GEE Seminar - Professor Jacobus Boomsma, University of Copenhagen

Academic Host: Seirian Sumner
Abstact: Evolutionary biologists often speak of major transitions without appreciating they were social advances that subjugated previously independent agency to live on as a nested layer of somaticized organization. Hence, an ant colony has lifetime unmated somatic workers, who in turn have lifetime somatic cells, who in turn have lifetime somatic prokaryote organelles. Inclusive fitness theory offers first-principled Darwinian explanations of cooperation and conflict in societies of animals and free-living cells. However, if the theory is deserving of its eminent status it should, with similar parsimony, also capture the origins of major transitions: from prokaryote to eukaryote cells, to differentiated multicellularity, and to colonies with specialized queen and worker castes. This suggests that open societies and closed (super)organisms have different inclusive fitness explanations because new levels of somatization required maximal kinship in simple ancestors - not conflict reduction in elaborate societies. In that view, major evolutionary transitions were new levels of informational closure that enabled novel domains of social evolution without having open-society ancestry. Early neo-Darwinians such as William Morton Wheeler and Julian Huxley understood this principle, but the fundamental distinction between societies and organisms became obfuscated in the 1970s when colonial life was synonymized with broad-brush ‘eusociality’ without conceptual justification. In sum, the social insects encompass both societies and superorganisms. Societies are defined by adult reproductive role differentiation and superorganisms by pre-imaginal caste differentiation. The latter should not be assumed to have evolved from the former.