The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies By Thomas D. Seeley (review)

had only barely started to experiment with the vaccine before using it on the young boy who had been bitten. But what difference does this make? Didn't the boy survive? This type of question is one of many that have been asked about the book. Some reviewers have been frankly protective of individuals—"How dare Geison criticize my hero!" (The subtext is, perhaps, that if Pasteur can be criticized, so can anyone else.) Some have been protective of disciplines—"If Geison thinks this is easy, perhaps he should try to do the experiments himself." (The subtext is, perhaps, that only scientists can criticize other scientists.) Neither of these objections, in this reviewer's estimation, is highly relevant. Some objections have been progressivist—"What difference does it make, Pasteur was right, and that's all that counts." Perhaps so, at least according to our late-20th conceptualization of biology, but if the study of science is to be meaningful, we need to understand the process of knowledge creation as well as its outcome. The most important type of critical discourse relates to the somewhat more reasoned objection that "Maybe Pasteur's notebooks tell a different story than his published papers, but that's just the way science works." Clearly this is so and will continue to be so. Herein lies a lesson for today's scientific researchers. They do not do themselves or their patrons a service by insisting for public consumption that the experimental process is neat, linear, and tidy. Pasteur's science was conducted in a competitive, political atmosphere and exhibits a disconnect between public and private; such is likely to be the case today as well. Geison points out that Pasteur's glorification as a scientist has been exceeded by only Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. Distinguished company, indeed. Nor does Geison feel that such a standing is unwarranted. For, as he states repeatedly throughout the book, he views Pasteur as one of the greatest scientists of all time. So should we. To point out inconsistencies between Pasteur's private and public presentations of science is not to label him a bad person, or a bad scientist. Rather, to examine these inconsistencies using a particularly important set of case studies is part ofa historical research program to understand the process by which scientific knowledge is created. If we are to see history as a tool for understanding the scientific process, we must be willing to examine heroes with the same intensity as we examine heretics (for one may become the other) , and there are few who have worked in the real world who will not have some elements of their life that under close scrutiny may seem imperfect. Joel Howell Department ofMedicine Taubman 3116/0376 University ofMichigan Medical Center Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0376 The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies. By Thomas D. Seeley. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995. Pp. 295. $49.95. What is an organism? Superficially, it is an individual that acts as a coherent unit to survive and reproduce. However, individuals are composed of subunits, such as genes, and are themselves subunits of larger entities, such as social groups and eco304 Book Reviews systems. Can genes, social groups, and ecosystems be regarded as organisms? If not, then why do individuals enjoy such a unique status in the hierarchy of life? The answers to these questions have been emerging from the science of evolutionary biology over the last few decades. Natural selection can potentially act at any level of the biological hierarchy; between genes within single individuals, between individuals within a single group (conventional Darwinian selection), between groups within a population of groups, or even between ecosystems. The history of life on earth has been marked by a number of major transitions in which lowerlevel units coalesced into higher-level units. Modern individuals are themselves higher-level units, communities of previously free-living organisms that have become so thoroughly integrated that we see them as a single entity. The Wisdom ofthe Hive is about the next major transition, of individuals into social groups that are sufficiently integrated to deserve the term superorganism. Bee hives and other social insect colonies...