Noted biologist and author John Tyler Bonner has experimented with cellular slime molds for more than sixty years, and he has done more than anyone else to raise these peculiar collections of amoebae from a minor biological curiosity to a major model organism--one that is widely studied for clues to the development and evolution of all living things. Now, five decades after he published his first pioneering book on cellular slime molds, Bonner steps back from the proliferating and increasingly specialized knowledge about the organism to provide a broad, nontechnical picture of its whole biology, including its evolution, sociobiology, ecology, behavior, and development. The Social Amoebae draws the big lessons from decades of research, and shows how slime molds fit into and illuminate biology as a whole.

Slime molds are very different from other organisms; they feed as individual amoebae before coming together to form a multicellular organism that has a remarkable ability to move and orient itself in its environment. Furthermore, these social amoebae display a sophisticated division of labor; within each organism, some cells form the stalk and others become the spores that will seed the next generation. In The Social Amoebae, Bonner examines all these parts together, giving a balanced, concise, and clear overview of slime mold biology, from molecules to cells to multicells, as he advances some unconventional and unexpected insights.

"Most people think of amoebae (if they think of them at all) as 'simple' single-celled organisms, but Princeton University biologist Bonner (Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales) examines the complex communities they form, known as slime molds, and the important role they play in soil ecology. In slime molds, individual amoebae coordinate their behavior (to move and reproduce) through chemical signals called acrasins. Held together in a slug by a thin layer of slime, the aggregated cells don't all behave alike: some individual cells, for instance, sacrifice themselves to help other cells produce spores, a kind of 'altruistic' behavior that was once thought the exclusive purview of higher organisms. Bonner, one of the grand old men of microbial ecology, presents a relaxed overview of the social amoeba's biology, ecology and communication process, demonstrating an intimate grasp of the subject and an easy manner of explanation (including straightforward line-drawings) that avoid jargon. Discussing key research findings and still-unanswered questions, Bonner makes it clear that what may seem an arcane branch of biology entails important, fundamental questions of life's beginnings and evolution." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)