The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness
of Insect Societies
By Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson
W.W. Norton. 522 pp. $55
Reviewed by Paula Marantz Cohen
For those interested in bugs, Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson are the men to go to. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their 1990 book
The Ants
, the first science work to win that award, and they've now expanded beyond myrmecological (i.e., ant-related) research to encompass bees, wasps and termites.
In
The Superorganism
, Holldobler and Wilson are concerned with how these insects function as coordinated societies or "eusocial" groups.
At the root of this behavior is a division of labor relating to reproduction: In the most developed instances, the sisters of the queen entirely forgo reproduction and "altruistically" remain in the nest to care for the young. As the authors explain, "groups with altruists will be more successful and productive than those who don't have them."
This suggests that for eusocial insects, the target of natural selection is not the individual but the group - or superorganism - that develops and functions in ways like the single organism as conventionally understood.
Subsequent chapters deal with how a superorganism develops and functions. It seems that algorithms (organic counterparts of the strings of choices that direct the operation of a computer) encoded in the genes of these insects create castes, directing certain members to specialized functions within the group; behavioral algorithms then determine the moment-to-moment actions of caste members. Ninety percent of the signals used to direct and communicate within the group operate through chemical substances known as pheromones. A track of pheromones may lead a group of ants to a food source and help determine how many are needed to bring the food back to the nest. Other signals involve smell, taste, touch and vibration; the "waggle dance" of the honeybee, for example, communicates through vibration.
Holldobler and Wilson also discuss the varying degrees of complexity that characterize different insect superorganisms. Leaf-cutter ants are presented as the most complex, with strikingly specific caste members and well-defined labor functions. At the other end of the spectrum are the dawn ants, which exist in the most primitive state of eusociality.
In these ants, caste differences and division of labor are plastic, with individual organisms shifting roles as circumstances demand.
Readers should be warned that
The Superorganism
is not an easy read.
Substantial portions of the text are inaccessible without a background in entomology or a knowledge of genetics. But dedicated lay readers should hold on, as this reviewer did. Skipping the hard parts, one can find passages that are profoundly lucid and engrossing. A bonus are the lavish photographs, taken by Holldobler, that will enthrall the bug enthusiast.
The authors take care to keep their gaze fastened on their tiny subjects. They do not explore the connections that sometimes seem so compelling between superorganisms and human societies. That reticence may be the result of past controversy. E.O. Wilson coined the term
sociobiology
in the 1970s, and was roundly criticized in some quarters for taking a deterministic view of human nature. Most of his critics did not grasp how much his view of gene behavior stressed environmental factors, which so often determine what elements of a gene's potential are activated. Where a highly developed division of labor has evolved, as in the leaf-cutter ants, environmental stimuli have been extremely uniform over time and individual organisms have lost the need to shift their functions. In this respect, human beings seem more like the changeable and versatile dawn ants than like the highly specialized leaf-cutters.
The elegant division of labor and so-called altruism that one sees in eusocial insects might be taken as an inspiration for human society.
But it ought to be remembered that coordination and self-sacrifice in insects extend only as far as the group. What Richard Dawkins called "the selfish gene" is simply transferred from the individual organism to the superorganism. This may help explain the tendency of human beings not only to organize into mutually supportive societies but also to wage war on societies not their own. The lesson to be derived from eusocial insects seems, in short, double-edged. One is left to ponder the meaning of one resonant analogy cited by the authors: "Insects, like human beings, [. . .] create civilizations without the use of reason."