as-
pects of physical anthropology. She touches on osteological ter-
minology, fracture trauma evidence in the cranium, and the sali-
ent features of sex and aging criteria in the pelvis in chapter 1.
Chapter 2 illustrates the most basic sex and ancestry related fea-
tures present in the cranium, including photographs demonstrat-
ing these features. Perimortem versus postmortem bone frac-
tures are referenced in chapter7, tooth development for subadult
aging in chapter 12, cranial suture closure for age in chapter 15,
and the basic aspects of forensic entomology in chapter 19. In
chapter 1, she also touches on the necessity for a scientific wit-
ness to be an objective reporter of findings in acourtroom.
The greatest criticism of this book is how often Manhein
passed up the opportunity to segue from the described forensic
investigation into a presentation of methods and techniques of
skeletal biology used in analyzing the case. In chapter 1 she
passes up discussing the basic methodology for stature estima-
tion from the skeleton after stating that she had derived the vic-
tim' s height from the femur. In chapters 2,12, and 21 there were
excellent opportunities to introduce the reader to forensic odon-
tology and dental growth and development and its use in aging
subadults. There could have been more in-depth presentation of
sex and ancestry features in the skull, including the genetic and
environmental basis for these differences. These lessons could
also have been applied in chapter 17 or chapter 20. Chapter 6
missed the opportunity to discuss arthritic changes observed in
the geriatric skeleton and chapter 7 could have included further
discussion of the differences between perimortem and postmor-
tem trauma. Chapter 12 needed a discussion on the use of epi-
physeal ossification and union for aging of the subadult in that
case. Photographs or drawings of epiphyseal growth, dental
growth, arthritis of the skeleton, facial skin depth markers, and
stages of facial reproduction (such as in chapters 17 and 24)
would greatly enhance understanding of the concepts presented.
This was a slim volume and the chapters were generally short.
Therefore, occasions for brief introductions to some basic de-
scriptions of skeletal biology and their applications in forensic
anthropology would not have oversaturated the reader with in-
formation or lost their interest.
The final chapter is an epitaph to the individuals from Man-
hein's cases who have yet to be identified. As a commemoration
to the people who often remain unknown in forensic cases, it is
hoped that the facial reproductions and forensic profiles pre-
sented in this chapter will jog the memory of some reader and ul-
timately lead to the rediscovery of these "lost" souls.
The appraisal of this book is intended for the American An-
thropologist academic community, while this book is expressly
written for nonacademic readers. With an academic focus in
mind, the book could be useful for early undergraduate anthro-
pology students who are beginning their careers and are curious
about forensic anthropology. It does describe forensic cases,
and it emphasizes the long and hard hours necessary for forensic
work. Manhein's casework accounts also underscore that in fo-
rensic anthropology not all cases are, or will ever be, solved.
One concern of this reviewer is that the presentations in this
book encourage interest in a profession that has few full time job
opportunities.
For the nonacademic, the book is adequate in presenting brief
vignettes of forensic anthropology cases in an easy and light
storytelling manner. As an informative academic text, present-
ing forensic cases and including techniques and methods of fo-
rensic anthropology and skeletal biology used in those forensic
investigations, this book does not compare well to other texts.
However, as Manhein asserts in the introduction, it was in-
tended to be the contributions of a storyteller sharing her passion
for forensic anthropology. m>
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution
of the Human Mind. Geoffrey Miller. New York: Doubleday,
2000.352 pp.
JEFFREY A. KURLAND
Pennsylvania State University
Although our brain represents the main adaptive feature of our spe-
cies, what it is adapted to is not clear at all. What is clear, however, is
that, like the rest of our body, our brain is a product of natural selec-
tion, that is, of differential reproductions accumulated over millions
of years under the pressure of various environmental conditions.
Our brain has therefore evolved at our gonad's services, as already
emphasized by Freud many years ago. [Francois Jacob, Science,
1977]
During the film Sleeper, when Woody Allen is threatened
with a brain-burn, he responds: "No! Please. Not that. It's my
second-favorite organ!" If evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey
Miller is correct, Allen is badly confused. In his iconoclastic
book, Miller argues for the primacy of sexual selection, Dar-
win's other evolutionary mechanism, in the evolution of mind.
Because fitness has two major components, namely, survival
and reproduction, Darwin realized that traits that compromise
survival but confer a sufficiently compensatory reproductive
advantage could evolve. Whereas natural selection favors those
traits that increase the individual's survival, sexual selection fa-
vors traits that increase the individual's mating advantage.

Inmost species, because males invest little in offspring other
than their haploid genome, they evolve prodigiously exagger-
Ited, high-risk traits for increased access to fertile females. By
contrast, because females invest relatively more in offspring,
they arc the reproductively limiting and limited sex. An error in
the mate choice can have disastrous effects on their lifetime fit-
ness. Hence females evolve diverse mechanisms for mating se-
lectively with the best available male. What counts as the "best"
mate has been under intense theoretical debate and empirical
analysis for the last three decades. Miller advocates the primacy
of matechoice as the key to understanding humankind's unique
suite of traits, especially the infinitely productive and creative
mind manifest in cultural diversity. Given the expanse of this
topic, it is perhaps not surprising to find that Miller's book is
broad in scope, complex in presentation, and sometimes glib in
pop analogy.
Afiermore than a century, the failure to find a totally convinc-
ing survival-advantage for our uniquely large brain, complex
cognitive skills, and panoply of shifting emotions, which does
not apply to other animals, suggests that it is time to apply Dar-
win's other theory in earnest. Our minds and bodies may have
evolved not just as survival machines, but also as courtship de-
vices. Those peculiarly human traits described in introductory
anthropology courses that differentiate us from the rest of nature
are indeed not amenable to survival-advantage arguments. Af-
ter all, what is the survival payoff of a good joke, a catchy mel-
ody, or a story about the gods, let alone narcissism and irony?
Death to functionalism! Of course, many have offered survival
explanations (e.g., J. A. Kurland, Zygon, 1999). However,
Miller finds them inadequate.
Although R. A. Fisher's "runaway" process (The Cenetical
Theory ofNatural Selection, Dover Publications, 1958) is criti-
cal for understanding the evolution of the hypertrophied human
mind, Miller recognizes that the kind of exaggerated sexual di-
morphism that this mechanism produces, for example, in pea-
cocks, simply does not apply to humans. As in language, where
each of us generates and decodes speech, putative courtship dis-
plays like humor, intelligence, and nurturance require that eve-
ryone is both producer and e valuator. Hence, claims Miller, mu-
tual mate choice must have operated in the course of human
evolution.
Matechoice will also favor those most responsive to reliable,
phenotypic markers of "good genes." How is "genetic quality"
reliably advertised? What prevents "cheaters," who have the
"indicator" but lack the "good genes," from evolving? Back to
introductory anthropology. Conspicuous consumption, such as
aKwakiutl potlatch, makes obvious one's true wealth. By anal-
ogy, true fitness can be reliably advertised by costly "handi-
caps" that are therefore not counterfeit, such as seemingly altru-
istic acts of hunting or charity. The peacock's tail indicates how
much reserve is available to carry and flaunt it. Seventy years af-
ter Boas in anthropology, Veblen in sociology, and Spence in
economics, Zahavi' s "handicap principle" (JournalojTheoreti-
cal Biology, 1975) provides a key explanation for the evolution
of altruism, communication, and courtship.
"Fitness indicators" can be indirect and devious in their
causal link to our DNA, for example, the fluctuating geometry
of faces, bodies, and digits; so why not our feelings, thoughts,
a
nd behavior? For Miller, the mind is a generator of condition-
dependent, honest displays of fitness. Based on Kondrashov's
BOOK REVIEWS / Physical Anthropology 1197
(Nature, 1988) theory of the origin of sexual reproduction,
Miller argues that the brain evolves as this species' most sensi-
tive assay of deleterious mutations. Because the human brain
uses a major portion of metabolism and biomass, as well as
nearly 50 percent of the genome, the output of healthy, complex
brains is accordingly a sensitive and reliable advertisement of
nondeleterious genes. The mind is our peacock's tail. Its activity
does not have to be explicitly sexual or erotic to be an honest fit-
ness indicator, although, holy Darwin and Wallace, Sigmund, it
sure does that a lot. Rather, the brain's wasteful filigrees display
genomic "wealth." Cognitive and emotional productivity is hu-
mankind's mental potlatch. Strange bedfellows, namely, socio-
biologists and evolutionary psychologists, validate the anthro-
pologist's traditional celebration of the symbolic arbitrariness
and creative meaning of culture.
As his notebooks make clear, Darwin realized that a species'
psychology is a major source of selective pressure on all traits,
but, especially, psychological traits. Sexual selection is there-
fore an intrinsically self-reinforcing, recursive process. This be-
comes clear in the domain of sensory bias. The psychophysi-
ological structure and function of perception may bias the
output of sexual selection. Symmetric or colorful "secondary,"
sexual traits like skin color or pelage patterns may arise because
of their exploitation of the built-in, perceptual predispositions of
species psychology. For example, female mollies prefer males
with swordtails although males of their species lack such fea-
tures. Sexual ornamentations evolve because they tickle the
senses.
Given his multimechanism theory of mate choice, Miller por-
trays the mind and body as, in part, acomplex entertainment sys-
tem of extended phenotypes. Like the virtual dance of some bi-
zarre mental grebe, our ancestors titillated each other during
courtship not only with pleasuring genitals and eroticized skin,
but also with the ability to improvise vocalizations, move emo-
tions, tickle one's fancy. . .talk the talk. With their complex so-
ciality, large brains, intricate vocalizations, behavioral creativ-
ity, and sensuous skin, cetaceans, like dolphins, might also
conform to Miller's mating mind theory.
Miller speculates that by being internal representations of po-
tential fitness effects, pleasure and pain allow the individual to
prioritize alternative courses of action. Indeed, it has become ap-
parent to cognitive neuroscientists that the mind is embodied,
uses metaphor, and operates unconsciously (G. Lakoff and M.
Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books, 1999). Feelings
are the engine of reason. They motivate human sociality. In the
context of sexual courtship, because these mental machinations
demand unpredictability and novelty ("protean behavior") for
maximal effectiveness; that is, for peak attractiveness, the posi-
tive feedback of sexual selection takes over, ever cranking up
mental prowess and thus brain size over evolutionary time. Cul-
tural activities like dance, music, or decoration may vary unpre-
dictably from place to place in their details, however, their
costliness, uselessness, and high value ("beauty") to humans
suggests that their evolutionary origins are to be found in sexual
selection. That is, the psychology of a particular group of Afri-
can hominids may have evolved due to biased responses to an
ancestral, ape psychology. Evolutionary Freudianism comes of
age!
We are therefore ultimately a self-domesticated species. With
courtship increasingly predicated on tinkering the mind for
1198 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 103, No. 4 • DECEMBER 2001
successful mating, pleasurable creativity becomes the measure
of all things. An intensely and self-consciously pleasure-driven
animal can suffer withdrawal from this primary, psychophysi-
ological currency. It becomes addicted to its own embodied
mind. Withdrawal generates an addiction-like symptom: bore-
dom. Delightful novelty and surprise ("neophilia") now become
a new medium of mental exchange and value. For Miller, these
nuances of the mating mind underlie the arts, for example, court-
ing vocalizations and bodily movements may be the evolution-
ary ground of language and dance. If I am correctly reading him,
Miller is laying the foundations for an evolutionary biology of
aesthetics and ethics. An audacious program, but long overdue.
Miller's preoccupation with small-group interactions like
courtship blinds him to specifying the social environment of the
mating mind. How are all these sexy, talky, and eroticized homi-
nids organized? Certainly not like chimpanzees or bonobos,
who reveal only crude aspects of a mating mind. Indeed, I would
argue that our sociality is unique among primates. Humans are
best characterized as living in pair-bonded families, embedded
in larger groups of similar families with occasional philanderers
and polygynists. Following Matt Ridley (The Red Queen: Sex
and the Evolution of Human Nature, Penguin Books, 1993), the
animal analogy is not African apes but, rather, avian colonists
like kittiwakes and gulls, which congregate in great hoards be-
cause of mutual predator protection and spatially limited re-
sources. In an environment of colonial monogamy, mate com-
petition and choice are highly activated by extra-pair bond trysts
("adultery"), which are always possible, threatening the stabil-
ity of pair bonds ("divorce" and "desertion"). Only increased
survival benefits can explain the tolerance that hundreds and
thousands of distantly related, tool-wielding, reproductively
competitive hominids could have had for each other. That bene-
fit is protection from other belligerent, hominid groups. Al-
though Miller rejects this model, I believe that only the possibil-
ity of deadly intergroup conflict ("warfare"), as postulated by R.
D. Alexander (The Biology ofMoral Systems, Aldine, 1987) and
others, can explain our peculiar sociality. Mate competition be-
comes as much a driving social force as mate choice.
In no way have I done justice to the richness, ingenuity, and
subtly of Miller's theory of human origins. His book will annoy
many readers of this journal. Indeed, those of us working in this
area can fault him for the paucity of data, overuse of the counter-
factual, and unbridled speculation. Despite my carping, Miller
makes clear that the mind, in all its rococo detail, is best seen as
an extension of reproduction not as a handmaiden of survival,
echoing Nobel laureate Francois Jacob's claim of 25 years ago.
Of the recent flood of books on human evolution, evolutionary
psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, Miller's stands out as
strikingly well written, engagingly provocative, and delight-
fully droll. We can now rethink the nature and evolution of mind
from a fresh perspective. •»
Human Biology: An Evolutionary and Biocoltural Perspec-
tive. Sara Stinson, Barry Bogin, Rebecca Huss-Ashmore, and
Dennis O 'Rourke, eds. New York: Wiley-Liss, 2Q00.639 pp.
BENJAMIN CAMPBELL
Boston University
This collection of articles presents an up-to-date picture of
human population biology by some of the leading figures in the
field. In doing so it not only provides a clear and comprehensive
view of human genetics, biological variability, human life cy-
cle, and population dynamics as seen by human biologists, but
provides an orientation toward future development of the field.
Overall, the volume represents an impressive effort and should
quickly become a standard for those interested in human biol-
ogy-
Chapters on theoretical and historical perspectives on human
biology provide an introduction to the scope of human biology.
Huss-Ashmore, in her discussion of theoretical perspectives,
points out that while human biology's major theoretical orienta-
tion is Darwinian because it deals with variation within a single
species, ecological and biomedical principles are often useful as
well. Johnston and Little's contribution on the history of human
biology complements this theoretical perspective by highlight-
ing individuals important to the development of the field. It
brings home the fact that human biology has an enduring focus
and a hopeful future, if a relatively short past.
Genetics, an increasingly important part of human biology, is
represented by three chapters covering introduction, quantita-
tive genetics, and human variation and genetics. Together,
Weiss's introductory chapter on genetics and Konigsberg's on
quantitative genetics provide a thorough background to genet-
ics, although they might have used a few more specifically hu-
man examples. The human focus is more evident in O'Rourke's
contribution on the geography of human genetic variation as is
the wealth of information on human genetic variation that can be
used to understand the historical relationships between human
populations.
On an organismic level, human variation as it relates to cli-
mate, disease, nutrition, and work capacity each receive sepa-
rate attention. Beall and Steegman's chapter on adaptation to
climate is of most interest for its cogent explanation of the vari-
ous factors involved in the adaptive significance of skin color, a
topic that students are already aware of to some degree. To-
gether, Sattenspiel's and Jackson's respective chapters on disease
provide nuts-and-bolts coverage of epidemiological methods
and evidence genetic traits for resistance to specific diseases.
Leonard's and Ulijaszek's chapters provide a comprehensive
picture of human nutrition and energetics, their evolutionary
background, and consequences for variation in human work ca-
pacity across populations. Together, all of these contributions
make it clear that human adaptability is the result of both bio-
logical and cultural mechanisms.
The human life cycle, another common structure for under-
standing of human biology, is represented by chapters on human
life history and senescence. Bogin and Smith's contribution on
the evolution of human life history will be recognizable to many
as the latest version of Bogin's take on this intriguing topic,
including some new wrinkles. Stinson's chapter focuses on