past, many contemporary biologists have become, inessence, cultural revolutionaries, resolute in their determi-nation to break with scienti®cally discredited explanations.Kaye cautions biologists against making scienti®c deduc-tions with far ranging implications, many of which hebelieves are neither the logic of facts nor genetic fallacies.He suggests that the guiding presence of metaphysical,moral and social principles should be embedded in theirscienti®c work. Of interest is how the author contends thatimportant segments of the humanities and social sciencesare being biologized.

The parallels between the writings of biophilosophersand certain prominent themes in contemporary culture areaddressed. The author analyses Social Darwinism and theDarwinian Revolution and where it failed. Darwin's viewsare characterized as tending to mythologise human evol-ution into a story of progressive intellectual and moraladvance. Darwin is said to have taken recourse in the phil-osophy of Lamark, however ambivalent, which enabledhim to mitigate the ¯aws of natural selection.

The works of various social reformers in history such asWeismann, Ward, Huxley, Drummond, Spencer, Sumnerand others are also critically reviewed. The author tracesthe process by which natural and social scientists agreethat cultural evolution in man had superseded biologicalevolution as the shaper of human destiny. He sees as reas-serting the validity of traditional moral beliefs.

From metaphysics, the author moves to molecular bi-ology and how the DNA molecule was successfully eluci-dated in 1953. Credit is given to the contribution made bymolecular biology in bringing about the conceptual revolu-tion of human thought by explaining the chemical activityembedded within living organisms and genetic coding.Attention is also given to the concept of natural selectionin light of the structure and function of DNA. However, acautionary note is raised regarding the possibility thatmolecular biology could exaggerate the degree of genetic

determination of human behaviour and the human mindwell beyond that for which there is clear scienti®c warrant.The expanded role of science in social responsibility is

also reviewed. We are reminded of the call by the 1962Nobel laureate Wilkin that fellow scientists should give upthe notion of pure science in order to incorporate abroader approach which takes into account human needsand social priorities. The notion of sociobiology, asespoused by Wilson in 1975 and by others, is alsoreviewed. The responses of the scienti®c community andthe mass media are also mentioned. He discusses thepopularization of human sociobiology, noting that the in-terpreters of sociobiology share a number of other meta-physical, social and moral assumptions. Kaye furtherobserves that Alexander's argument in support of the lib-eration potential of human sociobiology is contradictory.He ®nds the moral messages in the literature on evolution-ary theory at odds with the myth of the ``sel®sh gene''.The ``imperative'' to ``reproduce maximally'', like the gene``morality'' upon which it is based, is dismissed as a stat-istical artifact, metamorphized into a moral command-ment.The theoretical perspectives and arguments presented by

Kaye are testimony to the remarkable growth of ethologyand sociobiology. There are developments in molecularand sociobiology which lend support to the notionsadvanced by the author in the ®ve chapters and the epilo-gue. This book is well referenced, informative and presentsan analytical assessment of the literature.

Michael T. MbizvoUniversity of ZimbabweMedical SchoolP.O. Box A178 AvondaleHarareZimbabwe

PII: S0277-9536(98)00050-1

Annotated Bibliography of Tibetan Medicine (1789±1995),by Jurgen C. Ascho�. Fabri Verlag, Germany, 1996, 426pp. $86.00 (cloth).

Professor Ascho�'s bibliography will appeal to students,researchers and even voyeurs of Tibetan medicine.Contained between its pages are sources and commentson all that has been written on Tibetan medicine from1789±1995. Some of the comments are actual quotes fromthe written sources, and others are commentsÐsome ofthem weightedÐby the author. Since all that has beenwritten on Tibetan medicine is herein contained, theworks range from scholarly translation of texts to moreunreliable ``New Age'' bastardisations of Tibetan medicalteachings, and Ascho� is able to rigorously set a standardof academic research.

The author has brought together works on TibetanMedicine from Russian, Mongolian, German, French andEnglish sources. The author distinguishes between threecategories of works on Tibetan medicine: the Englishtranslations of medical texts and their commentaries;the works of occidental writers in English, French andGerman; and the Russian/Mongolian voluminous contri-butions of translations, commentaries and occidentalwritings. The Russian and Mongolian sources areespecially interesting in light of their extensive researchinto the pharmacognosy of Tibetan medicines, and their

previous inaccessibility to scholars without Russianlanguage comprehension.This is the ®rst time in the history of Tibetan medical

research that anyone has undertaken the arduous task ofassembling an annotated bibliography of Tibetan medicinefor the Western research world. It is long overdue, andscholars in Tibetan medicine, especially, will ®nd this auseful reference. As Ascho� indicates, ``It is not an easytask to de®ne Tibetan medicine, especially to distinguishit from `Healing' within the context of Tibetan religion,philosophy, meditation and Shamanism. It is equally pro-blematic to separate Tibetan geographically from Nepal.I have tried to avoid too narrow a de®nition of Tibetanmedicine and have includedÐapart from the Tibetan clas-sic medicineÐthe shamanistic and philosophically-based`healing rituals'.'' Yet the author has done a brilliant jobof delineating the ®eld of Tibetan medicine in its ownright, and signifying in his comments the ``state of the art''of Tibetan medical research. This is an outstanding refer-ence textÐa must for all scholars of Tibetan Medicine.

Mary RyanPractitioner of Chinese and Tibetan MedicineInstitute of Biological AnthropologyOxford UniversityOxford OX2 6QSU.K.

PII: S0277-9536(98)00025-2

Book Reviews1630