This article is particularly welcome since such a stance – as sound it may seem – is still far from being shared by the vast majority of anthropologists, be they socio-cultural or biological. I'd like to point out here that both authors have already done what they are calling for at the end of the article: they have widely read in each other's subfields. Trained in Britain as a social anthropologist, Adam Kuper is renowned for his ethnographic studies in Botswana and his history of British social anthropology. But he has also been for some time the editor of [i]Current Anthropology[/i], one of the very few journals which publish articles from all the subfields of anthropology. In his book [i]The Chosen Primate : Human Nature and Cultural Diversity[/i], Kuper recalls how challenging (but rewarding) it was to take up this position, since he had to read a huge amount of publications in evolutionary anthropology (and related fields) he was not familiar with. Jonathan Marks, on the other hand, is a US-based biological anthropologist who has just published (2010) a tetxtbook entitled[i] The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology[/i] (see http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Anthropology/BiologicalPhysicalAnthropology/?view=usa&ci=9780195157031). I haven't had a chance to get hold of this book yet, but the blurb on the OUP website says that it «complements traditional textbooks in biological anthropology and explores connections between biological and general anthropology». Such an integrative perspective is rarely – never? – found in biological anthropology textbooks and sounds very promising. But to my knowledge there is no recent textbook in socio-cultural anthropology aiming at bridging the two sides.

Of course I approve of nearly all the sentiments in the paper but I feel it could also mislead readers of nature, or worse, confirm them in their prejudices. This is because it does not mention that there is also lots of work going in the direction called for by, among others, contributors to this site and indeed the commentators on the paper.