{"id":863,"date":"2012-03-21T11:23:14","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T16:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=863"},"modified":"2012-03-29T12:10:47","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T17:10:47","slug":"altruism-ants-and-e-o-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/03\/21\/altruism-ants-and-e-o-wilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Altruism, Ants, and E.O. Wilson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Soldiers<\/a>
Soldiers and citizens work together to fight flooding in North Dakota. Photo by Master Sgt. David Lipp.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last spring a fascinating little story in the LA Times<\/em> on the collective\/behaviorial intelligence of fire ants put me in mind of the Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (\u201cFire Ants for Sociology<\/a>\u201d). I first heard about Wilson in high school (his paradigm-shifting book came out in 1979; I graduated in 1985), read some of his work in college, and talked about it a fair bit hanging out with biologists in graduate school, but I hadn\u2019t thought a lot about him and his ideas since.<\/p>\n

Wilson, I learned from a recent New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0piece <\/a>on the genetics of altruism, hasn\u2019t been hiding or anything. Though now over 80 years old, Wilson is still as busy as the ants (too bad, for alliterative purposes, it wasn\u2019t bees) he’s spent his life studying. Indeed, among his numerous accomplishments of last 20 years is a massive, richly (and apparently hand-) illustrated, 800-page book on Pheidole, the \u201cmost abundant genus of ants.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article in the New Yorker<\/em> is actually not about Wilson, though, so much as a whole debate that has taken shape within his field. It centers on natural selection and the existence of altruism and cooperation. More specifically, it is about the validity of William Hamilton\u2019s \u201cinclusive fitness theory,\u201d which posited that the Darwinian concept of competitive fitness was driven not only by how many offspring an individual manages to have, but also about the reproductive capabilities of surviving relatives. At the core of the controversy is the validity and utility of the elegant mathematical formula from and upon which Hamilton derived his theory in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

For several decades now, the equation\u2014which which I won\u2019t detail here\u2014has held essentially biblical status for explaining genes and cooperation. According to the story, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins called Hamilton \u201cthe most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.\u201d But a new generation of biologists are challenging the formula on mathematical grounds; they have joined forces with Wilson, whose own doubts stem from his voluminous knowledge and observations of insects. Wilson now says his embrace of Hamilton’s math was misguided: \u201cI\u2019m going to be blunt,\u201d he told the New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cThe equation doesn\u2019t work. It\u2019s a phantom measure.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article is a model of science reporting (and sociology of science type insight), with fascinating details about how an idea emerges and takes hold of a field, the relationship between mathematical modeling and empirical observation in the biological sciences, and the social nature of the development of scientific knowledge. The latter isn\u2019t always pretty: the insurgents have weathered a storm of both public and private\u00a0virulent criticism. It is, as reporter Jonah Lehrer nicely characterizes it, \u201cscience with existential stakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, for my money, the Wilson parts of the story are the most compelling. Wilson, after all, is the one who helped make Hamilton\u2019s equation famous; now he’s leading the charge against the theorem, and he seems to relish the attention and controversy. Perhaps I\u2019m a sucker for the drama and intrigue of the renegade scholar. But at a more intellectual level, what I find appealing is Wilson\u2019s insistence that \u201chuman generosity might have evolved as an emergent property not of the individual but of the group.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGroup selection\u201d is apparently dismissed by most evolutionary biologists, but Wilson believes it holds the key to understanding altruism. \u201cGoodness,\u201d as the article explains, \u201cmight actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins.\u201d Wilson cites cases of cooperation the animal kingdom ranging from microbes to plants and female lions. \u201cIn all of these studies, many of which have been conducted in the controlled conditions of the lab, clumps of cooperators thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehrer goes on to quote a wonderful, concise bit from a 2007 Wilson paper: \u201cSelfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love those first two sentences. But as profound and compelling as I find them, the third gives me pause, reminding me of the difference between the straight biological sciences and the human sciences. My sense is that in the human domain it is precisely the tension between selfishness and altruism and the choices we make between ourselves and our collective commitments\u2014Wilson\u2019s \u201ccommentary”\u2014that is most interesting and uncertain (not just theoretically, but in actual social life).<\/p>\n

In my earlier post on Wilson and his ants, I wrote that a group or collective can develop complex systems to achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. In addition, I suggested humans have a unique ability and capacity to organize, structure, and reflect upon our collective activities. Indeed, in my view, self-conscious reflection is one of humans\u2019 real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. As both individuals and groups, we are constantly faced with choices about if and when to be self-interested or altruist, individualistic or cooperative. These are not easily summarized by mathematical equations. Nor, for that matter, are they fully structured and determined\u2014which is why, as biological as we are and as much as the social sciences share with the hard sciences, important differences remain regarding what the significant questions are, how we act upon them, and what is only just commentary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last spring a fascinating little story in the LA Times on the collective\/behaviorial intelligence of fire ants put me in mind of the Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (\u201cFire Ants for Sociology\u201d). I first heard about Wilson in high school (his paradigm-shifting book came out in 1979; I graduated in 1985), read some of his work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1111,14563,14270],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-altruism","tag-social-life","tag-wilson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/03\/sandbagging-cropped.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":873,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions\/873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}