THE GENETICS OF BEHAVIOR

The Genetics of Behavior by Lee Ehrman and Peter Parsons concerns a topic of rising interest among biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others particularly because of issues concerning racial differences in intelligence and the implications of sociobiology. Obviously, a good understanding of the complexities of the genetic and environmental factors affecting behavior would be of benefit to many individuals examining both controversies. For individuals with little exposure to genetics, especially quantitative genetics, the book provides a good introduction to behavior and genetics. However, it is apparent that Ehrman and Parsons generally see behavioral genetics as an extension of regular genetics but with a few additional complications. They do not confront behavior as would an ethologist, and show how behavior itself can be studied, illustrate techniques involved in quantifying behavior, or examine specifically evolutionarily important behaviors. Their apparent interest, and an important one, is to introduce genetic techniques to nongeneticists but an equally valid need is to introduce the concepts of behavior in a rigorous fashion to geneticists. Throughout the book, examples of mutants or chromosomal aberrations which have a pleiotropic effect on behavior are given as evidence that behavior is genetically determined. These should be, in my opinion, of secondary interest to documentation of naturally occuring variants when illustrating the importance of genetic components of behavior. In fact, the implications and evidence for the evolutionary basis of behavior (the basis of sociobiology) needs to be critically evaluated as well as the importance of behavior in evolutionary events such as speciation. When mutants or chromosomal variants affecting