Thoughts on Anthill and other things

I am reading the middle section of E.O. Wilson's Anthill right now, the part about a fictional colony of ants. Wilson and Bert Holldobler wrote a book called The Superorganism (which would probably be way over my head). But I love thinking about ant colonies as superorganisms, perhaps analogous to our bodies being made up of cells, or maybe to all the neurons in our brain communicating with each other, like the ants communicate with pheromones. I know Julie is taking a course on insect ecology now so maybe she has something to add here.

Ants within a colony are completely altruistic--they know their caste and their role in life, and they just perform their jobs. They don't take food from each other and if they are sick they get away from the other ants so as not to bother them or infect them. But--and I don't think I got this until I read The Blank Slate--the reason complete altruism works in this case is that they are all genetically identical to one another. (They all come from the queen and the sperm she was inseminated with (from one male ant) on the day she left her birth colony. It says the sperm survive inside her body, waiting to be used in turn, for up to 20 years!)

The reason we can't live like this, always acting for the greater good of humans in general, or even for the greater good of our ingroup, is that we aren't genetically identical. And Pinker says that we should be glad of it, because "without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." p. 268 He also says that "Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings towards other people at all." p. 267.

But I wonder if an ant colony is analogous to a multicellular organism. I'm not quite sure if that's what Wilson says.

Unfortunately, reading about the individual ants in the colony, and their pointless lives (for example, the male that inseminates the queen lives a very short time and that's his whole goal in life, to mate with a queen--he can't even eat on his own. Being the queen is no picnic either from what I can tell) is also mildly depressing to me as it further indicates that there is no meaning to life. All of this behavior is completely about the genes replicating themselves. I really do believe in the Selfish Gene--Life, in every species, is all about the genes wanting to make more of themselves, not about the lives of the organisms. The ants aren't happy or sad--they just are. Where did we humans get the idea that we have a right to be happy?

This is my biggest stumbling block with mainstream Christianity. There is no objective purpose to any of us being here. Religion will have to continue to evolve towards the idea that you need to make your own purpose and then live that to the fullest.

One review of The Superorganism

Grief in Chimps

Perhaps the rest of you heard this story on the way home today too:

Grief in Chimps

E.O. Wilson's talk last night

Nancy W. and I went to hear E.O. Wilson speak about his new novel, Anthill, last night.

I jotted down some of the many interesting things he had to say, several of which related to things we've talked about in our group.

• "Kin selection" is no longer a tenable theory. This relates to altruism, which we discussed at the last meeting. (I think. I meant to, anyway.) Altruism is a problem for evolutionary biologists, because why would we do things--like share resources--that increase someone else's fitness at the expense of our own? I looked up kin selection theory on Wikipedia: " ...(A) gene that prompts behaviour which enhances the fitness of relatives but lowers that of the individual displaying the behavior, may nonetheless increase in frequency, because relatives often carry the same gene; this is the fundamental principle behind the theory of kin selection... Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to explain prosocial behavior through kin selection by stating that “behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.” " But, now current evolutionary biologists like Wilson are saying that evolution doesn't work this way. Instead, he says that individual selfishness drives altruism (which is the same thing Pinker is saying).

• I think Wilson said altruism has developed only about 20 times in the history of life.

• Competition between groups of humans is what drives the evolution of what we tend to think of as the highest human qualities, the most "noble" qualities. I think he's saying that a lot of things such as love and altruism and honor are actually things that help your tribe defeat the neighboring tribe. For millenia we tended to behave in these positive ways about our in-group. Pinker (see that website that Karen sent) sees that with modernity we have been able to extend who we see as being in "our" group, and that because of this, and contrary to what it looks like, there is less violence as time goes on.

• Along the same lines--I think--one of the most remarkable things that Pinker explained in The Blank Slate was "...without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." (p 268) So it's competition over resources, and strife, basically, that has driven us to be the conscious beings we are.

• Humans are tribal in nature. Religion is a manifestation of tribalism. A group's creation story is the story of how they came about and why they are the chosen group of the Creator. (I have often thought that one of Jesus' missions was to try to "extend the tribe"--i.e. think of more and more people as "us"--hence the stuff about loving all your brothers and sisters and helping people like Samaritans (an outgroup from the Jewish point of view). (I think Christians who raise Christianity as some sort of superior belief system are missing one of Jesus' main points, personally.) I think Karen Armstrong saw a similar widening of the circle and extending social justice in the religious movements around 800 B.C. by the way.

• The human condition: we have

Paleolithic emotions
Medieval institutions
but Godlike technology