Human behaviour and adaptation / edited by N. Blurton Jones and V. Reynolds.

Date:
1978
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Human behaviour and adaptation / edited by N. Blurton Jones and V. Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/332 (page IX)
    PREFACE This volume contains the papers given at the Society's Sym¬ posium of 6-7 January 1977 at St. Antony's College, Oxford. This was the first meeting of the Society to deal specifically with human behaviour. We decided not to attempt to represent the whole spectrum of research on human behaviour, nor even the range of biology-based human ethology. Instead we concentrated on two areas which not only interested us very strongly but which overlapped with the interests and activities of members of the society - ecology and physiology. The work representing these two areas is linked around the theme of adaptation. However, they approach two different aspects of adaptation: in part one the long-term accommodation to the environment on an evolutionary time-scale and on the time-scale of culture change. In part two, the papers concern short-term reactions to the environment. One or two of these papers deal with mankind at the limits of his flexibility, when he creates a social and material environment which seems to stress people to the limits of their adaptability and the borders of pathology. The meeting owes its success to the financial support of the Nuffield Foundation, and the Royal Society, which enabled us to gather so many distinguished speakers from overseas. We would also like to thank, on behalf of the symposium, the speakers, and the participating members of the society, the hard working and courteous local organizers, Robert Attenborough, Gillian Naish, Jane Sell, and Caroline Palmer who ensured that everyone had somewhere to sleep and plenty to eat and drink, that the slides got shown and that most people had somewhere to sit. June 1978 N. Blurton Jones Vernon Reynolds vii