Gadagkar, R (2018) Social Evolution: Does Collapsing Taxonomic Boundaries Produce a Synthetic Theory? A Review of - Comparative Social Evolution, (Eds.) D. R. Rubenstein and P. Abbot, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York (2017). In: The Quarterly Review of Biology, 93 (2). pp. 121-125.
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Other (Gadagkar, R. 2018. Social Evolution: Does Collapsing Taxonomic Boundaries Produce a Synthetic Theory? A Review of - Comparative Social Evolution, (Eds.) D. R. Rubenstein and P. Abbot, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York (2017). Quart. Rev. Bi)
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Abstract
A review of Comparative Social Evolution. Edited by Dustin R. Rubenstein and Patrick Abbot. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. $115.00 (hardcover); $64.99 (paper). xii + 465 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-1-107-04339-8 (hc); 978-1- 107-64792-3 (pb). 2017. This publication is an epic effort by 28 authors led, inspired, directed, and perhaps policed by two editors. It attempts to bring together into a single volume essentially everything that we know about social evolution in diverse taxa, invertebrate and vertebrate. Evenmore importantly, it aims to produce a synthesis of the essential features, trajectory, and logic of social evolution, a synthesis that hopes to dissolve all taxonomic boundaries and produce a single, unified narrative meaningful throughout the animal kingdom. Sociality is encountered in about2% of insects, 5% of mammals, 9% of birds, and more rarely in other groups of animals. The book succeeds admirably in the first task of bringing everything together. There are individual chapters on sociality in ants, bees, wasps, termites, aphids and thrips, spiders, shrimps, primates, nonprimate mammals, birds,fishes, and even lizards. Reading the volume is like climbing the peak of a very high mountain on a clear day and surveying the vast landscape in all directions. Read from cover to cover, the book gives readers a truly breathtaking experience of the mindboggling diversity of animal social life. Individual chapters allow you to dig as deeply as possible with the current knowledge into the intricacies and variations in social life in different groups of animals that show at least some form of social behavior. Never before has something like this been attempted and executed so successfully, at least not since Wilson’s Sociobiology 43 years ago (Wilson 1975). But there is a crucial difference between Wilson’s tome and this one. Wilson’s was a top-down approach and this one aims to be a bottom-up approach, but more on that later because this difference concerns the second aim of the book, namely synthesis.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Quarterly Review of Biology |
| Publisher: | The University of Chicago Press |
| Additional Information: | Copyright to this article belongs to The University of Chicago Press |
| Keywords: | Book review, Comparative social evolution |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Feb 2021 11:20 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Feb 2021 11:20 |
| URI: | http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/67566 |
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