Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T06:11:07.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“If it looks like a duck…” – why humans need to focus on different approaches than insects if we are to become efficiently and effectively ultrasocial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2016

Kenneth John Aitken
Kenneth John Aitken*
Affiliation:
Learning Disability–Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (LD-CAMHS), Greater Glasgow Health Board, Yorkhill Hospital, Glasgow G9 8SJ, United Kingdom. drken.aitken@btinternet.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The parallels between the agricultural successes of ultrasocial insects and those of humans are interesting and potentially important. There are a number of important caveats, however, including the relative complexities of insect reproduction, their more rigidly determined altricial patterns of social behaviour, the roles of post-reproductive group members, and differences in the known factors involved in ultrasocietal collapse.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 39 , 2016 , e94
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, D. (1987) Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency. Pocket Books. Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Aitken, K. J. (2008) Intersubjectivity, affective neuroscience, and the neurobiology of autistic spectrum disorders: A systematic review. Keio Journal of Medicine 57(1):15–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alberts, S. C., Altmann, J., Brockman, D. K., Cords, M., Fedigan, L. M., Pusey, A., Stoinski, T. S., Strier, K. B., Morris, W. F. & Bronikowski, A. M. (2013) Reproductive aging patterns in primates reveal that humans are distinct. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110(33):13440–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Amdam, G. V. & Page, R. E. Jr. (2005) Intergenerational transfers may have decoupled physiological and chronological age in a eusocial insect. Ageing Research Reviews 4(2005):398–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benckiser, G. (2010) Ants and sustainable agriculture. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development 30(2):191–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berenbaum, M. R. (1995) Bugs in the system: Insects and their impact on human affairs. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Bogaard, A., Fraser, R., Heaton, T. H. E., Wallace, M., Vaiglova, P., Charles, M., Jones, G., Evershed, R. P., Styring, A. K., Andersen, N. H., Arbogast, R.-M., Bartosiewicz, L., Gardeisen, A., Kanstrup, M., Maier, U., Marinova, E., Ninov, L., Schäfer, M. & Stephan, E. (2013) Crop manuring and intensive land management by Europe's first farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110(31):12589–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brinton, R. D. (2012) Minireview: Translational animal models of human menopause: Challenges and emerging opportunities. Endocrinology 153(8):3571–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cremer, S., Sophie, A. O., Armitage, S. A. O. & Schmid-Hempel, P. (2007) Social immunity. Current Biology 17:R693–R702.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Croft, D. P., Brent, L. J. N., Franks, D. W. & Cant, M. A. (2015) The evolution of prolonged life after reproduction. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 30(7):407–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dumas, G., Nadel, J., Soussignan, R., Martinerie, J. & Garnero, L. (2010) Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction. PLoS ONE 5(8):e12166. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012166.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feynman, R. (1974) Cargo cult science: Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how not to fool yourself. [Caltech's 1974 Commencement Address.] Engineering and Science 37(7):10–14.Google Scholar
Foster, K. R. & Ratnieks, F. L. W. (2005) A new eusocial vertebrate? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20(7):363–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fraser, E. D. G. & Rimas, A. (2010) Empires of food: Feast, famine and the rise and fall of civilizations. Random House Books.Google Scholar
Gepts, P., Famula, T. R., Bettinger, R. L., Brush, S. B., Damania, A. B., McGuire, P. E. & Qualset, C. O., eds. (2012) Biodiversity in agriculture: Domestication, evolution, and sustainability. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacob, F. (1977) Evolution and tinkering. Science 196:1161–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kapheim, K. M., Pan, H., Li, C., Salzberg, S. L., Puiu, D., Magoc, T., Robertson, H. M., Hudson, M. E., Venkat, A., Fischman, B. J., Hernandez, A., Yandell, M., Ence, D., Holt, C., Yocum, G. D., Kemp, W. P., Bosch, J., Waterhouse, R. M., Zdobnov, E. M., Stolle, E., Kraus, F. B., Helbing, S., Moritz, R. F. A., Glastad, K. M., Hunt, B. G., Goodisman, M. A. D., Hauser, F., Grimmelikhuijzen, C. J. P., Pinheiro, D. G., Nunes, F. M. F., Soares, M. P. M., Tanaka, E. D., Simões, Z. L. P., Hartfelder, K., Evans, J. D., Barribeau, S. M., Johnson, R. M., Massey, J. H., Southey, B. R., Hasselmann, M., Hamacher, D., Biewer, M., Kent, C. F., Zayed, A., Blatti III, C., Sinha, S., Johnston, J. S., Hanrahan, S. J., Kocher, S. D., Wang, J., Robinson, G. E. & Zhang, G. (2015) Genomic signatures of evolutionary transitions from solitary to group living. Science 348(6239):1139–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kribs-Zaleta, C. M. & Mitchell, C. (2014) Modeling colony collapse disorder in honeybees as a contagion. Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering 11(6):1275–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Larson, G. & Fuller, D. Q. (2014) The evolution of animal domestication. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45:115–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loison, A., Festa-Bianchet, M., Gaillard, J.-M., Jorgenson, J. T. & Jean-Michel Jullien, J.-M. (1999) Age-specific survival in five populations of ungulates: Evidence of senescence. Ecology 80(8):2539–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, S. J., Beekman, M., Wossler, T. C. & Ratnieks, F. L. W. (2002) Parasitic Cape honeybee workers, Apis mellifera capensis, evade policing. Nature 415(6868):163–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McAuliffe, K. & Whitehead, H. (2005) Eusociality, menopause and information in matrilineal whales. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20(12):650.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McCall, C. & Singer, T. (2012) The animal and human neuroendocrinology of social cognition, motivation and behavior. Nature Neuroscience Review 15(5):681–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McComb, K., Shannon, G., Durant, S. M., Sayialel, K., Slotow, R., Poole, J. & Moss, C. (2011) Leadership in elephants: The adaptive value of age. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278(1722):3270–76. doi:10.1098/rspb2011.0168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Medawar, P. (1952) An unsolved problem of biology. H. K. Lewis.Google Scholar
Ng, S., Wood, S. H. & Ziegler, A. D. (2015) Ancient floods, modern hazards: The Ping River, paleofloods and the “lost city” of Wiang Kum Kam. Natural Hazards 75(3):2247–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nowak, M. A., Tarnita, C. E. & Wilson, E. O. (2010) The evolution of eusociality. Nature 466(7310):1057–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oldroyd, B. P. (2007) What's killing American honey bees? PLoS Biology 5(6):e168. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oldroyd, B. P. & Fewell, J. H. (2007) Genetic diversity promotes homeostasis in insect colonies. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22(8):408–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Omholt, S. W. & Amdam, G. V. (2004) Epigenic regulation of aging in honeybee workers. Science of Aging Knowledge Environment 2004(26):pe28. doi: 10.1126/sageke.2004.26.pe28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabeling, C. & Kronauer, D. J. C. (2013) Thelytokous parthenogenesis in eusocial hymenoptera. Annual Review of Entomology 58(2013):273–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schilbach, L. (2015) Eye to eye, face to face and brain to brain: Novel approaches to study the behavioral dynamics and neural mechanisms of social interactions. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 3:130–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seehuus, S.-C., Krekling, T. & Amdam, G. V. (2006) Cellular senescence in honey bee brain is largely independent of chronological age. Experimental Gerontology 41(11):1117–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shannon, G., Slotow, R., Durant, S. M., Sayialel, K. N., Poole, J., Moss, C. & McComb, K. (2013) Effects of social disruption in elephants persist decades after culling. Frontiers in Zoology 10:62. doi: 10.1186/1742-9994-10-62. Available at: http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/10/1/62 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Silver, M. (2012) The plague under Commodus as an unintended consequence of Roman grain market regulation. Classical World 105(2):199–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stone, R. (2006) The end of Angkor. Science 311:1364–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. (2014) The ultra-social animal. European Journal of Social Psychology 44(3):187–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Turchin, P. (2006b) War and peace and war: The rise and fall of empires. A Plume Book/Penguin. (Reprint edition with different subtitle).Google Scholar
Uematsu, K., Shimada, M. & Shibao, H. (2013) Juveniles and the elderly defend, the middle-aged escape: Division of labour in a social aphid. Biology Letters 9:20121053. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.1053 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whyte, I. (2008) World without end? Environmental disaster and the collapse of empires. I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Wilson, E. O. (2012) The social conquest of Earth. Liveright/W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Zerjal, T., Xue, Y., Bertorelle, G., Wells, R. S., Bao, W., Zhu, S., Qamar, R., Ayub, Q., Mohyuddin, A., Fu, S., Li, P., Yuldasheva, N., Ruzibakiev, R., Xu, J., Shu, Q., Du, R., Yang, H., Hurles, M. E., Robinson, E., Gerelsaikhan, T., Dashnyam, B., Mehdi, S. Q. & Tyler-Smith, C. (2003) The genetic legacy of the Mongols. American Journal of Human Genetics 72(3):717–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zohary, D., Hopf, M. & Weiss, E. (2012) Domestication of plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of domesticated plants in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin, 4th edition. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar