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Task Allocation and the Logic of Research Questions: How Ants Challenge Human Sociobiology

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Abstract

After biologist Deborah Gordon made a series of experimental discoveries in the 1980s, she argued that a change in terminology regarding the division of labor among castes of specialists was needed. Gordon’s investigations of the interactive effects of ants in colonies led her to believe that the established approach Edward O. Wilson had pioneered was biased in a way that made some alternative candidate adaptive explanations invisible. Gordon argued that this was because the term “division of labor” implied a division among specialists that was unwarranted, and proposed “task allocation” as a better description that did not bias research against the alternative causes she had discovered. Gordon’s empirical findings and theoretical proposals also vindicate the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology who have been dismissed as political radicals, but her proposals have been widely misunderstood by many contemporary behavioral ecologists. The terminological and methodological confusions rampant in contemporary discourse can be clarified by applying a framework developed by Elisabeth Lloyd involving an analysis of the constraints imposed by different research questions. Applying this framework will show how the methodological problems involving description raised by the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology extended to his analysis of ants, indicating that they were not challenging Wilson’s naturalistic approach to the study of human evolution, but rather his methods. It will also show how confusion over how Gordon’s proposed research questions have been conflated with the possible answers she has argued ought to be investigated. This in turn will clarify contemporary disputes over her proposal to abandon the term “division of labor.”

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Notes

  1. Although the related problem of “reification” in descriptions, or confusing some representation such as a mathematical construct with a trait subject to selection, occupied both Gould's and Lewontin’s attention as a descriptive problem that played a central role in their critiques of the controversy involving human IQ testing (Lewontin 1970, 1976; Gould 1981).

  2. The implications of these differences remain a point of some controversy. In cases of extreme morphological variation among workers, many entomologists have taken Wilson’s work as decisively supporting the view that the variation is the result of a colony adaptation (Wheeler 1986; Jeanne 2016; Lillico-Ouachour and Abouheif 2017). Gordon has questioned this as a default assumption and suggested that while it is a possibility, more empirical evidence tracking the differential fitness of colonies is necessary for the specific cases in question (Gordon 2016, p. 1103), and that the presence of a specific fitness contribution among those species with extremely diverse morphological castes is inadequate to explain the broader question of why tasks are allocated in colonies more generally (Gordon 1988, p. 251).

  3. Since Gould and Lewontin introduced the problem of “adaptationism” in “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” in 1979, a philosophical industry has grown up around distinguishing different types of adaptationism and evaluating their respective merits. In 2009, Tim Lewens identified seven different types of adaptationism (Lewens 2009).

  4. In his autobiography, Wilson described how he has been fortunate to collaborate with a series of gifted modelers, including Oster, Robert MacArthur (MacArthur and Wilson 1967), William Bossert (Wilson and Bossert 1971), and Charles Lumsden (Lumsden and Wilson 1981), all of whom he has strongly depended on for their mathematical ability. Wilson saw his contribution to these collaborations as involving his intuition, background knowledge, and the identification of problems to address (Wilson 1994, p. 122). Oster visited Harvard for a year to collaborate with Wilson to write Caste and Ecology of the Social Insects, working at the same time with Lewontin in an effort to develop a rigorous approach to optimality modeling (Nuzzo 2006). Many aspects of those models are strongly defended in Chap. 8 of Caste and Ecology of the Social Insects, but the problem of assuming that the division of labor among castes of specialists is an adequate description of colony behavior is not adequately addressed.

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Acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank Elisabeth Lloyd, Deborah Gordon, Michael Wade, and Colin Allen for all their insightful suggestions, and Rick Gawne, whose critical comments have been extremely helpful.

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  1. History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Ryan Ketcham

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Ketcham, R. Task Allocation and the Logic of Research Questions: How Ants Challenge Human Sociobiology. Biol Theory 14, 52–68 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-018-0308-8

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