Synopses & Reviews
The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of
The Ants render the extraordinary lives of the social insects in this visually spectacular volume.
The Superorganism promises to be one of the most important scientific works published in this decade. Coming eighteen years after the publication of The Ants, this new volume expands our knowledge of the social insects (among them, ants, bees, wasps, and termites) and is based on remarkable research conducted mostly within the last two decades. These superorganisms a tightly knit colony of individuals, formed by altruistic cooperation, complex communication, and division of labor represent one of the basic stages of biological organization, midway between the organism and the entire species. The study of the superorganism, as the authors demonstrate, has led to important advances in our understanding of how the transitions between such levels have occurred in evolution and how life as a whole has progressed from simple to complex forms. Ultimately, this book provides a deep look into a part of the living world hitherto glimpsed by only a very few. 110 color and 100 black-and-white illustrations.
Review
"Wilson and Hlldobler...bring an alienlike world to the notice of interested nonscientists." Booklist
Review
"While the superorganism concept is not new, it has never been stated explicitly or explored on such a grand scale." Library Journal
Review
"Ants are so much a part of our everyday lives that unless we discover them in our sugar bowl we rarely give them a second thought. Yet those minuscule bodies voyaging across the kitchen counter merit a closer look, for as entomologists Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson tell us in their latest book, they are part of a superorganism....The term "superorganism" was first coined in 1928 by the great American ant expert William Morton Wheeler. Over the ensuing eighty years, as debates around sociobiology and genetics have altered our perspectives, the concept has fallen in and out of favor, and Hölldobler and Wilson's book is a self-professed and convincing appeal for its revival." Tim Flannery, the New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review)
Synopsis
The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of render the extraordinary lives of the social insects in this visually spectacular volume.
Synopsis
The Superorganism promises to be one of the most important scientific works published in this decade. Coming eighteen years after the publication of
The Ants, this new volume expands our knowledge of the social insects (among them, ants, bees, wasps, and termites) and is based on remarkable research conducted mostly within the last two decades. These superorganisms--a tightly knit colony of individuals, formed by altruistic cooperation, complex communication, and division of labor--represent one of the basic stages of biological organization, midway between the organism and the entire species. The study of the superorganism, as the authors demonstrate, has led to important advances in our understanding of how the transitions between such levels have occurred in evolution and how life as a whole has progressed from simple to complex forms. Ultimately, this book provides a deep look into a part of the living world hitherto glimpsed by only a very few.
About the Author
Bert Hölldobler is Foundation Professor at Arizona State University and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He lives in Arizona and Germany.Regarded as one of the world's preeminent biologists and naturalists, Edward O. Wilson grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region's forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants--the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ants and The Naturalist, as well as his first novel Anthill, Wilson, a professor at Harvard, makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.