Logo IMG   Superorganism—or Family Business?  Michael T.
Ghiselin  THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and
Strangeness of Insect Societies. Bert Hölldobler and Edward O.
Wilson. xxi + 552 pp. W. W. Norton, 2009. $55.  Weaver antsClick
to Enlarge ImageBert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, whose book
The Ants won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, have now come out with a
magnificent book about social insects in general, The
Superorganism. It represents evolutionary natural history at its
very best, providing a rich description of how such creatures as
ants and bees engage in the struggle for existence. The details
are often astonishing, but the real strength of the work lies in
how those details are put together. Toward the end of the book,
fascinating historical accounts reveal how the various groups of
ants originated and how and why they have diversified through
time. Such narrative history is possible only because of the
contributions of systematic biologists.  Although well written
and adorned with many remar