Charlotte Sleigh
SIX LEGS BETTER
A cultural history of myrmecology
320pp. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. $55;
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £36.50.
0 8018 8445 4
For the writers of the Old Testament, ants held a particularly important place as an exemplar for human behaviour: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise”, reads Proverbs 6: 6. Repeatedly, comparisons have been made between human society and the scurrying activity of insect societies. For the pioneer Dutch entomologist Jan Swammerdam (1637–80), viewing ants through his mystical Christian glasses, life in the ant nest was positively idyllic: “love and unanimity, more powerful than punishment or death itself, preside there and all live together in the same manner as the primitive Christians anciently did, who were connected by fraternal love, and had all things in common”. Modern myrmecologists would see things very differently, but their views are probably equally tinged by their surrounding culture. Contemporary scientists argue that behind the superficial cooperation and order of the ant nest lurk powerful conflicting interests between the queen and the workers, an ageist division of labour, and complex behaviours that emerge out of very simple rules. No love, no unanimity, but selfish genes and conflict.
How we got from there to here, from Christianity to conflict, via the twentieth century, is the subject of Charlotte Sleigh’s fascinating account of the changing shape of our vision of ants. Part history of science, part history of culture, Six Legs Better uses the history of myrmecology as a focus for a sweeping survey of the interaction between science and culture through some of the decisive decades in the development of both expressions of human activity. Sleigh centres her story on the life and work of three key figures in twentieth-century myrmecology – the Swiss entomologist Auguste Forel, William Morton Wheeler (who did much to establish the study of ants as a respectable strand of biology) and his modern successor, the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the author of the book that marks the end of Sleigh’s account, Sociobiology (1975).
Sleigh’s fundamental argument is that each of these scientists represented a new approach to the study of ants, reflecting the predominant cultural and academic attitudes of their time. Thus Forel’s ants are seen through a psychological prism, Wheeler’s approach is argued to be influenced by sociology, while Wilson’s thoroughly modern ants are the product of the cybernetic age. While Sleigh makes her case clearly – Forel’s vision of ant behaviour emphasized plasticity over rigid instinct; Wheeler emphasized the importance of social behaviour in creating insect sociality; while Wilson focused on the role of communication – this division seems artificial. Sleigh’s description of Wheeler’s rich conception of insect behaviour as a determinant for both societal function and phylogeny was new to me, and seems to undermine her attempt to label his approach with a single term. Nevertheless, her sparkling description of Wheeler’s work, fully embedded in its scientific and cultural context, should be required reading for all myrmecologists and for those wanting to understand science as being more than something made by “great men”.
Sleigh is at her weakest when she focuses on more recent developments. Although Wilson did indeed raise the issue of communication within an insect society (the fact that the first article written by the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, was on ant behaviour is one of many telling titbits unearthed by Sleigh), the key point about Wilson’s Sociobiology is not that he focused on communication within animal societies, but that he sought to apply the insights that had been forged by Bill Hamilton, who in the mid-1960s developed the genetical theory of social behaviour. The decisive discoveries relating to the pheromonal communication systems functioning inside the nests of social insects have taken place in the past fifteen years, and have not involved Wilson. They have revealed that chemical communication is the primary sensory mode by which conflict is expressed, detected and resolved. The emphasis is not on communication per se, but rather on conflict producing cooperation.
Sleigh’s treatment of Wilson’s 1975 book is disappointingly scant. Perhaps this is because Sociobiology finds its true context not in the century of myrmecology surveyed by Sleigh, but in the overall attempts by biologists to understand the evolution of sociality in the light of Darwinism. As such, it deserves to be compared with a contemporaneous attempt to popularize recent findings – Richard Dawkins’s less ambitious, but immensely more successful The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins’s book has gone on to become a classic, while Wilson’s work has not enjoyed the same popular or academic success. The reasons for this, and the limits of Wilson’s insight into the evolution of animal behaviour, have been discussed in Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley’s Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (reviewed in the TLS, June 16, 2006).
Sleigh’s rich story is interwoven with accounts of people who seem forgotten by many of today’s researchers, such as Emile Roubaud, who wrote a paper on the solitary wasps that were buzzing round his hut in the Congo, or the linguistician Charles Kay Ogden, who not only translated Forel’s book The Social World of Ants, but, in Sleigh’s account, became a pivotal figure in the growing interest in how and what ants communicate. As well as these relatively minor figures, there is also a smattering of the great and the good – Henri Bergson, Bronislaw Malinowski, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Kinsey and Herbert Hoover all pop up unexpectedly in an appropriately anty context, reinforcing Sleigh’s thesis about the importance of ants as an image for conceptions of human society, and linking her microhistorical passages to the broader picture of twentieth-century culture.
Despite the wealth of lives and stories in Six Legs Better, there are points where the reader is left wanting more. I was particularly intrigued by the mention of a French industrial engineer, Charles Janet. This amateur entomologist made a series of brilliant insights into the behaviour of social insects, including how ant larvae are fed (workers regurgitate food for them, but also receive half-digested food back) and, above all, his 1906 discovery of how the queen ant rears her first brood after the nuptial flight (she feeds them on the fat derived from her now useless wing muscles). Although Sleigh argues that Janet’s engineering training helped him to understand this last effect in terms of “fuel conservation”, it would have been helpful to learn more about the context in which he did his work – was he part of an amateur entomological society, for example? – and how his discoveries were viewed by professional rivals.
There are also rich pickings here for future studies, in a series of apparently powerful but unexploited insights. For example, Sleigh briefly refers to the changes in American views of nature which took place in the early decades of the last century, whereby “Nature ceased to consist of apples and caterpillars and came instead to be signified by sequoias and wolves”. A detailed investigation of the contrasting fates of the familiar wild – apples and caterpillars – and the grandiose – sequoias and wolves – in the context of new waves of immigration and the romanticization and loss of the American West could provide new insights into the development of US cultural attitudes to nature and, in turn, those of the rest of the world.
Six Legs Better is a provocative, complex account of a multifaceted period of cultural history. There is material here that will lead to a great deal of reflection by historians and scientists alike. The sections dealing with “instinct” alone are a marvellous source of stimulating ideas. Anyone interested in the development of US culture in the interwar years will be excited by Charlotte Sleigh’s account of William Morton Wheeler’s work and its wider social and cultural context. It is certain to awaken the sluggards among us.
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Matthew Cobb is Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour at the University of Manchester. His book The Egg and Sperm Race: The seventeenth-century scientists who unravelled the secrets of sex, life and growth was published in paperback earlier this year.
