New Releases by Edward O. Wilson

Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects’ evolutionary achievement.

In Search of Nature presents for the first time a collection of the seminal short writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, addressing in brief and eminently readable form the themes that have actively engaged this remarkable intellect throughout his career. Photos & illustrations.

From the Arctic to South Africa - one finds them everywhere: Ants. Making up nearly 15% of the entire terrestrial animal biomass, ants are impressive not only in quantitative terms, they also fascinate by their highly organized and complex social system. Their caste system, the division of labor, the origin of altruistic behavior and the complex forms of chemical communication makes them the most interesting group of social organisms and the main subject for sociobiologists. Not least is their ecological importance: Ants are the premier soil turners, channelers of energy and dominatrices of the insect fauna. TOC:The importance of ants.- Classification and origins.- The colony life cycle.- Altruism and the origin of the worker caste.- Colony odor and kin recognition.- Queen numbers and domination.- Communication.- Caste and division of labor.- Social homeostasis and flexibility.- Foraging and territorial strategies.- The organization of species communities.- Symbioses among ant species.- Symbioses with other animals.- Interaction with plants.- The specialized predators.- The army ants.- The fungus growers.- The harvesters.- The weaver ants.- Collecting and culturing ants.- Glossary.- Bibliography.- Index.

This book calls attention to a most urgent global problem: the rapidly accelerating loss of plant and animal species to increasing human population pressure and the demands of economic development. Biodiversity creates a systematic framework for analyzing

Analyzes the reciprocative relationship between genes in individuals and the production of culture and shows how predictions about genetic evolution within a cultural pattern can be made.

In this pathbreaking and far-reaching work George Oster and Edward Wilson provide the first fully developed theory of caste evolution among the social insects. Furthermore, in studying the effects of natural selection in generally increasing the insects'' ergonomic efficiency, they go beyond the concentration of previous researchers on the physiological mechanisms of the insects and turn our attention instead to the scale and efficiency of the insects'' division of labor. Recognizing that the efficiency of the insect colony is based on a complex fitting of the division of labor to many simultaneous needs, including those imposed by the distribution of resources and enemies around the nest, Professors Oster and Wilson are able to construct a series of mathematical models to characterize the agents of natural selection that promote particular caste systems. The social insects play a key role in the subject of sociobiology because their social organization is so rigid and can be related to genetic evolution. Because of this important consideration, the authors'' work has consequences not only for entomology but also for general evolutionary theory.

Singularities of solutions of differential equations forms the common theme of these papers taken from a seminar held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1977-1978. While some of the lectures were devoted to the analysis of singularities, others focused on applications in spectral theory. As an introduction to the subject, this volume treats current research in the field in such a way that it can be studied with profit by the non-specialist.

A study of insect sociology, presenting individual investigations of wasps, ants, bees, and termites, and discussing caste, behavior, communication, symbioses, and other topics.

How to learn population biology. Population genetics. Ecology. Biogeography: species equilibrium theory.