Underbug
Underbug by Lisa Margonelli is a 2018 Science & Technology book written by TED speaker Lisa Margonelli, paired here with the talk they gave.
The pairing
- Paired talk: "The political chemistry of oil" (2010), 615K views on TED.com
- Timing: Published 8 years after the talk.
- Edition: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018 · 320 pages
The paired TED talk
The political chemistry of oil (2010), the TED talk by Lisa Margonelli.
From the publisher
Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with one of nature's most influential but least understood bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we're building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military-industrial complex. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite's properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others--unearthing disquieting answers about the world's most underrated insect and what it means to be human