trinity term 2014
it’s only natural... Are humans really so different from ants?
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hen Charles Darwin wrote ‘On the Origin of Species’, he began with a chapter on domestication. He rightly considered that artificial selection would make an excellent analogy for natural selection that would clarify the basic principles underlying his theory. However, in so doing, he also revealed the tendency of our species to consider itself apart from nature – something above and beyond the natural world. This is something we seem to take for granted. For example, when we speak of ‘saving the planet’ from climate change and global warming, we fail to consider the billions of years it survived without us, and at much greater temperatures, with and without extinctions and species radiations. Climate change may be a problem - but it is a problem for us, not the planet. In the grand scheme of things, the absence of polar bears is irrelevant. Similarly, when we worry about unnatural
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growing fungi that are dependent on the ants for their survival and reproduction. In turn, the mushroom farms provide food for the working colony and their young. As XXX defined domestication as: “The adaptation of an animal or plant through breeding in captivity to a life intimately associated with and advantageous to humans.” it is clear that leaf cutter ants have ‘domesticated’ the fungi they grow just as we have domesticated the wheat we grow or the cattle we raise. Given the obvious similarities, why do we consider the ant-fungus relationship as symbiotic or coevolved but never in terms of artificial selection or domestication? The fact is that we are inherently biased towards our own species and have, historically, classified human behaviour as unique and fundamentally different from that of animals. When Darwin used ‘artificial’ selection as an analogy, he
e did not ‘artificially select’ dogs to look like they do, we simply enabled those genes that mutated to appeal to us most to persist in the population.”
food ingredients and become obsessed with organic food, we are forgetting that, ultimately, every atom of every element came from the same places - the distinction is arbitrary. We are all stardust; human, virus, oil or steel. Now consider the curious case of the leaf-cutter ant, which lives in highly organised agricultural communities. They collect pieces of leaves to make compost for
failed to realise that this was nothing but a form of natural selection. The distinction may have academic uses but it confuses the reality of things by implying a separation between the selection pressures that act upon the ant’s fungi and the farmer’s wheat. As the correct biological terminology for the ant-fungus relationship is co-evolved mutualism, it is only right that this term should be ap-
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plied to the relationship we humans share with wheat, and indeed, all ‘domesticated’ species. When biologists started to think of the gene as the unit upon which selection acts, it ought to have been obvious that the dog’s genes were the ones that benefited from our interest in them. We did not ‘artificially select’ dogs to look like they do - we simply enabled those genes that mutated to appeal to us most to persist in the population. Those dogs that happened to display an appealing phenotype survived best to pass on their genes. The temptation here is to suggest that things have changed - when humans first began to practice agriculture, we could not alter genes directly. Genetic modification technology has changed that. However, and this is the point - even if we can, this is no more unnatural or artificial than the sand that made the glass from which my microscope’s slide is made.