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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, Charming, yet Scientfically Challenging
Review: I first encountered Gadagkar through his work on genetic relatedness in wasps and bees. His professional work is extremely careful, quantitative, and innovative. I was surprised to find a different side of this impressive animal behaviorist in this charming little book. Gadagkar has an admirable ability to explain complex biological theory without recourse to complicated terminology and equations. The centerpiece of Gadagkar's interpretation of cooperation and conflict in animal societies is Hamilton's inequality, which says that individuals will, in the long run, help others at a cost to themselves, if the benefit to the others times their relatedness to the helper is greater than the cost to the helper. This simple little equation is a powerful leitmotif that runs through each and every example in this book. And the examples are extremely elegant and memorable---reading this reminded me of when I read Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man when I was a kid, so wide ranging and daring are his examples---except that in this case what is being described is scientifically impeccable. This book is great for beginners in sociobiology and animal behavior, but it is also a wonderful treat for those (like myself) who have read widely in the field. There are two areas of cooperation/conflict that Gadagkar does not touch. The first is homo sapiens. You'll have to look elsewhere for the sociobiology of humans. The second is cooperation/conflict among cells in multicellular organisms. I recommend the collection edited by Laurent Keller (Princeton University Press) for an introduction to the latter.
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