All For One And One For All

摘要

Few scientists win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1991, Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson did for their magisterial The Ants (1). Now these distinguished collaborators offer The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. In this ambitious book, they seemingly have three goals. Holldobler and Wilson reprise and update themes from The Ants while broadening their survey to include other social insects (most notably honeybees). In a thread woven throughout the narrative, they argue that colonies of social insects should be seen and studied as superorganisms, a naturally selected level of organization a step above individual organisms. And they present the work in a format apparently intended to attract the broadest possible readership of both specialists and nonspecialists. This suggests the authors' probable primary motivation-they are advocating a conceptual framework for understanding insect sociality that has been out of favor for four decades.