Reviews for Human Biology

The average rating for Human Biology based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-28 00:00:00 Florian Otto This is very admirable and thorough intellectual biography of Sewall Wright written by William B. Provine. Together with R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, Sewall Wright was a founder of the modern evolutionary consensus and a pioneer of the concept of genetic drift and its role in evolution. Overall, I was impressed by the early background of our subject, coming from an academically oriented family, his rise as a scientist through his work with the US Department of Agriculture on cattle, and the development of his ideas on genetic drift. I was very interested to read on his interaction later in his career with Motoo Kimura, author of the neutral theory of evolution, who spent some time at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Wright worked. As a scientist, I am impressed by his modesty, his work with his students and his championing of Kimura's work. Sewall Wright is a scientist's scientist, something reflected in the depth at which his ideas and work are engaged with by Provine. My only regret on leaving this book is the lack of a similarly thorough biography of J.B.S.Haldane. Recommended for those interested in evolutionary biology and the history of evolutionary ideas.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-15 00:00:00 Patricia Mannone It's readable and does a good job of covering many different aspects of human physiology and relating them to both human health and current events. That said, it does an exceptionally poor job of articulating key concepts. My non-bio-major students (and I!) really struggled to identify general messages in each chapter, beyond the collection of specific biological facts. As a result, my students found it difficult to absorb everything over the course of the semester. In retrospect, I would have benefited from learning to use the electronic teaching resources. The supplemental videos weren't terribly useful, but using the quiz modules and getting automatic scores and reports could have been quite valuable. In particular it would have facilitated more frequent and narrowly-focused quizes, which my students felt would have kept them on-task without overwhelming them. But even more, I think my needs would have been better met by a more abstract textbook that (a) was bigger-picture and less detail-oriented and (b) emphasized more how students could investigate health topics as needed and apply that knowledge to real-world decisions (first-aid, behavior, insurance, policy).