Ben Waber reviewed Animal Societies by Ashley Ward
An Overly Broad Book with Some Glaring Inaccuracies
3 stars
To be fair to Ward, he tries to tackle an extremely broad topic that's hard to reduce to a single volume. It does have flashes of insight - the opening chapter on krill is great. However, as the book strays farther from Ward's expertise - fish behavior - the cracks start to show and then widen. There's no overall organizing structure or connective tissue between the chapters - it just goes from species to species. Beyond that, there's some inaccurate and extremely problematic content - the discussion of Galton without mentioning eugenics stands out, as does the review of the racist and unscientific work on "rat cities" by Calhoun. After that section I speed-ran the rest of the book.
To be fair to Ward, he tries to tackle an extremely broad topic that's hard to reduce to a single volume. It does have flashes of insight - the opening chapter on krill is great. However, as the book strays farther from Ward's expertise - fish behavior - the cracks start to show and then widen. There's no overall organizing structure or connective tissue between the chapters - it just goes from species to species. Beyond that, there's some inaccurate and extremely problematic content - the discussion of Galton without mentioning eugenics stands out, as does the review of the racist and unscientific work on "rat cities" by Calhoun. After that section I speed-ran the rest of the book.