Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology Book

A mixed bag of a book, though fortunately a high quality mixture of things. The primary focus of the books is Ants, and it follows the life cycle of three different types by focusing on an individual colony (or super-organism) of each. (For the curious, the three types are a leaf-cutter ant colony, a fire ant colony and a army ant swarm.) And the primary focus is fascinating, if you have any interest in animal behavior. Hoyt does a good job of switching between the general and the specific, looking at how certain types of behaviors manifest themselves in the three types of ants he focuses on. The book is also about an ant-collecting expedition in Costa Rica, with EO Wilson and William L Brown, Jr. That part of the book is pretty interesting as well. The book takes the predictable digressions into rain forest diversity, ecology, sociobiology and the like, but they are handled well enough to not be a major intrusion. A well-done introduction to a very specific facet of entomology.