Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

do not excuse the omission of the more recent treatments of interdeme selection from the volume. Many of the reprinted papers in this volume describe various aspects of human behaviors and ethics and heatedly debate the relative influence ofbiology and culture on their evolution. On both sides of the issue are eloquent writers and tedious writers, past and present. What is lacking is a studied perspective of biological and cultural evolution asprocesses in order to more clearly evaluate the similarities and dissimilarities of their products. The abovementioned features of biological and cultural evolution have been the subject of a series of papers by two prominent geneticists, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman. The present volume would be much improved by the inclusion of even a single paper from this collaboration. In summary, The Sociobiohgy Debate is a useful and welcome collection of sometimes classic papers on the historical antecedents of the sociobiology debate. It is also valuable as a compilation of the important papers in the recent public debate where criticisms and replies have appeared in diverse journals. Much of the biology of sociobiology, however, has been omitted although it is critical to the resolution of the disputed claims regarding human nature and human behavior . Michael J. Wade Department ofBiology University of Chicago The Human Mystery. By Sir John C. Eccles. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1979. Pp. xvi+255. $17.00. This book consists of the first series of Sir John Eccles's Gifford Lectures. The Gifford Lectures were established in the late nineteenth century "to promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of that term—in other words, the Knowledge of God." They were delivered in Scottish universities in two series of ten lectures each. Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have provided through these lectures a very interesting and often important stream of intellectual history. Happily, Eccles's lectures can relate to those delivered several decades previously by his mentor, C. S. Sherrington, published as Man on His Nature (1940). How successful Eccles is in bridging the gap between his scientific and philosophical investigations and natural theology cannot be assessed from this volume , though there are strong assertions of his beliefs and significant indications of how the argument will be mounted. The design of these lectures is clear, well developed, and intriguing in its ramifications for reflections on the human mystery and on a theology of nature. Eccles begins, as it were, with the Creation, that is, with the origin and evolution of the universe as this is explained by physicists and astronomers. While his assertion that the Big Bang theory suggests the operation of a supernatural creator is not fortified by arguments, it indicates his profound religious conviction (p. 15). From the origin of the universe he 660 Booh Reviews proceeds apace to the origin and development of our planetary system and focuses attention on the earth. Next in sequence, he rehearses well-established theories of the origin of life and biological evolution. Human evolution is then recounted, setting the stage for a discussion of culture and particularly of the development of language and human values. From this point he moves to the "creation of a self" and thus to the area of his great scientific achievements and his controversial philosophical judgments, that is, to the human brain and its relations to self-consciousness and to intentional action. His "dualistinteractionist " hypothesis of the brain-mind relationship is developed and defended in the last three lectures. (To locate Eccles's view of the brain-mind relationship on a spectrum of hypotheses, see pp. 211-212, but also Ronald Chase, "The Mentalist Hypothesis and Invertebrate Neurobiology" [Persp. Biol. Med., 23:103, 1979].) Eccles has taken a position which "is frankly and unashamedly anthropocentric " (p. ix) in the development of these lectures. While he is cognizant of counterevidences , the way in which he develops the story suggests hints of an argument from design in which, in spite of the contingencies in the developments which have led to life as we know it, a providential purpose culminates in the human. At many points along the way he comes to the edge of making an argument for a theology...