Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology (review)

Charlotte Sleigh offers readers an analysis of the century-long (1874–1975) struggle to establish the discipline of myrmecology—the branch of entomology devoted to “unraveling the social arrangements of ants” (p. 2)—in Six Legs Better. Sleigh argues for the social construction of myrmecology by exposing three major periods of the discipline’s development, both in Europe and across the Atlantic. By showing who the key figures are and how they developed their understanding of ants and ant behavior through social lenses that influenced their methodologies and, ultimately, their theories of the “social” insects, Sleigh provides the reader with a vast corpus of evidence pulled from the scientific, popular, biographical, and political interactions of the century. This excellent book, especially in the last third, pieces together the multiple players and theories, from Darwinism to cybernetics, that had an impact on social entomology and negotiated—often stirring up heated intradepartmental animosity—myrmecology’s place as a serious scientific discipline.

Sleigh devotes much of the book’s analysis to three key figures in myrmecology—Auguste Henri Forel, William Morton Wheeler, and Edward O. Wilson—but provides perspectives on the many others who interacted, supported, discouraged, and collaborated with the main characters. Sleigh’s immense reference list encompasses field notes, biographies, letters, diaries, reprinted proceedings, and textbooks, to name some of the primary research. Drawing on the methodologies of Gillian Beer and N. Katherine Hayles, Sleigh suggests that Forel’s metaphors have “cultural resonances that reach beyond [their] immediate application to the natural world and suggest all kinds of unintended connections, images, and analogies to readers” (p. 14); once established or simply offered, “the metaphor goes on to shape new exploration, experimentation, and representation” (p. 15). The three scientists’ similarities and differences are compared with regard to their social and academic positions as well as their sociohistorical contexts, which overlap somewhat.

First, readers see Forel’s impressive taxonomic feat of cataloging “3,500 ant species of the world,” which were “half of those known at the time” (p. 42), combined with his training in “neurological and psychiatric methods” as the Swiss scientist’s context for furthering “the key nineteenth-century concepts of instinct and intelligence” (p. 22). Forel’s “science”—his methodology and filter for studying formic behavior—was heavily influenced by the social concerns he explored, especially his anti-alcoholism stance. Forel’s position within the late-Victorian degeneration anxiety and general evolutionary debates adhere to entomology’s (and zoology’s) penchant for transforming human psychology onto animal evolution. Second, Wheeler—Forel’s overlapping American contemporary—extended the sociological view of ants “for an interwar American context” (p. 64); again, social issues filtered into ant behavior. Wheeler viewed trophallaxis—food, secretion, or odor exchanges among insects in a colony—as “any kind of functional exchange among a community that holistically construed, went beyond the nest” (p. 81). Interestingly, the cultural awareness of communism as well as Herbert Hoover’s understanding that “without the worker caste there was no society, and the raison d’être of the worker class was food and its exchange” (p. 83) abounds in Wheeler’s descriptions of colonies. The Great Depression only strengthened the view that food distribution was a social imperative: “feeding was the key to society’s evolution and maintenance” (p. 84). Finally, Wilson transforms ants into communicative creatures while in the context of World War II and postwar communication trends. At this point, “big science” had endowed research institutions (often via grants from the military) and pushed myrmecology into cybernetics; now, the ant colonies become machine-like super-organisms, communicating through signs and signifiers representative of semiotic theories, from Pierce and Lévi-Strauss.

Sleigh’s argument really gets going when she examines Wilson’s contributions—situating him within a postwar cultural perspective—that show myrmecology implicated within a military-industrial-academic context. Surprisingly, entomology, which moved from a curiosity of land-grant colleges in the latenineteenth century to a major discipline at Ivy League colleges over...