Tag Archives: sociobiology

social insects and disease

This article in Wired says social insects like ants and bees have a variety of behaviors that reduce pathogen spread in their crowded colonies. They range from obvious ones like keeping the nest clean and keeping waste outside, to forms of social distancing where they reduce the number of other individuals they are interacting with. Some species also swap body fluids intentionally to spread antibodies, which reminds me of the old stories where mom puts all the kids in bed with the first one to catch the mumps or chicken pox.

I’ve always found ants interesting because there are enormous numbers of them, rivaling or exceeding human biomass, they build cities and transportation systems and hunt and gather and farm and fight each other, and yet they don’t negatively impact the environment. They are the environment and nobody ever asks whether their population or their consumption patterns exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity. They also adapt just fine to all kinds of novel and damaged ecosystems that we are creating.

on leadership…

It seems to be out of fashion, but I always find it interesting when people try to draw social parallels between people and animals. This reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which spends hundreds of pages on ants and termites, and after I worked my way through it I actually feel more of an affinity for these creatures and the complex mini-civilizations they have built.

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and theoretical work on leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions. We categorize patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). We find that human leadership exhibits commonalities with and differences from the broader mammalian pattern, raising interesting theoretical and empirical issues.