DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Phenotype as Developmental Bridge: Whither Nature and Nurture?

Developmental Plasticity and Evolution
By Mary Jane West-Eberhard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xx + 794 pp. Paper, $49.95.

This is a big book. This is a big topic. In her award-winning book, Mary Jane West-Eberhard provides extensive documentation for what some will consider to be extreme views on experience-dependent maturation of the phenotype (developmental plasticity). West-Eberhard, a research scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an evolutionary biologist specializing in the study of social wasps, has contributed seminal theoretical and empirical work to the animal behavior literature, particularly on topics related to sexual selection, kin selection, alternative reproductive behaviors, and assessment by relative reproductive value. Many of the ideas in the present volume were originally developed in an earlier article (West-Eberhard, 1989), a contribution that led to guarded acceptance by evolutionary biologists (Schlichting & Pigliucci, 1998, p. 323).