- Email: [email protected]
Plant Resource Allocation, edited by F.A. Bazzaz and J. Grace
BOOK REVIEWS pulling focus periodically to reveal the lavish “sets” which give the words meaning’. The reader is invited to become film reviewer, to reflect, as Desmond himself does in an ‘Afterword’, on how this construction of Huxley took shape and how it stands up to critical scrutiny. For this reviewer, it stands up very well indeed. It is a riveting, exhaustively researched portrait of the man and his times that thoroughly bears out Desmond’s preview of a ‘story of Class, Power and Propaganda’. Volume One documented the upstart Huxley’s scrabbling rise from slum doctor, fired by radical Dissenting ideology, to the top of the British scientific heap. There, the hothead Huxley was the ‘Devil’s Disciple’, with Darwin as the Devil, scandalizing society and baiting ‘Parsonism’, aiming the Origin of Species as a ‘veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism’ at the opposition3. Volume Two picks up the story in 1870 with the middle-aged Huxley, now the ‘Agnostic Pope’ of the new secular creed of evolutionary naturalism, running British science in collaboration with his darwinian ‘priesthood’, backed by iron masters, factory bosses and cotton kings, the self-made men of the emergent middle class. The sets that Desmond’s camera frames have changed from the confident and prosperous 1850s and 1860s that saw Huxley’s rise to power, to the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873–1896, to mass riots and the undermining of liberalism, to the spectres of land nationalization, socialism, birth control and the ‘new woman’. With the widespread acceptance of evolution and the reclusive Darwin’s growing fame, Darwin is no longer the Devil but the Deity of the ‘Church Scientific’ and ‘High Priest’ Huxley is Darwin’s representative on earth (literally so, after Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey with full Church and State honours in 1882). With all his considerable energy, rhetorical powers and consummate political skills, and from the allegedly neutral territory of his government-built and industry-backed labyrinth of laboratories, lecture theatres and offices in South Kensington, Huxley persuasively marketed an ultra-respectable agnosticism aligned with conventional family pieties and increasingly conservative political values, an evolutionary creed appropriate to the industrial and social needs of late Victorian capitalism and imperial expansion. His knowledge manufactory produced the scientists, teachers and managers who furthered Huxley’s professional agenda of shifting power from an old ecclesiastical élite to a new technocratic élite, and created the middle-class infrastructure upon which corporate science would develop. It all took a heavy toll. Huxley achieved international fame but no fortune. Alongside the bigger picture, Desmond focuses on the private man whose prodigious out-
84
put – the reams of lectures and public addresses, the Government commissions and committees, the lobbying and faction fighting – was punctuated by immobilizing bouts of depression. The hardest blow was the dementia and early death of his brilliant artist daughter Mady, which forced a reassessment of Huxley’s endorsement of the pitiless darwinian necessity of the capitalist war in nature and society. Desmond is at his best in scripting those scenes, personal, professional and political, that led to the elderly, ailing Huxley’s famous Romanes Lecture of 1893, where he staked out a middle-ground between the Social darwinist and socialist extremes and conceded humanity an evolving ethical resistance against the amoral darwinian imperative of eat or be eaten. Desmond’s film metaphor and the ‘Afterword’ which puts Huxley in historiographic perspective are useful devices which allow us to read Huxley on different levels, upfront and behind the scenes, as readers and critics. Desmond may eschew cinéma vérité, but just as the mark of a good director is the illusion of fly-on-the-wall documentary, so Desmond’s power-broking, propagandizing, warts-and-all ‘celluloid construct’ is an alltoo-real Huxley, the work of a skilled historian at the height of his powers.
Evelleen Richards School of Science and Technology Studies, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia
References 1 Desmond, A. (1989) The Politics of Evolution, University of Chicago Press 2 Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin, Michael Joseph 3 Desmond, A. (1994) Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, Michael Joseph
Free lunches are still off Plant Resource Allocation edited by F.A. Bazzaz and J. Grace Academic Press, 1997. $84.00 hbk (xi + 303 pages) ISBN 0 12 083490 1
O
ptimal allocation of resources in organisms is widely held to be an important outcome of evolution by natural selection. Optimal resource allocation may be defined as that allocation which, if varied, reduces the rate of biomass accumulation and (a more appropriate measure for considerations of fitness) the potential to produce viable progeny. Quantitation of resource allocation, and unravelling the mechanisms underlying it, is thus an important aspect of
Copyright © 1998, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 0169-5347/98/$19.00
understanding the processes involved in evolution. Resource allocation also has important applied implications, for example in biotechnology and in relation to (anthropogenic) climate change. Resource allocation and optimization theory are quite important aspects of ecophysiological and evolutionary research. Plant Resource Allocation is thus a timely book, covering a range of approaches to its subject. The volume confines itself to plants in the strict sense (i.e. the embryophytes) and, of these, the seed-bearing tracheophytes get almost all of the attention. The only self-motile unitary organisms dealt with are the insects (in a chapter comparing their resource allocation with that of higher plants) rather than the flagellate algae, including those extant forms related to the ancestors of the higher plants. Thus the book deals with a group of sessile photosynthetic organisms, typically with modular construction, so that most of their resource allocation features can be observed quantitatively by destructive harvesting. The use of sessile plants means less need for lengthy periods of observation as is the case for behaviour in foraging or reproduction in motile animals, although such phenomena as chloroplast movements and leaf(let) movements should not be ignored (and nor are they in this volume). The book rightly emphasizes the potential problems with the optimal allocation approach and its progeny, the cost–benefit analysis of allocation. Thus, a complete analysis of costs and benefits is needed, as is proof that allocation of resources to one trait really does reduce allocation to other traits (testing for the absence of free lunches). There is also appropriate emphasis on the possibility that, even if optimal allocation is a major outcome of natural selection, it is not completely expressed because of adaptive or acclimatory constraints. Thus, physicochemical constraints, or the influence of evolutionary history, may limit the (rate or) extent of genetic adaptation of resource allocation. For acclimatory responses (within the lifetime of the plant) there are also genetic constraints. Important constraints here relate to the extent to which it is possible to track rather than integrate inhomogeneities in spatially or temporally fine-grained environments, without the resource cost of reallocating resources exceeding the benefit of increased resource acquisition, defence or reproduction resulting from the reallocation. There are also the problems of quantitatively allocating resource costs of a trait to multiple benefits, and of how organisms determine priorities when multiple benefits are (evolutionarily) desirable but the resource costs do not permit them all to be attained equally or, in some cases, at all. These important points are all made with varying degrees of vigour in this volume, with appropriate illustrations of TREE vol. 13, no. 2 February 1998
DIARY/CLASSIFIED
✶
Indicates a new entry
8–12 March 1998 The Eighth Annual West Coast Conference - Contaminated Soils and Groundwater, CA, USA. (Robyn Blain, Northeast Regional Environmental Public Health Center, N344 Morrill, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. e-mail: [email protected]) 11–12 March 1998 Wildlife and Modern Roads: the Ecological Impact, London, UK. (The Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, UK W1V 0LQ. e-mail: [email protected]. co.uk) 20–31 March 1998 NATO ASI on Advances in Molecular Ecology, Erice, Italy. (Professor Gary Carvalho, NATO ASI Molecular Ecology, Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, UK HU6 7RX. e-mail: [email protected]. ac.uk WWW:http://www.hull.ac.uk. molecol) 1–3 April 1998
✶
EMBP Workshop: Trinucleotide expansion diseases in the context of micro- and minisatellite evolution, London, UK. (Dr John Hancock, c/o Mrs Rosemary Bowen, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College School of Medicine, Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK W12 0NN.email: [email protected] WWW:http://www.rpms.ac.uk/cs c/embo/embo.html) 1–3 April 1998 ✶ Fourth European Meeting of PhD Students in Evolutionary Biology, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.(e-mail: keras@bioserv. imbb.forth.gr WWW:http://www.edu.biology.uc h.gr/conference/index.htm) 5–9 April 1998 ✶ The Mathematical Biology of Pattern and Process, Bath, UK. (Professor Nigel Franks, School of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, TREE vol. 13, no. 2 February 1998
as the be-all and end-all of biology, it does have its uses. In fairness I must admit that the analyses presented in the volumes do include the biochemical level in terms of the energy (etc.) costs of particular biosyntheses. I will end on the positive note that this book deserves; it represents a readable, authoritative and stimulating account of an important subject area. The editors are to be congratulated on assembling this volume, and not least for their two excellent ‘bookend’ chapters.
UK BA2 7AY. e-mail: [email protected] WWW:http://www.bath.ac.uk/Depa rtments/Biosciweb/mathbio.htm) 6–7 April 1998 The Ecology of Pools in Patterned Mines, Durham, UK. (Dr V. Standen, Dept of Biological Sciences, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham, UK DH1 3LE. e-mail: [email protected]) 6–8 April 1998 42nd Ecological Genetics Group Annual Meeting, St Andrews, UK. (Dr Richard Abbott, Dept of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Mitchell Building, University of St Andrews, Fife, UK KY16 9TH. e-mail: [email protected]) 6 –12 April 1998 The 1998 North American Ornithological Conference, St Louis, MO, USA. (Bette Loiselle, Dept of Biology, University of Missouri-St Louis, St Louis, MO 63121-4499, USA. e-mail: [email protected] http://www.nmnh.si.edu/ BIRDNET) 8 –9 April 1998 Insecticide Resistance: From Mechanisms to Management, London, UK. (The Science Promotion Section, The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London, UK SW1Y 5AG. http: britac3.britac.ac.uk/rs/) 22–23 April 1998 Supradarwinian Modes of Evolution, London, UK. (The Science Promotion Section, The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London, UK SW1Y 5AG. http: britac3.britac.ac.uk/rs/) 11–15 May 1998 Workshop in Mathematical Population Dynamics, Gothenburg, Sweden. (Population Dynamics Workshop, Dept of Mathematics, Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden. e-mail: [email protected] WWW:http://www.md.chalmers.s e/Conf/Wpd/index.html)
John A. Raven Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK DD1 4HN
References 1 Stitt, M. (1994) in Flux Control in Biological Systems: From Enzymes to Populations and Ecosystems (Schulze, E-D., ed.), pp. 13–36, Academic Press 2 Stitt, M. and Schulze, E-D. (1994) in Flux Control in Biological Systems: From Enzymes to Populations and Ecosystems (Schulze, E-D., ed.), pp. 57–118, Academic Press
Elsevier Trends Division
Classified Enquiries Ilona Benton Tel: +44 1865 843284 Fax: +44 1865 843973 E-mail: [email protected]
Materials Rachel Loweth Elsevier Trends Division 68 Hills Road, Cambridge, UK CB2 1LA Tel: +44 1223 315961 Fax: +44 1223 321410 E-mail: [email protected]
Overseas Representatives USA (East) Christine Ombramonti Tel: +212 689 1888 USA (West) Bob Krasner Tel: +510 938 0505 Canada Joan Champ Tel: +416 977 6269 Australia Keith Sandell Tel: +61 2992 22977
trends
CLASSIFIED
the problems and the extent to which they have been solved. Having said many positive things about the volume, I will mention an undeserving omission – the lack of reference to recent molecular genetic studies which show altered source–sink and resource allocation relationships by reduced expression of Nicotiana Rubisco, using antisense RNA techniques and expression of Saccharomyces invertase in Nicotiana cell walls1,2. While I would (and perhaps will) be the last to see molecular biology
courses & conferences
Each month we publish brief details of forthcoming meetings. The diary is updated regularly. If you are organizing a future meeting, please help us to maintain an efficient service by sending the appropriate details to the Editor well in advance. This month’s new entries are marked with an asterisk.
FULL-TIME ACADEMIC A full-time academic position in Plant Population Biology is available at the Unit of Ecology and Biogeography, Department of Biology, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, beginning in September 1998. The applicant will be expected to establish a vigorous, externally founded collaborative research programme, integrated in the activities of the lab. He/she will teach plant biology and ecology. Applicants should have a PhD or equivalent, a post-doctoral experience and a record of research achievements (international publications) in plant population biology. A good knowledge in plant systematics and/or techniques in molecular biology will be appreciated. As teaching will be in French, a knowledge of French is required. Curriculum vitae, abstracts of five significant publications and names and addresses of 4 referees may be sent to: Professor M. Crochet, Recteur, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1, Place de l’Université, B-1348, Louvain-laneuve, Belgium. Deadline: February 15, 1998. For more information: Prof. Ph, Van Den Bosch, [email protected]
V
84
put – the reams of lectures and public addresses, the Government commissions and committees, the lobbying and faction fighting – was punctuated by immobilizing bouts of depression. The hardest blow was the dementia and early death of his brilliant artist daughter Mady, which forced a reassessment of Huxley’s endorsement of the pitiless darwinian necessity of the capitalist war in nature and society. Desmond is at his best in scripting those scenes, personal, professional and political, that led to the elderly, ailing Huxley’s famous Romanes Lecture of 1893, where he staked out a middle-ground between the Social darwinist and socialist extremes and conceded humanity an evolving ethical resistance against the amoral darwinian imperative of eat or be eaten. Desmond’s film metaphor and the ‘Afterword’ which puts Huxley in historiographic perspective are useful devices which allow us to read Huxley on different levels, upfront and behind the scenes, as readers and critics. Desmond may eschew cinéma vérité, but just as the mark of a good director is the illusion of fly-on-the-wall documentary, so Desmond’s power-broking, propagandizing, warts-and-all ‘celluloid construct’ is an alltoo-real Huxley, the work of a skilled historian at the height of his powers.
Evelleen Richards School of Science and Technology Studies, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia
References 1 Desmond, A. (1989) The Politics of Evolution, University of Chicago Press 2 Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin, Michael Joseph 3 Desmond, A. (1994) Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, Michael Joseph
Free lunches are still off Plant Resource Allocation edited by F.A. Bazzaz and J. Grace Academic Press, 1997. $84.00 hbk (xi + 303 pages) ISBN 0 12 083490 1
O
ptimal allocation of resources in organisms is widely held to be an important outcome of evolution by natural selection. Optimal resource allocation may be defined as that allocation which, if varied, reduces the rate of biomass accumulation and (a more appropriate measure for considerations of fitness) the potential to produce viable progeny. Quantitation of resource allocation, and unravelling the mechanisms underlying it, is thus an important aspect of
Copyright © 1998, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 0169-5347/98/$19.00
understanding the processes involved in evolution. Resource allocation also has important applied implications, for example in biotechnology and in relation to (anthropogenic) climate change. Resource allocation and optimization theory are quite important aspects of ecophysiological and evolutionary research. Plant Resource Allocation is thus a timely book, covering a range of approaches to its subject. The volume confines itself to plants in the strict sense (i.e. the embryophytes) and, of these, the seed-bearing tracheophytes get almost all of the attention. The only self-motile unitary organisms dealt with are the insects (in a chapter comparing their resource allocation with that of higher plants) rather than the flagellate algae, including those extant forms related to the ancestors of the higher plants. Thus the book deals with a group of sessile photosynthetic organisms, typically with modular construction, so that most of their resource allocation features can be observed quantitatively by destructive harvesting. The use of sessile plants means less need for lengthy periods of observation as is the case for behaviour in foraging or reproduction in motile animals, although such phenomena as chloroplast movements and leaf(let) movements should not be ignored (and nor are they in this volume). The book rightly emphasizes the potential problems with the optimal allocation approach and its progeny, the cost–benefit analysis of allocation. Thus, a complete analysis of costs and benefits is needed, as is proof that allocation of resources to one trait really does reduce allocation to other traits (testing for the absence of free lunches). There is also appropriate emphasis on the possibility that, even if optimal allocation is a major outcome of natural selection, it is not completely expressed because of adaptive or acclimatory constraints. Thus, physicochemical constraints, or the influence of evolutionary history, may limit the (rate or) extent of genetic adaptation of resource allocation. For acclimatory responses (within the lifetime of the plant) there are also genetic constraints. Important constraints here relate to the extent to which it is possible to track rather than integrate inhomogeneities in spatially or temporally fine-grained environments, without the resource cost of reallocating resources exceeding the benefit of increased resource acquisition, defence or reproduction resulting from the reallocation. There are also the problems of quantitatively allocating resource costs of a trait to multiple benefits, and of how organisms determine priorities when multiple benefits are (evolutionarily) desirable but the resource costs do not permit them all to be attained equally or, in some cases, at all. These important points are all made with varying degrees of vigour in this volume, with appropriate illustrations of TREE vol. 13, no. 2 February 1998
DIARY/CLASSIFIED
✶
Indicates a new entry
8–12 March 1998 The Eighth Annual West Coast Conference - Contaminated Soils and Groundwater, CA, USA. (Robyn Blain, Northeast Regional Environmental Public Health Center, N344 Morrill, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. e-mail: [email protected]) 11–12 March 1998 Wildlife and Modern Roads: the Ecological Impact, London, UK. (The Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, UK W1V 0LQ. e-mail: [email protected]. co.uk) 20–31 March 1998 NATO ASI on Advances in Molecular Ecology, Erice, Italy. (Professor Gary Carvalho, NATO ASI Molecular Ecology, Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, UK HU6 7RX. e-mail: [email protected]. ac.uk WWW:http://www.hull.ac.uk. molecol) 1–3 April 1998
✶
EMBP Workshop: Trinucleotide expansion diseases in the context of micro- and minisatellite evolution, London, UK. (Dr John Hancock, c/o Mrs Rosemary Bowen, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College School of Medicine, Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK W12 0NN.email: [email protected] WWW:http://www.rpms.ac.uk/cs c/embo/embo.html) 1–3 April 1998 ✶ Fourth European Meeting of PhD Students in Evolutionary Biology, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.(e-mail: keras@bioserv. imbb.forth.gr WWW:http://www.edu.biology.uc h.gr/conference/index.htm) 5–9 April 1998 ✶ The Mathematical Biology of Pattern and Process, Bath, UK. (Professor Nigel Franks, School of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, TREE vol. 13, no. 2 February 1998
as the be-all and end-all of biology, it does have its uses. In fairness I must admit that the analyses presented in the volumes do include the biochemical level in terms of the energy (etc.) costs of particular biosyntheses. I will end on the positive note that this book deserves; it represents a readable, authoritative and stimulating account of an important subject area. The editors are to be congratulated on assembling this volume, and not least for their two excellent ‘bookend’ chapters.
UK BA2 7AY. e-mail: [email protected] WWW:http://www.bath.ac.uk/Depa rtments/Biosciweb/mathbio.htm) 6–7 April 1998 The Ecology of Pools in Patterned Mines, Durham, UK. (Dr V. Standen, Dept of Biological Sciences, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham, UK DH1 3LE. e-mail: [email protected]) 6–8 April 1998 42nd Ecological Genetics Group Annual Meeting, St Andrews, UK. (Dr Richard Abbott, Dept of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Mitchell Building, University of St Andrews, Fife, UK KY16 9TH. e-mail: [email protected]) 6 –12 April 1998 The 1998 North American Ornithological Conference, St Louis, MO, USA. (Bette Loiselle, Dept of Biology, University of Missouri-St Louis, St Louis, MO 63121-4499, USA. e-mail: [email protected] http://www.nmnh.si.edu/ BIRDNET) 8 –9 April 1998 Insecticide Resistance: From Mechanisms to Management, London, UK. (The Science Promotion Section, The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London, UK SW1Y 5AG. http: britac3.britac.ac.uk/rs/) 22–23 April 1998 Supradarwinian Modes of Evolution, London, UK. (The Science Promotion Section, The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London, UK SW1Y 5AG. http: britac3.britac.ac.uk/rs/) 11–15 May 1998 Workshop in Mathematical Population Dynamics, Gothenburg, Sweden. (Population Dynamics Workshop, Dept of Mathematics, Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden. e-mail: [email protected] WWW:http://www.md.chalmers.s e/Conf/Wpd/index.html)
John A. Raven Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK DD1 4HN
References 1 Stitt, M. (1994) in Flux Control in Biological Systems: From Enzymes to Populations and Ecosystems (Schulze, E-D., ed.), pp. 13–36, Academic Press 2 Stitt, M. and Schulze, E-D. (1994) in Flux Control in Biological Systems: From Enzymes to Populations and Ecosystems (Schulze, E-D., ed.), pp. 57–118, Academic Press
Elsevier Trends Division
Classified Enquiries Ilona Benton Tel: +44 1865 843284 Fax: +44 1865 843973 E-mail: [email protected]
Materials Rachel Loweth Elsevier Trends Division 68 Hills Road, Cambridge, UK CB2 1LA Tel: +44 1223 315961 Fax: +44 1223 321410 E-mail: [email protected]
Overseas Representatives USA (East) Christine Ombramonti Tel: +212 689 1888 USA (West) Bob Krasner Tel: +510 938 0505 Canada Joan Champ Tel: +416 977 6269 Australia Keith Sandell Tel: +61 2992 22977
trends
CLASSIFIED
the problems and the extent to which they have been solved. Having said many positive things about the volume, I will mention an undeserving omission – the lack of reference to recent molecular genetic studies which show altered source–sink and resource allocation relationships by reduced expression of Nicotiana Rubisco, using antisense RNA techniques and expression of Saccharomyces invertase in Nicotiana cell walls1,2. While I would (and perhaps will) be the last to see molecular biology
courses & conferences
Each month we publish brief details of forthcoming meetings. The diary is updated regularly. If you are organizing a future meeting, please help us to maintain an efficient service by sending the appropriate details to the Editor well in advance. This month’s new entries are marked with an asterisk.
FULL-TIME ACADEMIC A full-time academic position in Plant Population Biology is available at the Unit of Ecology and Biogeography, Department of Biology, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, beginning in September 1998. The applicant will be expected to establish a vigorous, externally founded collaborative research programme, integrated in the activities of the lab. He/she will teach plant biology and ecology. Applicants should have a PhD or equivalent, a post-doctoral experience and a record of research achievements (international publications) in plant population biology. A good knowledge in plant systematics and/or techniques in molecular biology will be appreciated. As teaching will be in French, a knowledge of French is required. Curriculum vitae, abstracts of five significant publications and names and addresses of 4 referees may be sent to: Professor M. Crochet, Recteur, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1, Place de l’Université, B-1348, Louvain-laneuve, Belgium. Deadline: February 15, 1998. For more information: Prof. Ph, Van Den Bosch, [email protected]
V