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Science 28 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5906, p. 1327
DOI: 10.1126/science.1167005
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Books

EVOLUTION:
All for One and One for All

James H. Hunt

The Superorganism
The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
Norton, New York, 2008. 544 pp. $55, C$60.50, £30. ISBN 9780393067040.
Summarizing the past couple of decades of research on the ecology and evolution of social insects-with their tightly knit colonies, altruistic cooperation, complex communication, and division of labor-Hölldobler and Wilson argue that these "superorganisms" represent a basic stage of biological organization, between the organism and the species.
The reviewer is at the Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA. E-mail: jim_hunt{at}ncsu.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)