Lisa Margonelli

I've already lost two part reviews because LibraryThing doesn't have an autosave...and I have gone off without saving my work. Very frustrating.
But then, so is this book. It seems to jump around all over the place. Partly, this is as a result of the way the book has been produced. It seems the publisher commissions a writer ....who can write and is a good researcher but who knows nothing about the subject....to go out and interview a lot of experts and digest all the information into a book. In the process we get a story of the authors travels and her interviews with the little personal touches about the idiosyncracies of the various experts. Yes, I get it.....it does make the book more human friendly ...but it also burdens it with a lot of, probably, unnecessary words and verbiage. And maybe, bringing in somebody who is not already committed to some scientific paradigm, is a way of getting an unbiased view of research and knowledge in the field.
But I did find that Margonelli's musings and philosophising about the society of termites to get a little distracting and verging on the religious ...and I wasn't looking for this.
I'm not sure that we actually arrived at any real conclusions either about whether the termite nest was a super organism or something else.

I did learn a few interesting things along the way. For example, it's not totally straightforward to take a biochemical process being carried out by a microbe in the termite's gut and turn out a fuel (grassoline) at the other end. Yes the termite can do it and digest cellulose but it's much harder to do when out of the termite and trying to turn it into an industrial process. However, one research group had been able to bring the price of lignocellulosic biofuel from an estimated $100,000 per gallon to about $30....which I find absolutely extraordinary.
I also learned that termite behaviour is classically non-linear....forty termites are not like two groups of twenty termites.
And they don't always work like little teams of workers....much of the time only about 5% of the termites are actually working on the job in hand...the others are milling around. Also the gut microbes in the termite co-evolved with the termites. The termites didn't necessarily pick up new organisms over the years. A lot of the Australian termites have protists in their gut ...each with multiple genomes and bacterial symbionts riding along with them ...sometimes these protists are 100 x bigger than the bacteria in the termite....Oh, and by the way, Linda the Australian expert on these protists would not say (p184) "Bugger if I know".....the phrase is "Buggered if I know" .......
Maybe the closest we get to a picture of what is going on in the termite "mind" is the suggestion of Scott Turner that "The termites and fungi and microbes act together as a cognitive system...and rather than defining the individual genetically, it may be more productive to define them cognitively"......"Cognition is a social phenomenon, whether it's happening as nerve cells interact with one another or within a crowd of termites. Together the termites have a sense of what their environment should be like, ....the perfect mound has few breezes, has the perfect concentration of carbon dioxide and humidity , has smooth edges and hard---not crumbly---walls. What the termites do is, they build a world to conform to that cognitive picture.....and that is the intentionality of the swarm".
There is also a digression into robo-bees: tiny engineered robots. Some of which might be designed to act as a swarm on a battle field ...each with a shaped charge sufficient to penetrate the head of a soldier. And there are no conventions (Or any serious) discussion about the ethics of using such weaponry. It's like the situation we had prior to WWI when there was no conventions about the use of poisoned gases. And there is no empathy possible when a robo-bee has been programmed to seek out a person and release it's charge.
On the whole an interesting book but I did get a little distracted by Magonelli's philosophising. Four stars from me.… (plus d'informations)