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A review by archytas
Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World by Marlene Zuk
3.75
I was possibly the perfect audience for this book: I know a fair bit about current animal cognition discussions, but nothing at all about insects, and I enjoy Zuk's humour a good deal. So the book's fairly haphazard approach to explaining the significance of, say, cooperation, didnt really bother me. I loved Zuk's clear explanation of hive life, and such innovations as consensus decision making through dancing. Zuk does love a good insect reproduction anecdote and will travel some distance from her point to tell it, but she also excels at using the surprising to challenge assumpions, which *is* usually the point.
The book ultimately argues for some pretty sophisticated cognive functions in insects, most compellingly in social hive structures. Like most in this field, Zuk doesn't strongly delineate what she means by intelligence, regarding it possibly as a kind of summed total of various diverse traits. (I really the term, implying a linear measurable value-laden scale, should be ditched entirely in this field.) Her elaboration of the complexities of negotiation among species is the high point here: she has a remarkably clear explanation of consensus, leader and dispersed decision making works in ants, termites and bees.
Zuk is pretty firmly on the Selfish Gene side of evolutionary theory, whereas I tend to agree more with complex factor evolutionary biologists. This influences, obviously, a lot of her thinking around collaboration in particular, which she views as a constant tension related directly to gene transmission. She sits on the sceptical side of the social brain hypothesis, and even of extended-childhood-for-learning, without much explanation as to why. But her aim is always to explain not to pursuade, making it easy to disagree with her and enjoy the book at the same time. It is a skill more of us should have.
The book ultimately argues for some pretty sophisticated cognive functions in insects, most compellingly in social hive structures. Like most in this field, Zuk doesn't strongly delineate what she means by intelligence, regarding it possibly as a kind of summed total of various diverse traits. (I really the term, implying a linear measurable value-laden scale, should be ditched entirely in this field.) Her elaboration of the complexities of negotiation among species is the high point here: she has a remarkably clear explanation of consensus, leader and dispersed decision making works in ants, termites and bees.
Zuk is pretty firmly on the Selfish Gene side of evolutionary theory, whereas I tend to agree more with complex factor evolutionary biologists. This influences, obviously, a lot of her thinking around collaboration in particular, which she views as a constant tension related directly to gene transmission. She sits on the sceptical side of the social brain hypothesis, and even of extended-childhood-for-learning, without much explanation as to why. But her aim is always to explain not to pursuade, making it easy to disagree with her and enjoy the book at the same time. It is a skill more of us should have.