espeon's reviews
39 reviews

comics aren't for me =(

i enjoyed this read! very detailed look at two species of army ant, eciton burchellii and eciton hamatum. i love ants but i had never learned much about army ants, and i found this book to be a wonderful introduction. the stated goal of the book was to be approachable to general audiences, and i'm no entomologist but still found the book to be a great read, so i think it did a decent job at that. 

What a nightmare. This book is awful. Going to be honest, I'm decades younger than the author. That means I grew up long after the shakeups in taxonomy she names, and it really isn't difficult to conceptualize. The umwelt she references and abuses is a tenuous concept at best. The only compelling evidence she gives for it is the thing about brain damage making it so people can't separate biological organisms. But even this really isn't as compelling as it seems. Damage to certain parts of the brain also results in an ability to speak coherently - am I meant to believe English is codified by human evolution?

What I find so insulting about this insufferable author is not that she's preoccupied with the umwelt - it made me dislike the book, but I would have finished it anyway if for no other reason than to make my criticism more complete. No, the thing that made me set it down in disgust was her effusive praise at Linnaeus for capturing the "umwelt"...only to turn around and scoff in disgust at indigenous peoples around the world for, in her words, their "kooky" classifications.

Classifications that are no more "wrong" evolutionarily than Linnaeus's, lmao. Her praise of the unscientific babblings of early European taxonomists, only to turn around and scoff at folk taxonomies of non-white people, makes it incredibly clear that this is a washed up hack who learned "fish" is not a taxonomical category and lacked the mental flexibility to internalize this. I wouldn't normally be so harsh on someone for that, I'm not unsympathetic to that sort of difficulty, but making it anything but a personal problem is absurd. I can't believe this drivel got published.

Hot tip: try not gasping in confusions at Filipino people naming orchids after human body parts when there's plants with english names like "bleeding hearts" and "lip ferns". I wonder why it is they would not be offered a drop from the gallons of grace she pours on Europeans. 

By the way, Linnaeus also classified human races and ranked them. Am I to believe this is more genius of the umwelt? Please. 

Read a different book. Other reviews mention "Fish Don't Exist" by Lulu Miller - I second this recommendation for an actual look at the dangers of the "natural" ideas peddled in this one. 

amazing book!! highly highly highly recommend