Soul of the White Ant

I heard about this book in late 2016 while watching a YouTube video of Daniel Dennett talking about consciousness. I remembered the title while laying in bed one evening and found the book on Kindle. I purchased a copy and spent the next few hours reading it. The author and the text are wildly interesting. Marais was a South African who lived from 1871 to 1936, working as a lawyer, journalist, poet, naturalist, and newspaper owner. According to his Wikipedia biography, he became addicted to opiates while young, and his wife died as a result of giving birth to their only son. He also had to deal with the plagiarism of his work conducted for this book (by a Nobel Prize winner, no less!). Tragically, he took his own life in 1936. He is recognized as the first person to conduct scientific research of animal behavior in the wild. In this book, Marais examines the behavior of termites and the termite colony in detail. I was struck by the extent of his research. He describes at great length the structure and behavior of the colony - the roles of each type of termite, the sort of hierarchical class structure. Most notably, he may be the first to posit the idea that the termite colony behaves essentially as a complex organism itself - a sort of emergent phenomenon comprised of many smaller, less complex parts, none of which are likely to be aware of the whole. This was a fascinating book and worth picking up.