Bee

Jonathan Haidt has long claimed we humans are, this is an image, not a genetic reality - just to be clear! - 90% chimp and 10% bee.

He has been interested in the concept of group selection as originally posed by Charles Darwin and then expanded by E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson. Now, this theory does not have majority support within the evolutionary science world, but to me it offers some fascinating hypotheses.

So, genetic mutations happen at an individual level. Individual selection seems unarguably the driving factor. But, individuals have to survive in a given environment and for humans, that environment has always involved other humans. We cannot, or are very unlikely to, survive alone. Many of the environmental demands that effect our thriving - from hunter-gatherer tribes to now - were the demands of the social environment. How we co-operated, or free-loaded, how we communicated information or benefited from group information, our behaviour and our beliefs - all of these things would impact the group.

Once a group becomes strong, it has developed a certain 'theme' of behavioural trends. Those who are better adapted to those behavioural trends are more likely to pass on their genes, so the society becomes 'more like that'. If that is a successful strategy within the larger environment, the genetic adaptations that favoured flourishing in that group will be further enhanced and disseminated - as the group out-performs other groups with less successful strategies.

I only wanted to write about this because I took that rather lovely photo of the bee. By coincidence, yesterday, when I actually wrote this, was World Bee Day. Yay, bees! Today I was directed to this article explaining how vital bees and other pollinators are - and how they can, to an extent, play a part in limiting the probability of another pandemic. Again, and loudly this time, yay, bees!

Anyway, having decided to write about bees before realising they are humanity's saviours, I then recalled that this very debate about groups came up in conversation with a friend on one of the online philosophy fora. I was making the claim that there is a genetic variance that favours risk-taking and exploration - as she was wondering how this could be adaptive. Why would those who took risks flourish? Surely they'd be more likely to get killed and not pass on their genes. What I should, perhaps, have said was that risks can reap large rewards. The exploratory individual who finds a new source of food or who discovers that it is possible to get over that river or that mountain, might, if she didn't die in the attempt, garner greater respect from her tribe. This is an occasion where my attempt to use the pronoun 'she' might be unhelpful. But then, who knows? Anyway, that offers an individual selection benefit.

What I actually said was that it would benefit groups to have both risk-averse and risk-taking individuals, as the former would ensure survival in certain situations, the latter find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. She rightly countered that group selection theory has been largely discredited. And of course the incidence of individuals with extreme variants of specific traits would be natural given the way genetic inheritance works. The risk-takers might benefit the group, but that's not how they came to be.

I wonder though. Say you were a society of largely risk-averse and moderately risk-sensitive types. You do not expand far from a certain geographical site nor expand your range of bahaviours.Then an environmental challenge threatens group survival (climate change was frequent and severe in the Pleistocene), then your group might be wiped out while the group with some risk-takers survived. A group full of risk-takers would have been dead in the water, let's assume, so being in a group, as it might 'value' those with opposing strengths, seems as if it could perpetuate the continuation of widely varied phenotypes. Thus altruists and free-loaders, sceptics and believers, chimp-egoists and bee-collectivists.

But that's just my 'Just So' story. One of the many things we may never, truly, know.