Karl Marx was
right, socialism works
Edward O. Wilson
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.
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?
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.
Are humans more murderous than other animals?
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.
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?
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.
Nevertheless, animals of the same species often kill one another. How could Lorenz have been so completely wrong?
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.
There are about 9.500 known species of ants, many of whom you studied, but there is only one species of Homo. Why?
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.
You write that ants often share food among themselves. Why, and how did you find out?
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.
Why doesn't this sort of communism exist among humans?
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.
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?
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.
Nowadays not only the word sociobiology is used, but also words such as evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology and others. Why so many names?
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.
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?
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.