Attack of the Clones

What might link early generations of insect suicide bombers, nuns allocating tasks in a convent, delegates at a crucial climate change conference and Meer Cats on late night sentinel duty?

One of the pleasures of academic life at the place where I work is the richness and diversity of the outside speakers who come mainly in the evenings to talk to over a hundred separate school societies. Faced with a rare evening off, tonight I had the choice of going to the Rous (Horse Racing) Society for their Cheltenham preview (cleverly marketed to students as offering ‘guaranteed winners’). Head to hear some stand up comedy from a Classicist (Alex Horne). Or take in a meeting of the Orwell Society with the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Brendan Barber. Instead I opted for the Scientific Society and a presentation by Dr William Foster, from the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge and an expert on insect ecology and their behaviour

It turned out to be a good choice. I wanted to learn a little more about the behaviour of social insects and the evolution of altruistic behaviour because there must be lessons that young economists can learn from understanding the biological behaviour of different species. Do they act solely in their own self interest, or in the interest of their caste or family.

Dr Foster was incredibly enthusiastic about his own speciality - aphids. But his talk introduced us to termite soldiers who explode to defend their colony (an early incarnation of a suicide bomber), to social wasps and stingless bees and the honeybee’s defence against the Oriental Hornet which involves thermal warming to kill the hornet but a degree of inevitable group sacrifice along the way.

Altruism was defined as ‘an agent behaving at a cost to themselves but for the benefit of the group’. For insects, evolutionary biologists are pretty clear (despite some recent press controversy) that animals behave in a social and altrustic way because they know what it is they are optimising - namely fitness and the survival of the fittest! In answering questions from the floor, Dr Foster claimed that “among social insects, altruism in the end is genetically selfish”

Altruistic behaviour by humans isn’t so cut and dried, there can be all manner of motivations for doing so. That said, the cross-fertilisation of ideas and arguments between Biologlists and social scientists has been fruitful over the years including the rise of game theory and developments in behavioural economics. An immediate application that came into my mind during the talk was that of the interactions between delegates at global climate change negotiations and the willingness of nations to make some growth sacrifices in pursuit of a common goal (and common good) of reducing the annual flow of CO2 emissions. Dr Foster drew another interesting parallel - namely the decision by someone to leave his/her wealth to his/her sisters’ off-spring rather than their wife’s / husbands’ off-spring - so that they can be sure of the genetic relationship.

So where do the Nuns come into all of this? Well the post-lecture discussion continued the theme of the ideas we can draw from intense studying of insects and their human equivalents. Social insects, it turns out, are really rather good at applying the principle of division of labour even though they might all appear to come from the same mould. Presumably a successful convent could not work unless it was organised along similar lines!