Book Reviews Formative Experiences: The Interaction of Caregiving, Culture, and Developmental Psychobiology . Edited by Carol M. Worthman, Paul M. Plotsky, Daniel S. Schechter, and Constance A. Cummings. xxxiv 1 587 pp. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. $99.00 (cloth). Sir Charles Waddington (1956) recognized our lack of understanding of the miraculous transitions that occur during development of a zygote into an adult morph as the ‘‘great gap’’ in biology. Surely then, ontogeny of the mind of the human child must represent one of the greater of such gaps; the infant brain is ‘‘the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe (Gopnik et al., 1999:1), its cortex comprised of about 30 billion neurons of 200 different types, each of which is interlinked, on average, by more than a 1,000 synapses, resulting in a million billion connections work- ing at rates of up to 10 billion interactions per second (Edelman, 2006), influenced over a near-infinite number of developmental steps by a myriad of genetic, chemical, and cultural factors. Seemingly undaunted by the task, the field of develop- mental psychobiology is currently progressing at break- neck speed to fill the gap. New methodologies in neurobi- ology, genetics, genomics, endocrinology, and neuroimag- ing are providing exponential increases in information about how the mind of the human child develops. Because of the lag time and low impact relative to competitive jour- nals, edited volumes tend to be the dinosaurs of academic publication, and normally do not fare well in such fast- paced disciplines. Formative Experiences is an exception. It works brilliantly for several reasons. First is the integrative design of the volume, forcing an exciting discussion among anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, et al. in each of six sections. Section 1 introduces key themes with overviews of devel- opmental plasticity and culture. Section 2 provides state- of-the-art analyses of how social environment becomes biologically embedded via epigenetic and physiological mechanisms. Section 3 examines the influence of care giv- ing relationships with ethnographic, primatological, and clinical case studies. Section 4 addresses the larger social context of child development in culture, again with sev- eral focused case studies. Section 5 turns to emotional de- velopment with emphasis on stress and social play. The volume concludes in Section 6 with pragmatic discussion of the relevance of the core ideas for social policy. There are many crosstalk gems in Sections 2 to 6 that are rarely found in discipline-focused journals. The result is a genu- ine and transformative interdisciplinary mix, with an- thropology providing a key role in this crucible for neu- rons, hormones, genes, emotions, social learning, family relationships, cultural history, and public health policy. Second is the quality of the 71 contributors. The volume combines senior superstars (mostly from biological psychi- atry) with emerging junior researchers (including cultural anthropologists and medical clinicians) who present the empirical content. It is a superb, global group that inte- grates substantive reviews of theory and mechanism with solid ethnographic and clinical case histories to produce new ideas about ontogeny of brain and mind in social and cultural context. Third is the timeliness and excellent editing of the vol- ume. A high proportion of the cited literature is recent— most contributions include 2010 references. The index is thorough and competent. The writing is uniformly read- able, clear, and to-the-point. Coverage of topics is compre- hensive and salient. Flow through the sections is logical and coherent. Formative Experiences is a must-have for scholars inter- ested in the biology of child development in cross-cultural context. It does a remarkable job of capturing the key points of what must have been a fascinating conference. My only wishes would be for recent evolutionary ideas in this field (e.g., Ellis and Bjorklund, 2005) to have been more promi- nent, and for comparative material on chimpanzee cognitive development (e.g., Tomasello, 2008; de Waal, 2009). Regard- less, Formative Experiences would be an excellent catalyst for an interdisciplinary seminar on child development, per- haps in combination with Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood (2010). These volumes provide a broad playing field for graduate students in anthropology, developmental psychology, human biology, genetics, medicine, neurobiol- ogy, and related disciplines to get together. LITERATURE CITED De Waal FBM. 2009. The age of empathy. New York, NY: Harmony Books. Edelman GM. 2006. Second nature: brain science and human knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ellis BJ, Bjorklund DF. 2005. Origins of the social mind: evolutionary psy- chology and child development. New York, NY: Guilford. Gopnik A, Meltzoff AN, Kuhl PK. 1999. The scientist in the crib: minds, brains, and how children learn. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co. Konner M. 2010. The evolution of childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard University Press. Tomasello M. 2008. Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waddington C.H. 1956. Principles of embryology. New York, NY: Macmillan. MARK V. FLINN Department of Anthropology University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21169 Published online 29 March 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind. By John S. Allen. xii 1 338 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Belknap). 2009. $39.95 (cloth). At the very basis of Allen’s book lies a relatively simple story that the archaeological and fossil record is telling us about brain evolution. The story is fragmented, partial, and incomplete, yet it speaks with some certainty of two broad evolutionary trends that form the basis of Allen’s insightful synthesis. The first trend refers to the modest expansion in cranial capacity from 6 to 2 million years ago; the second to the relatively rapid expansion during the last 2 million years (a tripling in brain size). What is AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 23:429–433 (2011) V V C 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.