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Bert Holldobler

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies Hardcover – November 17, 2008

by Bert Hölldobler (Author), Edward O. Wilson (Author)

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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, 100 black-and-white

Print length

544 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

November 17, 2008
Dimensions

8.4 x 1.5 x 10.3 inches
ISBN-10

0393067041
ISBN-13

978-0393067040
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Social insects such as ants have long fascinated renowned biologist Wilson. With colleague Hölldobler, he presents this integrated look at social insects, from the genetic to the colony levels of analysis. Incorporating the evolutionary record into the text, the authors alert readers to the relentlessness of environmental pressures on everything that an insect is or does. The authors particularly theorize the adaptive advantages of a species whose members exist as part of a social organization, which emerges in their discussions of preconditions necessary for a transition from an individual to a communal life-cycle. This transition is rare in nature; adding to the amazement is the complexity of insect colonies, to which the authors devote most of their generously illustrated work. Divining how social insects divide into castes of workers, soldiers, and queens; explaining how castes communicate; and placing these successful species within the larger web of life, Wilson and Hölldobler, albeit fond of technical nomenclature, bring an alienlike world to the notice of interested nonscientists, in a volume with long-term library value. --Gilbert Taylor

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.

Edward O. Wilson is the author of more than thirty books, including Anthill, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Conquest of Nature. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson is a professor emeritus at Harvard University and lives with his wife in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (November 17, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393067041
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393067040
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.56 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.4 x 1.5 x 10.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #188,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36 in Developmental Biology (Books)
- #101 in Entomology (Books)
- #145 in Biology of Insects & Spiders

Customer Reviews:
66 ratings

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0000pp

GREAT Book about Ant Societies and Insect Colonies

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2015

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TREMENDOUSLY good book on ants and insect societies. I learned a lot and thought it was absolutely fascinating. Other books by Bert Holldobler are accurate scientific descriptions, but not always easy for the person who's not a bio major. This book is both comprehensive and very readable. I thought the most fascinating thing was this ... if you didn't know better ... you would swear that some of the chapters were written by a computer scientist. Biologists have really made leaps and bounds - in terms of thinking about how insects organize themselves and why their "structure" works as a society. Hopefully when you read this book, you will no longer spray insecticide all over your kitchen floor when you are invaded by ants! Hahahahaha!! Great Book, thank you Prof. Holldobler!

6 people found this helpful

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Russell A. Rohde MD

Evolution continues to evolve

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2012

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"The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies" by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2009, NY. ISBN-978-0-393-06704-0, HC 522 Pgs. in 10 3/8" x 8 ¼" format on high-quality media to accommodate hundred of exacting colored images, both photographic and detailed line drawings. There are 10 chapters and an invaluable Glossary and 5 Page Index.

Authors Holldobler and Wilson, both having had lengthy professorships at Harvard also shared the Pulitzer Prize for their studies on Ants in 1991; and Wilson a 2nd Pulitzer Prize for "On Human Nature".

The introduction into the social hierarchy of certain insects is studied in great detail, with most of the attention given toward the ants, but also mentioning some parallel relationships with the Termites, Wasps, Bees that show similarities in behavior-ship but have different modalities in communication commands, etc. For example, bees have several important "waggle" dances whilst ants may use one of several dozens of pheromones for communication. The hundreds of invaluable references and the many dozens of superbly taken high-resolution video-graphic images are of the highest order. Neo-Darwinism is discussed in addition to an extensive review of Pheromone chemistry, the latter being must less complex than one might have anticipated.

finis

4 people found this helpful

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Herbert Gintis

Rates Another Pulitzer Prize

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2008

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This beautiful volume shows the amazing amount that naturalists have learned about eusocial insect species since the publication of the authors' Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ants, in 1990. The book is accessible to the lay reader, except for some introductory chapters that require some knowledge of genetics and population biology. These chapters can simply be skipped without compromising the understanding of other chapters. Both because of its breadth and the huge number of references to the professional literature, this book will likely become a reference for many researchers in sociobiology, including those whose specialty is eusocial insects.

From a theoretical standpoint, this book champions two ideas that E. O. Wilson has vigorously supported despite considerable criticism by biologists and social theorists. The first is that all social species share many traits in common, so that there is room for a special field, which Wilson calls "sociobiology," that charts the commonalities and differences among social species. This notion, laid out in Wilson's brilliant 1975 volume by that name, was greeted with scorn and contumely by social theorists who vehemently objected to including human sociality as a mere variant of biological sociality. The ensuing debate is brilliantly documented in Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford University Press, 2001). Of course, sociobiology has withstood the criticism of the ignorant and the intolerant, and is now a fully flourishing field.

More recently, E. O. Wilson has become an ardent supporter of group selection, which holds that Darwinian selection occurs on multiple levels, including the gene, the individual, and in species with a high level of sociality, on the level of the group itself. The central theme of this volume is that the eusocial insects are the product of biological selection on the level of the insect society (bee hive, termite mound, ant hill). Until recently biologists have considered this concept anathema, and many still choke on the idea of selection above the level of the gene, as forcefully expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford: 1976). Lately he has teamed up with a long-time proponent of group selection, David Sloan Wilson, to produce a coherent defense of the notion, in the context of insect sociality. The chapter devoted to this issue in the book is a masterpiece that explains clearly the compatibility of gene-level and societal-level selection, and avoids all of the errors commonly committed by group selectionists of a previous generation.

This volume is a true tour-de-force, ably fulfilling two often incompatible goals, that of elegance, excitement and instruction for the general reader on the one hand, and a contribution on the level of basic research on the other.

59 people found this helpful

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Jeffrey

Not for the feint of heart; a mistake for a Science Book Club

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2018

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It's a very thorough analysis of how wonderful the various social insect species are but it goes into far too much detail and also seems to miss many of the finer points of his later books on Eusociality and the Tribal / Group theory of genetics.

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N. A. Crawford

Quite a book

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2011

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My field is in theory/literature, so I can't portray this book's place in its field. It is, however, an excellent work for any earnestly interested in gaining a thorough understanding of ants and their eusociality. It is a scientific work, but very readable to a layperson who isn't put off by the occasional study, diagram, or formula. You'll need to look up some words and just read through others (there is a glossary), but frankly, if you need your hand held as badly as the negative reviewers suggest, then stick to Eyewitnesses and their pretty pictures. There is nothing superfluous to the writing, but there may be some sections an individual would prefer to parse through. This work is, after all, for study rather than coffee table reading. What I've learned has been invaluable. Understanding ants opens new depths onto life, both animal and human.

If you are excited by the concept of a communal stomach; regulated nest temperature; fungi farming; tournaments to display the strength of conflicting colonies; that ants rush to collapsed portions of their nest to unearth their trapped compatriots; or the fact that when one ant wanders onto another's nest, it submits to the defender who then chooses to escort the wayward ant away from the nest rather than outright killing it, AND you want to put some hours into the project, buy this book.

You won't regrANT it!

2 people found this helpful

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Ossie Weinert

Fascinating!

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2021

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E. O. Wilson explains difficult concepts in terms everyone can understand. We are learning more every day about the incredible world we live in.

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Chris C

A lot of good content

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 25, 2018

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A very good book on the subject

Timothy Hawthorn

Not quite "The Ants" but still very good.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2009

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Beautifully produced and illustrated. A great book even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of "The Ants". Perhaps slightly more polemical and less an objective account of ant societies and lives. BH & EOW are basically pushing a (very reasonable IMHO) line that it is the colony and not the individual ant that is the true unit of selection when looking at the more 'advanced' ant societies. Though which societies count as truly 'advance' they disagree between themselves. It is quite technical yet still very readable. In fairness so was "The Ants". A better Glossary would have helped eg defines 'ecology' but not 'elaiosome'. Ultimately if you're fascinated by ants then I can heartily recommend this book.

12 people found this helpful

Callum B.

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2015

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Very interesting book

CNC

fantastic but technical

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2010

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This is a basic textbook and designed for the really (not casually) interested. I love it and read it all on holiday. It is worth every penny and is not difficult to follow, but I think that others with no biology background might find it a bit hard to understand. However, it is not technically demanding and is within everyone's reach if one takes the time to absorb the information. Make sure you're really interested first and if you are, you will love this.

5 people found this helpful

Charlotte Davis

Life Sciences

Reviewed in Germany on January 11, 2011

Verified Purchase

This book is highly interesting, containing as it does masses of information about the genesis and further development of colonies among various species of hymenopterans. For me, the name Hölldobler is a guarantee of excellent writing, even though I would tend to warn potential readers that this book definitely is one for informed readers who have more than a passing interest in the subject.

The graphs, statistics, sketches and photos complement the text to perfection, making it easier to comprehend and absorb the details. Anyone who has wondered about the seemingly disorganized rushing about of ants when their nest is disturbed, and wants to know more about the structure of their "society," should start out with Hölldobler's first book, The Ants as it offers details that are explored in greater detail in The Superorganism.

8 people found this helpful

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