Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist
and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture
taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a
banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiology!'. Following
the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobiology, the New
Synthesis, he became both to opponents and proponents the
living symbol of the application of evolutionary theory to
social behavior. This interview took place at Harvard
University, March 27, 1997.
I: Konrad Lorenz wrote that animals of the same species
sometimes by accident kill one another, but they never do
it on purpose. Humans supposedly are the exception. What
is your comment?
J:Well of course the mass of evidence over the last thirty
years shows that this is not true. Killing of members of
the same species, including deliberate killing during
contests for dominance, killing of territorial rivals
and invading males, infanticide and even cannibalism are
commonplace. This has been shown in many different groups
of animals. We always hope that what Lorenz had said would
be true, so we could use the animal-kingdom as an example
of how human beings should conduct themselves.
K: Are humans more murderous than other animals?
L:No. The data from long-term behavioral studies of groups
such as lions, hyena's and chimpanzees show that the per
capita murder-rate in animal-societies that do engage in
murderous aggression is much higher than in human beings.
It is just that we have a much more alert media that
reports murders whenever they occur. Some time ago I
calculated all this, and I believe that is true even if
you throw in the rate of mortality due to direct
aggression during war in the modern area. Even there, in a
few episodes during this century where we saw the highest
mortality in modern history, the percentage of people
killed out of the entire population of Europe was still
relatively small. As horrendous as it was, a couple of
tens of millions, it was still only a small percentage.
Whereas a larger percentage of an entire clan of
aggressive social animals sometimes is killed. And when
you go down to ants, they are genuinely the most warlike
of the animals, and the mortality-rates there of
individuals and colonies can be truly staggering.
M: But animals often do show some restraint, as Lorenz
claimed. There is ritualised fighting, and the losing
party is often not killed. Why not, as he may live and
fight another day?
N:Lorenz was basically correct in pointing out that most
animal aggression is ritualized. Explanations of why
animals take so much time to threaten, rather than attack
directly, have been discussed many times. I believe that
the prevailing explanation is that it is often
advantageous to both parties to work out some
communication whereby the duel is steeled by display
rather than direct aggression. One of the reasons for this
is that even the stronger individual is frequently killed
or badly hurt. For the same reason a winner may refrain
from killing the loser, because the loser may still do
damage. And the winner may have to face yet another rival.
Also, for a social animal it may not pay to kill off a
subordinate animal, because this last animal may be vital
for the dominant animals success, particularly in hunting
or combatting rival groups. And yet another explanation is
kin selection; closely related rivals may have a genetic
interest in keeping one another alive.
As to male rivals of a species with lethal weapons, such as
poisonous snakes; use of such a weapon by one side would
almost certainly meet with immediate retaliation. So I
believe there are several reasons why rivals often refrain
from full-blown aggression, but instead use complex rituals
which are often quite conspicuous and elaborate.
I; Nevertheless, animals of the same species often kill one
another. How could Lorenz have been so completely wrong?
O:Lorentz was a great naturalist, but he himself studied
only a very limited number of species. The information
that has produced a newer picture was forthcoming for the
most part only after field-studies of many animals that
had not been studied in Lorenz' time. It was not a case of
him ignoring information, he just did not have the
information.
But I also believe that the great success of his book Das
sogenannte Böse, or On Aggression, was due in part to the
fact that it was a message people wanted to hear, namely;
nature tells us that it is a mistake to be aggressive and
carry out war. I slightly knew Konrad Lorenz, who was one of
my sources of inspiration when I was a young student. One
of the reasons that he was annoyed by me was that I showed,
by bringing together a large amount of information in the
nineteen-sixties from insects, that not only were many
insects murderous in their aggressive interaction, but
aggression was totally lacking in large numbers of other
species. So in fact, aggression was not a general instinct
spread throughout the animal kingdom as Lorenz had thought,
but it occurred only in species in which aggressive
behavior evolved as a density-dependent factor. In other
words, when densities of populations are not regulated by
predators, emigration or disease, then you will find
territorial and other forms of aggression, which can be
interpretated as specialized responses to favor
individuals competing for limited resources. Not all
species do have individuals growing to densities and numbers
that they even get to compete. And therefore there is never
a situation in which there is any advantage in being
aggressive.
P: There are about 9.500 known species of ants, many of
whom you studied, but there is only one species of
[censored]. Why?
Q:I think I have the answer for that. That is because we are
so big. We are giant animals. The bigger the animal, the
larger the territory and home range that the animal needs.
Ant-species, consisting of very tiny organisms, can divide
the environment up very finely. You can have one species
that lives only in hollow twigs at the tops of trees,
another species that lives under the bark, and yet another
species that lives on the ground. Human beings, being
giant animals and particularly being partly carnivorous,
cannot divide the environment up finely among different
[censored]-species. There have been episodes in which there were
multiple hominid-species, probably two or three species of
Australopithecus, co-existing perhaps with the earliest
[censored]. But it is evidently the tendency of hominid species
and particularly of [censored] to eradicate any rivals. It is a
widespread idea among anthropologists that when [censored]
sapiens came out of Africa into southern Europe about a
hundred-thousand years ago, it proceeded to eliminate
[censored] neandertalensis, which was a native European species
that had survived very well along the fringe of the
advancing glacier.
R:You write that ants often share food among themselves.
Why, and how did you find out?
S:Back in the fifties Tom Eisner, a colleague of mine, and I
did I believe the first experiments tracing radio-active
labelled sugar-water through colonies of ants. We were
able to estimate the rate at which the food was exchanged,
and the volume that was exchanged. Not only do many
colonies exchange food with fanatic dedication, but in the
colonies of many antspecies the workers regurgitate food
back and forth at an extraordinarily high rate. Now we
understand that the result of this is that at any given
time, all the workers have roughly the same food-content
in their stomach. It is sort of a social stomach. So that
an ant is informed of the status of a colony by the
content of its own stomach. It therefore knows what it
should be doing for the colony. If you only had a small
number of extremely well-fed ants and the rest were
hungry, the workers would go out hunting for more food,
whereas in fact it might be a bad time to hunt for food.
T: Why doesn't this sort of communism exist among humans?
U: What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right,
socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.
Why doesn't it work in humans? Because we have
reproductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian
fitness by looking after our own survival and having our
own offspring. The great success of the social insects is
that the success of the individual genes are invested in
the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in
the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the
reproduction of new colonies.
This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea
of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most
species of social insects have sterile workers, and
therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the
colony is all, the individual is only a part of the colony,
and the success of the whole community is what counts far
above the success of the individual. The behavior of the
individual social insect evolved with reference to what it
contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of
a human being depends on how well it can individually use
the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme
contractual arrangements.
V: You write that a major difference between humans and
ants is that we send our young men to war, while they send
their old females. Why is that?
W: Well first of all, all the worker-ants are female. In
the bee, ant and wasp-societies sisters are extremely
closely related to one another, and therefore it pays to
be altruistic toward sisters, whereas brothers do not
benefit by giving anything to sisters. So the females are
the ones who are fanatically devoted to one another.
Why are they old? Once again it comes down to this matter of
what is best for the colony. As the workers grow older, they
put more and more of their time outside, and as they become
quite old or injured or sick, they spend their time either
outside of the colony or right at the edge. The advantage of
this is that the individuals that are going to die soon
anyway, having already performed a lot of services, are the
individuals that sacrifice themselves. It is the cheapest
for the colony.
Whereas in humans, not only are the young males the
strongest, but by being mammals in a competitive society
young males tend to be greater risk-takers, braver and more
adventurous. They are moving up in the ladder of status,
rank, recognition, and power. And to be a member of the warrior-
class when it is needed, has always been a rapid way of
moving up. So that appears to be the main reason why we send
young men out, and they are willing to go.
X: Nowadays not only the word sociobiology is used, but
also words such as evolutionary psychology, Darwinian
anthropology and others. Why so many names?
Y:The classical Lorenzian, ethological tradition recognized
that characters evolve in behavior just as they do in
anatomy. You cannot appreciate what a great advance that
was intellectually in the forties and the fifties, unless
you lived that time. Now we take it for granted. In the
seventies I realised that we needed to have a new body of
theory that would incorporate the best elements of
ethology, but it would be directed at the study of
societies, in particular complex societies, and that
would use natural selection theory to explain
relationships within a society. Sociobiology was to be the
study of the biological basis of all forms of social
behavior, in all kinds of organisms, including human
beings. Sociobiology then came under attack by critics all
over the place because its use in studying human
behaviour. It was regarded as biological determinism which
was not acceptable for the social sciences. Any idea that
human behavior of any kind had a biological basis was not
acceptable in the seventies. And then there were Marxist
critics like Gould and Lewontin who felt that it was
injurious to the progress of human beings toward a
socialist society, which they considered the most just
and inevitable society. You won't get Gould admit that
today, but that was how he talked in those days! So the
word sociobiology was under heavy attack in the late
seventies and early eighties. The subject of
sociobiology however flourished; it became the dominant
way of thinking in animal behavior studies. But in humans
it was so controversial and there were so many
misunderstandings and attacks! Then a new generation
entered the field of human sociobiology, some of them are
very capable, they have been coming up with really new
ideas. And they started avoiding the word sociobiology,
and use words like evolutionary psychology and Darwinian
anthropology.
There is also the expression: A scientist would rather use
another scientist's toothbrush than his terminology.
Z: This famous incident in 1978, where an anti-
sociobiologist threw a bucket of water over your head, did
it perhaps unconsciously motivate you to devote more time
to bio-diversity?
Z:Leave sociobiology and no more buckets of water? The
answer is no. The reason I went into biodiversity was that
it was my lifelong passion. I was trained to study
biodiversity. I had been to the tropics and was well aware
of all of the conservation-problems around the world. I
realized that the time had come for biologists who knew
about biodiversity and ecology and extinction, to become
active in this field. So I moved in that direction, and I
think it was the right decision to make. Because I
consider for the immediate future to be involved in that,
help spread information, get policies, and so on, it is
more important than even this business of understanding
human behavior. And furthermore, I just loved the work.
This is what I do naturally, study biodiversity.
"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term
survival value." Stephen Hawking