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Journal of Bioeconomics (2005) 7: 103106Book Review: Dean Falk. 2000. Primate Diversity.
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 415 pp. $40.00VICKI K. BENTLEY-CONDITDepartment of Anthropology, Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa, USA ([email protected])Those of us who teach primate behavior at the graduate or undzergraduate level
are often faced with the challenge of designing a course that incorporates evolutionary theory and its renements, taxonomy, systematics and cladistics, anatomy,
primate evolution, primate behaviors and strategies, and methodology. Simultaneously, we want to make the course accessible, demanding, and intellectually
stimulating. We want our students to come to view nonhuman primates as the
active, social strategists that they are, whose behaviors are inuenced by the environment, kinship, status striving, costbenet ratios, and evolutionary outcomes.
We want our students to become familiar with the types of issues addressable
through primate behavior research and when these issues may or may not be
applicable to understanding human behavior. We want to communicate to our
students the excitement, relevance, and joys of this type of research while also conveying the diculties, challenges, and sometimes drudgery that primate behavior
research can entail. And we generally want to accomplish all of this in approximately 14 weeks and often in a locale were nonhuman primates are not readily
accessible. Finding the right combination of course materials to meet these varied
needs is thus of the utmost importance.I teach a sophomore-level primate behavior course in which I try to do all of
the above and I have utilized Dean Falks text, combined with other supplementary materials, to address these topics and issues. In the following paragraphs, I
rst present a brief review of the Falk text. This is followed by a brief discussion
of how I incorporate this text and other materials into my course.Falk states in the preface to Primate Diversity that she was frustrated in (her)
eorts to nd a text that worked for her undergraduate primate course. She thus
set out to design a text that would provide an overview of all of the basics, and
she does this quite well. The text is organized with an introduction and two initial
chapters that address taxonomy, evolution, theories, and methods, followed by
twelve chapters that examine the various primate families, subfamilies, or genera
with representative species. These...