Physical anthropologists and even their successors, biological anthropologists, have often perceived the influence of environmental variation on developmental processes as a dreadful nuisance. This, of course, it is if one is using the phenotypes as measures of the genotypes that are required for establishing affinities and evolutionary relationships between populations; and such objectives dominated anthropology throughout most of this century. When, however, attention is turned to questions of developmental regulation and growth, adaptability and homeostasis, fitness and health, the environmental factors that affect these processes and phenomena become the essential focus of interest. In many respects (though not all) it is the genetic variance that becomes the nuisance. Increasingly, such issues have become of concern in biological anthropology, and the ecological dimension of the discipline is now considered to be as important as the evolutionary one. Ultimately, anyway, they represent different aspects of much the same coin.

The recognition of the importance of environmental dimensions owes much to the researches of Gabriel Lasker. At the time that he was undertaking his pioneering studies in Mexico, almost nothing else was being done on the nature of plasticity in humans, only in animals. He recognized not only the importance of the phenomenon but also how, in the much more difficult circumstances presented in human biology, it could be rigorously investigated by natural experiments, especially those involving migration.

The contributions to this book by colleagues and friends of Gabriel Lasker pay tribute to that pioneering work and well show the range of enquiries opened up by it. The concept of plasticity is widened well beyond the developmental one with, for example, contributions on demography, isonymy and epidemiology, but these are all fields in which Gabriel Lasker has made notable achievements.