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Discover Interview: E.O. Wilson
Biology's chief provocateur explores the evolutionary origins of cooperation, warfare, and the tribal mind
by Richard Conniff, Photography by Gerald Forster
DM:. In the popular mind, the word Darwinian still often means conflict—fighting over resources—whereas the reality is often adaptation by cooperation.
Wilson: That's why I wrote the book Sociobiology, about the adaptive value of cooperative behaviors. I wrote a paper with Bert Hölldobler last September that proposes a controversial new model of the origin of social behavior, including cooperative behavior in the insects.
DM: Controversial in what way?
WilsonL I'm taking the idea of kin selection, and I've critiqued it. Kin selection is the idea that cooperation arises, especially in the eusocial insects—bees, wasps, ants, termites—because of individuals favoring collateral kin: not just Mom and Dad or your offspring but, just as important, brother, sister, cousin, and so on.
DM: So you cooperate with close kin because it helps get some of your shared genetic heritage into future generations.
Wilaon: I found myself moving away from the position I'd taken 30 years ago, which has become the standard theory. What I've done is to say that maybe collateral kin selection is not so important. These ants and termites in the early stages of evolution—they can't recognize kin like that. There's very little evidence that they're determining who's a brother, a sister, a cousin, and so on. They're not acting to favor collateral kin. The new view that I'm proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin.
DM: The notion of group selection is heresy, is it not, in the current thinking about evolution?
Wilson: Yes. I'm being provocative again, because this is a radical departure.
DM: The theory is that natural selection works only on individuals, not the social group. Isn't that the idea of the selfish gene?
Wilson: No, that's where a lot of biologists mix things up. The unit of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity. The target of selection is normally the individual who carries an ensemble of genes of certain kinds. But the target can also be the group. How well does that group survive vis-à-vis other groups and vis-à-vis solitary individuals of the same species, and how well does that group produce its own kind? For group selection to happen, all you need is one gene that would cause individuals to come together, and for some of them to be willing to be subordinated and become workers.
DM: But ant workers give up their reproductive futures. Why would they do that, from a Darwinian perspective?
Wilson: That is easy to explain by a feature that we now recognize as universal: the plasticity of expression of single genes. The same gene can produce different body types depending on environmental conditions. The classic case is the arrowleaf plant. If grown on dry ground, it produces an elephant-ear leaf; if grown in a pond, it puts up leaves like lily pads; and if grown in deeper water, it grows up with slender leaves like eelgrass. So consider a gene that has plasticity such that in one setting an individual carrying that gene becomes reproductive. Maybe this individual was the ant or wasp that arrived first, maybe it was the biggest one, or maybe it was the one to just by accident start laying eggs first. The important thing is that the reproductive role can shift from one colony to the next and from one generation to the next. The group forms, and some individuals by circumstance become workers. Their cooperative behavior and the division of labor confer superiority on that group, with that particular gene, over other groups. It could be as simple as that.
DM: So why isn't it more common?
Wilson: It only occurs if the environment is extraordinary in some way, producing a resource that is very valuable—like a hollow stem that might serve as a nest site—so that it pays a group with social organization to defend and exploit it. Otherwise, altruism toward fellow group members is discouraged by the Darwinian advantage of surviving and having personal offspring. But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
DM: Is group selection also why humans are now so dominant?
Wilson: What I've done is pose the question. For social insects, I'm presenting as much evidence as I can summon for each of the two opposing views: Either collateral kin selection is the key, or group selection favored by very unusual environments caused them to be altruistic. And I'm pretty sure I'll continue saying, "I think it's the latter." But if you think it's the former, let's see better evidence.
DM: For humans this would mean that the tribe was the most important factor in our evolution.
Wilson: Darwin pretty clearly says in The Descent of Man that it's tribe against tribe—exactly what I'm saying. If this turns out to be the case in the early origin of social behavior in human beings, it might be the best explanation of endemic warfare, which humanity has engaged in since prehistory.
DM: And of endemic altruism?
Wilson: Yes, precisely. The genes that favor this type of group cohesion would also favor an innate sense of morality and group loyalty. It would explain how so often group or tribe loyalty overrides even family loyalty. It would help to explain why, for example, it is the squad or the platoon that men fight and die for, more even than country or religion. So I'm going to be spending time in the future looking into this area, with human behavior as a special case.
DM: Has anyone attacked the idea?
Wilson: No, because I've kept it to social insects. But I have respected colleagues working on social insects who think I got it wrong. Right now it's a work in progress and a trial run.
DM: So you're not yet riding the flag along the enemy lines?
Wilson: No, I'm not. Not for humans anyway. I might in a couple of years. _____________________________________________
See: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/38/13367#top
Eusociality: Origin and consequences
Edward O. Wilson * and Bert Hölldobler
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
July 12, 2005
*Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2902; 
School of Life Sciences-LSC 274, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501; and 
Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften (Biozentrum), Universität Würzburg, Lehrstuhl für Zoologie II, Am Hubland, D97074 Würzburg, Germany
ABSTRACT
In this new assessment of the empirical evidence, an alternative to the standard model is proposed: group selection is the strong binding force in eusocial evolution; individual selection, the strong dissolutive force; and kin selection (narrowly defined), either a weak binding or weak dissolutive force, according to circumstance. Close kinship may be more a consequence of eusociality than a factor promoting its origin. A point of no return to the solitary state exists as a rule when workers become anatomically differentiated. Eusociality has been rare in evolution, evidently due to the scarcity of environmental pressures adequate to tip the balance among countervailing forces in favor of group selection. Eusociality in ants and termites in the irreversible stage is the key to their ecological dominance and has (at least in ants) shaped some features of internal phylogeny. Their colonies are consistently superior to solitary and preeusocial competitors, due to the altruistic behavior among nestmates and their ability to organize coordinated action by pheromonal communication.
