The Evolution of Social Wasps by Raghavendra Gadagkar; James H. Hunt | Paperback | Evolution

In the Evolution of Social Wasps, Jim Hunt begins with wasps but ultimately casts his net much more broadly to social organisms (or at least social insects) in general. Hunt begins the book with chapters on the different groups of wasps and their life histories. These chapters are useful, rich and informed and are a wonderful mix of the kinds of lovely drawings and natural history one might have found in a book on wasps in the 1900s (and given the lack of both in most modern books-I offer the comparison as high praise) and modern theory. The book then covers the biology of individual wasps, the biology of colonies and then of populations. It occurred to me while reading these sections that while invaluable to anyone interested in social wasps or in sociality more generally, it would also be a useful book around which to frame an undergraduate class on behavioral ecology as a kind of case study of the ways in which knowing one organism allows one to arrive at deeper insights. Finally, throughout the book (and the thread develops early in the book-just as it seems to have developed early in Hunt's work), Hunt advances his theory for how wasps and more generally social insects evolved sociality. Hunt's theory is controversial, but at a time when there is no accepted explanation for why and how sociality evolved, so are most of the others. Time will tell, one hopes, which theory for the origin of sociality best fits with the data we have now or those we will have in the future. Regardless of the answer, Hunt's book will stand as a classic treatise on wasps and a classic example of how a scientist moves from observation to insight again and again and again.