PERSPECTIVES IN HUMAN BIOLOGY – serie

This volume takes its subtitle from the theme of the ASHB meeting for 1994 “Genes, Ethnicity and Ageing”. The first paper is the annual conference lecture as delivered by the Honourable Fred Chaney, formerly Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Federal Government of Australia. It considers some of the difficulties in delivering government services to indigenous peoples. Jim Chisholm puts an evolutionary perspective on some aspects of human behaviour, life history and Darwinian approaches to medicine. Carol Bower reviews the value of the Western Australian Birth Defects Registry and the contributions of registries to improved health care. Alexandra Brewis and Gokarna Regmi document determinants of fertility in a Pacific Island population. There are two papers from a special symposium on Ageing and the Aged held within the meeting: George Broe and Helen Creasey consider some of the social issues associated with an ageing society, and Alan Hipkiss and colleagues take a biochemist's look at possibilities for extending the human life cycle.There are two additional papers. One by Alan Bittles documents consanguinity in the Middle East. The second, by Tsunehiko Hanihara and Hajime Ishida describes the results of their studies of Australian Aboriginals and neighbouring populations.“Understanding Ageing”, by Robin Holliday, Cambridge University Press is reviewed by Anne Mitchell.

This volume takes its subtitle from the theme of the ASHB meeting for 1995 “Humans in the Australasian Region”. Papers from the conference include a philosophical discussion of the ‘Great Ape Project’ by Colin Groves, and ‘An Osteological study of Holocene Biological Evolution of the Malay Peninsula Aborigines’ by David Bulbeck. In the short communications section, Colin Groves considers the hominid and faunal material of the Australia-New Guinea region which may explain the failure of Homo erectus to colonize Australia.Additional papers are from Peter Lisowski who provides a historical and contemporary overview of health care in China, Lincoln Schmitt who discusses the interpretation of DNA variation in the legal setting, and Charles Oxnard and Alanah Buck who present their work on techniques of assessing osteoporosis from non-invasive Fourier analyses of bone structure.The Evolution of Modern Diversity: a Study of Cranial Variation, by Marta Mirazon Lahr, is reviewed by Leonard Freedman.

This volume takes its subtitle from the theme of the ASHB meeting for 1996 “Human Adaptibility: Future Trends and Lessons from the Past”. The first paper is the annual conference lecture ‘Human Evolution Today: Which Way Next?’ delivered by Professor Maciej Hennenberg, the newly appointed Wood Jones Professor at the University of Adelaide. This is followed by the transcripts of two papers resulting from a debate on ‘Species and Human Evolution,’ also from the meeting. The first is ‘Species Concept in Palaeoanthropology’ by Colin Groves and the second, ‘The Problem of Species in Hominid Evolution’ by Maciej Hennenberg.There are also a series of individual papers. Two of these are shorter integrative pieces: ‘Philosophical Problems in Palaeoanthropology’ by Darren Curnoe, and ‘A Biological Basis for Generative Learning in Science’ by Lynette Schavieren and Mark Cosgrove.These are followed in turn by two proffered papers on specific problems: ‘Patterns of Morphological Discrimination in the Human Talus: a Consideration of the Case for Negative Function’, by Robert Kidd and Charles Oxnard, and ‘The Specific Status of a new Siwalik Sivapithecine Specimen’ by David Cameron, Rajeev Patnaik and Michelle Stevens.The final contribution is one of the longer integrative papers which has characterised each of the prior volumes: ‘The Interface of Function, Genes, Development and Evolution: Insights from Primate Morphometrics’ by Charles Oxnard.