Skip to main content

The Lives of Ants – Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon *****

We’re in the habit of moaning about OUP popular science because it’s often the case they have great subjects, but written by academics making the books often poor to read. The recommendation is that they get their academics to link up with a writer, and in effect that is what has happened here, as the book is a translation (probably from French) – and benefits hugely, because unlike many of its fellows it is a joy to read.
It would be ironic if that enhanced readability were coupled with a less than inspiring subject – but not here. The subject is, as it says on the tin, the lives of ants, and they are truly incredible. At risk of sounding like the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you may think you know about ants, but that’s nothing when you see the sheer variety and complexity of ant life. The different species indulge in all sorts of behaviours, from rearing insect ‘cattle’ to capturing slaves and invading others’ nests and pretending to be of that species. We discover a queen ant of one species that spends its life riding on the back of a bigger queen from a different species. And then there are the ants that grow crops, the different ways the queens operate, the unusual sexual practices – in one species the males clone themselves as well as the queens (the workers are more normally produced), the only known creature in which a male is capable of this.
It’s simply stunning. I was slightly puzzled there wasn’t more about the super-organism concept, something that books about bees like The Buzz about Bees and The Super-Organism cover in a lot of detail. If the authors don’t think ants are a super-organism – i.e. a nest is effectively one creature, with the different insects acting almost like cells in a human’s body – then they should say so, and why. If they do think ants are a super-organism it ought to have been given more coverage. There is a passing reference to ‘swarm intelligence’ which may be the same concept, but it only really comes in the section on robots with ant-like behaviour, in itself an interesting bit of work, but not the main theme of the book.
I only have two other slight moans. One is that too long is spent on something that’s clearly of more interest to the author than the reader. This looks at the percentage of genetic relationship two ants have to each other on how this effects the way the ants treat each other. It goes on a bit. The other complaint is a simple factual error. We are told that ten million billion ants averaging three milligrams per ant weights roughly the same as the whole human population. Some basic arithmetic shows this to be wrong. There are around 6 billion people in the world – let’s make it 5 for ease of calculation. So that’s 2 million ants per person. Two million lots of three milligrams is six kilos. Now I know there are a lot of babies in the world, but there’s no way the average human being weighs six kilos – this is almost an order of magnitude out.
These are minor gripes, though, in what is a riveting book about a fascinating subject.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more