Interview with E.O. Wilson

From: Michael Ragland (ragland37_at_webtv.net)
Date: 07/01/04 

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 15:46:32 +0000 (UTC)

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?
 
W:
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.

I: 
Are humans more murderous than other animals?
 
W:
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.

I: 
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?
 
W:
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?
 
W:
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.

I: 
There are about 9.500 known species of ants, many of whom you studied,
but there is only one species of Homo. Why?
 
W:
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 Homo-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 Homo. But it
is evident­ly the tendency of hominid species and particularly of Homo
to eradi­cate any rivals. It is a widespread idea among
anthropolo­gists that when Homo sapiens came out of Africa into
southern Europe about a hundred-thousand years ago, it proceeded to
elimi­nate Homo neander­talensis, which was a native European
species that had survived very well along the fringe of the advancing
glacier.
 
I:
You write that ants often share food among themselves. Why, and how did
you find out?
 
W:
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.

I: 
Why doesn't this sort of communism exist among humans?

W: 
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.

I: 
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.

I: 
Nowadays not only the word sociobiology is used, but also words such as
evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology and others. Why so many
names?
 
W:
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.

I: 
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?
 
W:
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